I was wondering if it would be possible to implement a feature that would allow for multiple placements of RoomBox units in a model using some sort of array. This would be very helpful for workflows that involve quickly populating office/residential towers with Parallax units for rendering.
I created a custom dynamic component for our office (prior to my knowledge of RoomBox) that utilizes 9 different ShaderBox Parallax rooms to create a repeating arrayed grid wall for quick tower façade placement. This allows for the user to specify many different options such as how many floors, the floor-to-floor height, floor thickness, the day/night texture, unit size, etc… to quickly setup a customized component for the project. In addition, the dynamic component has built-in Enscape lights for each unit to allow for better user-controlled lighting when rendering.
The current downsides of this workflow is that we don’t have the option to easily customize individual rooms’ sprites (i.e. remove specific wall/furniture) to account for corner units. In addition, the RoomBox interface is much more user-friendly compared to the built-in SketchUp Dynamic Component Options window.
I attempted to create a similar arrayed Dynamic Component using the RoomBox units however they seem to lose the ability to access their options once placed in a component.
I’m wondering if this proposed feature is even possible with the way RoomBox is currently setup however, a randomized grid of RoomBox units that allow for overall settings such unit size, floor spacing and dividing wall thickness while still maintaining access to customize individual units to account for corner conditions would be super useful for not only our firm, but I imagine many others as well.
Please consider this feature request. I would be glad to continue this conversation and share my current workflow if it helps with this development.
This is something we’ve been wanting to explore for a while, but not sure how to implement it.
In your mind, how would the selection of rooms work? Should the “array tool” randomly pick rooms for the library? How would it work with rooms of different widths? (small, medium, large)
Rooms in the RoomBox library come with default dimensions. Should these default dimensions be discarded in favor of the array dimensions?
I’m glad the team is looking into this. Here’s a mockup workflow of how we would like this implemented:
The user first filters for the desired room type and size (i.e. Residential, Small). The array option will only be available after using these two filters.
They then have the option to select all of the rooms that they’d like to be included in the array. The selected rooms would then be in a pool to be randomly placed when the array is created. Perhaps some built-in rules to not allow for duplicate rooms to be adjacently placed.
An option window comes up after placing the array that allows the user to select Array Options that would affect all Rooms such as Lighting, Resolution, Dimensions and # of units. The default dimensions would be based on the first Room selected. This should hopefully eliminate the issue of varying room sizes as all rooms will be controlled with this Array Option window.
The Array Options window can be accessible after being placed as well as the option to individual edit rooms to customize specific instances (i.e. corner units). Perhaps the array breaks when an individual room within the array is edited to not cause issues.
Please let me know if you’d like to discuss this further. I’ve come up with this workflow without any thought on the coding so I’m not sure how feasible it is.
