I'm building modelling tools for SketchUp that think in buildings. This is where I write about how that's going.
Temporary Dimensions, a new Modelling tool, shows how far the selection is from a face, edge or corner I Option-click, and moves it when I type a new distance into the label. Getting there took a test model, a prototype with 117 checks and a lot of ideas that didn't survive.
Lengthen now takes a typed value the way Push/Pull does, in the direction the preview shows, with =1500 for a total. It also works on L, U and angled wall groups, and on one wall inside a group of walls.
A reply on the SketchUp Community showed me how to lengthen an off-axis line with Move. I tried it, then added dragging with a preview and gable walls to Lengthen.
Lengthen, a new Modelling tool, changes a line, a layered group or a loose beam by a typed length along its own run, and a standing group's height from its top or bottom.
Trim/Extend to Corner now rounds or chamfers a corner as well as making it sharp, in plan and in elevation, because our house needs a ramp that bends onto its landings.
My first topic on the SketchUp Community forum led to Profile Builder, and to the question I keep coming back to — how much BIM I can add before SketchUp's modelling freedom starts to go.
Trim/Extend now draws its highlight above the model, previews the trim before the click, picks a box at the face you point at, and uses SketchUp's own selection colour.
From 0.2.0, Aplo checks aplo.studio for a new Release and offers to install it — but never installs anything by itself.
Aplo 0.1.0 is out with three free Modelling tools — Trim/Extend to Corner, Trim/Extend to T and a new one, Merge — each with its own page on the site.
The second tool. Pick a boundary, then bring any number of lines or walls to it, one click each — and a wall that lands on another wall's run is joined as a T.
The first tool out of the wall work. Click two lines or two walls on the side you want to keep, and both meet at a corner — layer by layer for walls.
Two weeks into building Aplo's Revit-style wall, I found the tools I miss every day are not the wall itself but joining, trimming and extending — on walls and on plain lines alike.