I was recently doing a small SketchUp consulting project for a friend who’s a landscape architect. She wanted my help with generating topographical surfaces, while she was going to concentrate on finding the right vegetation components. Because we weren’t working with any kind of fancy file-checkout system, we agreed that we’d work on the same model independently: she worked on plants and trees, I worked on topo.
Two Separate Models
On her model, she added her entourage: plants, trees, a person, a car.
On my version, I worked on smoothing the surfaces and adding the four vertical walls on the sides of the terrain. No entourage here.
Note that in both models, everything is in the same geo-location. The axes go off in the same directions; the origin is behind the house on the left. This is important.
Combining the Models
This part was easy: SketchUp’s little-known Paste in Place tool. Most people use this tool for moving objects in and out of components within a file. But you can also use it to copy from one file to another.
So in my friend’s model with all of the entourage, I selected all of the entourage objects she added. (Easy to do when all of these objects are on the same layer).
I pressed Ctrl + C to copy; you can also find Copy on the Edit menu.
Then in the topography model I worked on, I chose Edit / Paste in Place. It took SketchUp a few minutes to make the transfer, but everything came in at the same exact location as in the other model.
I wouldn’t recommend working this way on a multi-person, large project – it’s too easy to confuse versions. But for something small when two people can easily agree on their own specific tasks, Paste in Place is a great tool to have in your arsenal.