Hello,
I would like to show my colleagues a cloud model. Is it possible to hide and show components without a connection to SketchUp?
Hide Components in the Cloud-Model
No, sorry. You can hide and show layers/tags, though, so maybe try to set up some layers/tags in advance.
Thanks for your fast Response, Is there perhaps a way to automatically create the tags based on the structure? It is a model of an engine, this model consists of approx 250 components…
Ouch, OK 
If you want every single component to be individually hide-able, then indeed, right now you have to create 250 tags… and then you’ll get a list of 250 tags in VR, and the only way to show or hide a component is to know the name of the tags, find it in the list, and toggle that. It’s going to be rather annoying to use (and even more so if the user isn’t familiar with all the names). If you are still OK with that, then yes, it can be automated with a Ruby script in SketchUp that would create a new tag for each component, and give the tag the same name as the component’s. I can help you with that if you want.
If you’d prefer, we can instead try to find a better approach by tweaking VR Sketch. For example, how about being able to toggle each group/component between the normal mode and a “wireframe” mode, where only the edges are shown but not the faces? You can then see through that component, but still retain a sense of its location. Also, as the edges remain visible, you can conveniently click there to re-activate the normal mode for that component. Would such a thing help in your case, or do you think that the edges alone are too dense to easily see through the wire frame? In that case, various tweaks are possible (e.g. hide the edges and show the faces as transparent, like with the existing option “Component edit: hide rest of model—opacity”)… Or maybe simply show the edges in a more grayed out color than the default black? Or, in case you have a lot of nested components, show the edges of the outermost “wireframed” component but completely hide the nested subcomponents?
Just a quick note: there are existing Hide and Show All commands from the non-cloud-model mode, but just making them work with cloud models would not be very useful: you could only hide top-level components in a cloud model, because you can’t open subcomponents for editing in cloud models. I should have mentioned this at the start of my previous post. That’s why I’m searching for another approach that could hide any subcomponent, and ideally re-show specific subcomponents too instead of just a single “Show All”.
I think in this case the last option you suggested would make the most sense.
Depending on the complexity of the model, all of your suggestions make sense
I didn’t expect such a quick reaction, really great!
No problem, I like thinking aloud I found a problem, btw. If you have a component that contains no faces or edges on its own, but only subcomponents, then you wouldn’t be able to pick it with the solution I described. You could only pick the subcomponents that have faces or edges. To hide a complete component, you might need to pick each and every subcomponent of it, which again can be annoying depending on the model structure…
Another thing that wouldn’t work: say you have a component “Motor” that is the whole motor, with the stator part as faces inside “Motor” but the rotor in the middle being a subcomponent. In this case you’d like to hide the stator (or make it transparent) but not the “Rotor” subcomponent. It’s something that occurs naturally in the editing (non-cloud) mode, if you open the “Rotor” group and choose in the preferences to make the rest of the model either hidden or transparent. But it wouldn’t work with what I’m describing above, because what I described hides or makes transparent whole components including subcomponents.
I’m thinking now that we need a solution that works very similarly for cloud models as it does for non-cloud models. With it, you could pick one component or subcomponent somewhere, and have everything else hidden or transparent. Maybe it could be made to work with cloud models the same way that it does with non-cloud models—in other words, you could open and close components and subcomponents even in cloud models, for the hidden-or-transparent effect on everything else. (It might also be useful just to interactively explore the structure of nested subcomponents?)
Done and will be included in the next release of VR Sketch: you can now select objects and open components in cloud models. This should already help a lot in your case if you configure in the settings “Components: hide rest of model” or give it a non-100% opacity. Do you want a beta version of VR Sketch to try it out now? I can post one here. Just confirm if you need the PC VR version or the standalone Quest/Pico version.
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Great, i can wait for the official Release. Thank you for your great Work!