Hey, what is up, nation?
In this session I'm going to teach you how you can trim multiple objects at once.
Okay, so there's a question asked on the Sketchup forums.
I've recreated this.
But basically what the person was trying to do
was subtract these differen spheres from this grid, of I assumed wood.
So I'm gonna show you how to do that in this video.
Now we'll start out by saying I'm not sure of any plugins that will do this in a more efficient way.
They may exist, this way is going to be somewhat tedious,
less serious than if you were to do this one by one.
But what you want to be sure to do when you do this
is make sure you save the first thing,
and even maybe even save a "copy as" just so that you have a backup in case something happens.
So the issue that you might be running into here is that I have this as a group.
If I click into this, these are all separate, they're groups, they're not components.
Even though they're the same. I just quickly did this.
But what happens when I try to use the solid objects here.
So if I do select subtract, so I want to select first solid from a second.
So let's say I want to get rid of one of these spheres.
What you select it, lets me select this and then I get a little too
but I get the X mark, like a little you cannot do this.
And it says "not a solid" for this guy.
So if I click into this, all of these are separate groups and that's why this isn't a solid.
But this particular one, you can see when you get a solid it'll give you a volume.
All of these individually are solids.
So what we need to do, and why you might want to back this up,
is we need to make this one uniform solid.
And to do that we're gonna use the solid operation tools.
It's gonna take a little bit because there's a lot going on here.
But just bear with me and we'll go through it.
And eventually we're gonna end up speeding this up because it's gonna take a little bit of the time.
But you can actually do this in multiple steps depending on how fast your computer is.
So it might be quicker for you than it is for me, it might be slower for you than it is for me.
Okay, so I'm just going to start using this as a little reference.
Copy this off to the side really quickly.
I'm gonna hit B for the paint bucket tool, select a color.
Let's choose...just choose green.
So this guy is gonna have one capped edge.
Let me just measure and make sure this is correct, so this should be 4 foot.
One foot, this should be six.
Want that to be actually one foot shorter, because we just wanted to be five.
Okay, so we have that just gonna select all this, make it a component.
And then select this again, right click make unique.
Hit all of it, and then we're just gonna make this like a teal.
And this guy will have no captains.
So, start here, this goes across one foot,
and then this guy will rotate one of them. Choose them, put them there, times 9.
We may need to just move off to the side a little bit, I'm just gonna select all these and see how many I have.
So I have ten. Will do a 10 by 10 grid, so that works out.
Well, this over five. Choose this, choose that times eight
Select these, there should be ten.
And then just double-check my spacing between them, should be five.
Yep, so that's good so far, times 9, times 8.
The same thing over here. Take this, rotate it up.
Okay, so we have these guys across.
Now what I want to do is select this, rotate it down over, times nine, okay.
Go to the top view. I have a quick shortcut that I've set up just for that.
So I'm going to just select these really quickly. I'm holding ctrl just to get the selection.
Okay, times nine. Yep, the same thing here.
Take this and hit Q to rotate and move this down, times nine.
Then we'll check and make sure everything looks alright, and it does!
So that's our bottom part.
Now just for reference, because I need this when I'm going up.
I don't want this blue guy. So if I have a blue guy, which I do, unfortunately.
Just check the end pieces really quick as I go through this to make sure there's no duplicates.
We make ctrl X here to get rid of those. Go to the top view.
Now where I see the blues I'm gonna delete them, edit, paste in place.
And that should be good.
I just wanna check that I didn't... so must has done that when I rotated,
because these guys on the edge look fine.
Take this guy, I'm gonna copy him up.
So I'm gonna copy here and then up an additional five feet, exactly or want that.
Go to here, times eight.
So and then the rest of these middle ones are gonna be exactly the same.
So what I'm gonna do is go to my max.
Let me just check and make sure that this is correct first.
Should be ten of these, yeah. So I'm gonna select my bottom pieces,
go all the way up this is already have a reference I'm just gonna scale these in reverse direction.
Negative one. Then come back down, to here.
And then I'll have duplicates there, so I'm just gonna delete them.
I'm gonna hit "save" here just in case anything happens while I'm working on this next part.
So I have these guys, those references but I won't need them for this.
Maybe I'll use that first one just as a reference because it'll make things a little bit faster, I think.
So I'm gonna copy this guy up, I guess rotate them up, move them to here.
Same thing, times nine.
Choose the front P, this is where parallel projection is really helpful.
If you're not using parallel projection you might want to consider using that for this.
Just because when you move to like a side view it's easier to select everything.
Okay, so basically what we have here in the middle is gonna be great for continuing to go up.
So if I select all these, minus that guy, will just double-check my measurements here, five feet.
So I'm selecting this guy. We're going to here, times nine.
So I'm not sure exactly what happened, let me just check that there are nine of these.
There ten, yeah. I'm not sure what's happened there.
But I'm just gonna roll with it. Maybe I didn't move them at the right location, front.
The first time. She's all those. Choose these guys and then move them down.
And that should be good.
So now everything should be clean, nice and clean how we want it.
I'm gonna just save this.
And then what I'm gonna do is select this, group it,
And then the smart thing here is...to ungroup, or to make a copy of it at first.
Then I'm gonna hide that so it doesn't bog down everything.
And then what I'm gonna do is select this and explode. And explodes it again.
Now this could take some time.
Basically everything's gonna be stuck to each other after this happens.
But this should be easier for the the software to understand then unioning everything together.
Okay, so we finished here. And now you can see everything is stuck to itself.
And when we make it a group, we have a volume so that means that it's a solid
which is exactly what we wanted.
And then we can come in here if we want, we can change back to the default.
So what I'm gonna do is hit B for the paint bucket tool.
And then choose alt to select the default color. Right click.
I'm just gonna color all those faces to be the default.
Can you use this as a reference, okay.
Bring this in here. Just trying to make sure that I stay on that line.
I just made a copy, it makes it a little bit easier for me, hide.
So now, ctrl+s to save, because when you're doing something like this intense
you just want to make sure that you're saving, or saving a "copy as" at an every sort of step of the way.
Now what I could do is I could Union these together
and then try subtracting it for this.
Because I know it's going to be sort of an advanced operation.
What I'm going to do is just try it one at a time,
because I think it'll be best that way.
If it doesn't work, then we will try it differently. But let's try this first.
So I hit subtract there, I selected one of the objects that I wanted to subtract from my geometry.
So I selected that sphere first, our spheroid object and then I selected my new group solid.
It's gonna take a little bit at a time.
And then once the separation finishes, I'll move on to the next sphere.
So you can see right there that I've reason operation finished.
So again, because I got sort of the result that I was looking for,
when I do control, we're gonna do a "save a copy as" just in case, save multiple to.
Just save that copy.
Again subtract, select your first geometry that you want to subtract, the geometry you just wanna subtract of.
Then select the geometry you want to select from.
You're gonna get wait some time.
And then we'll just go through this and we'll do each one and then I'll show you the result.
Okay, so our operations have finished, and you can see there's some floating bits here
so you might just want to come in and delete any floating geometry that you have.
But overall, we have finished our operation and we were able to get what we were looking for.
If you guys have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask them in the comments down below
and share the video with friends if that was helpful.
And as always, happy hacking!