Lesson 6: Adopt a hand-drawn panel

Goal: draw three ground rails, a side panel and two countertops yourself, bring them into Cabybara with the Stock Painter, and check their grain and face with the two painters that read what every panel carries.

Time: fifteen minutes.

The generator covers most parts, but some you draw yourself. A plain SketchUp component is invisible to Cabybara until it has a stock. Giving it one adopts it: it becomes a generic panel, its face is stamped Inside, and its grain follows the stock. From then on it nests, prices, appears in the reports and gets labels like any generated part. When the part is a plain rectangle, Create Panel on the toolbar draws it with a stock already assigned; adoption is for shapes you draw yourself.

1. Draw the rails

The ground rails are the strips that hide the legs and the gap under the cabinets: 90 mm high and 18 mm thick, two of 1270 mm for the back wall and one of 1458 mm for the side wall.

1. Draw a rectangle 1270 by 90 and Push/Pull it 18 mm.
2. Triple-click the solid to select all of it, right-click, Make Component, and name the definition Ground rail.
3. With the component selected, type an instance name in Entity Info: ground-rail-1. Cabybara shows a part's instance name wherever it has one and the definition name otherwise, so this name follows the rail into the Components Manager, the reports and the labels instead of a generic one.
4. Draw the other two the same way, named ground-rail-2 (1270) and ground-rail-3 (1458), and place all three under the cabinets, against the legs.

Make them components, not groups: the painters pick components only.

2. Draw the tower's side panel

The tower's flank above the stove cabinet is bare carcass, and the stove wall cabinet was made 882 wide in Lesson 4 to leave it 18 mm. Draw a rectangle 578 by 1340 and Push/Pull it 18 mm: 578 reaches from the wall to the front of the tower's door, and 1340 runs from the top of the stove cabinet at 860 to the tower's top at 2200. Make it a component named Tower side panel, give it the instance name tower-side-panel, and stand it against the tower's flank in that gap, flush with the door front.

3. Draw the countertops

The countertops are marble: 40 mm thick, 600 mm wide, and 2482 mm long from the side wall to the tower along the back wall, then 1400 mm along the side wall. Draw each as a rectangle 600 wide, Push/Pull it 40 mm, make it a component named Countertop with the instance names countertop-back and countertop-side, and lay them on the cabinets at 860 so their tops meet the Marble Top line at 900.

4. Adopt them with the Stock Painter

Activate the Stock Painter and pick HDF 18mm in its Stock Picker: these parts go to the HDF factory with the fronts. Hover a rail: the tooltip shows its thickness and that it has no stock yet, and green means the click will paint it. Click the three rails and the side panel. Every click writes the stock and adopts the component in the same step. Then press the Marble chip in the picker, choose Marble 40mm, and click the two countertops. Hold Shift for the stock map: all six are now tinted in their stock's catalog color, and gray marks anything still unassigned.

The painter accepts a stock whose thickness is off by more than 0.5 mm but warns about it; 18 on 18 passes without a word.

The HDF parts should match the black fronts beside them. Open Materials, press Paint on the HDF Black card from Lesson 5, and click the three rails and the side panel. Stock and material stay independent: the four parts are still HDF 18mm to nesting, pricing and the report, and HDF Black only in the Material column.

5. Check the grain

Activate the Grain Painter and hover a rail. It highlights amber: Auto, following its stock, and HDF 18mm runs Along Length, so the white arrows run along the rail. Nesting will keep it that way on the sheet. Click cycles Auto, Along Length, Along Width and No Grain; a value set by hand is manual and survives later stock swaps, and Auto follows the stock again. Holding Shift shows the whole model tinted by grain state. The countertops are gray there: Marble 40mm has no grain, so they are free to rotate.

Worth knowing for the carcasses: the shipped MDF 18mm carries Along Length too, so every Auto panel on it is rotation-locked in nesting. If your MDF has no grain worth respecting, set its Grain Direction to None in the Stock Catalog, or ignore grain for one run; Lesson 8 shows where.

6. Check the face

Every panel has an inside and an outside. The stamped face is the side the nesting drawing is viewed from and whose machining goes into the DXF: a groove cut into one face must be on the stamped face, or it never reaches the CNC. Doors are stamped Outside; drawer fronts, carcass panels and adopted panels are stamped Inside.

Activate the Face Painter and hover a rail: the faces of its stamped side highlight blue for Inside, and the tooltip names it. Click toggles a panel, Alt+Click sets Inside, Ctrl+Click sets Outside, and Shift+Click sets every panel of that type inside a cabinet. Hold Shift for the overview: orange marks Unset, which nesting refuses to run with; you will not see it on generated or adopted panels. The side panel has a visible side, but Inside is only the side machining is read from, and none of these six parts carries any, so they stay as they are.

The Components Manager shows stock, grain and face as columns for every panel, edits them in bulk, and its Only problems filter lists exactly the panels that would block nesting or pricing.

Checkpoint: in the Components Manager, with Show set to Standalone Panels only, six parts are listed under the names you typed: the rails and the side panel with HDF 18mm and HDF Black, the countertops with Marble 40mm, all with Auto grain and an Inside face. The Stock Painter's Shift map shows no gray panel.

What can go wrong

• A group cannot be adopted. Right-click it and choose Make Component first.
• Removing a rail's stock with the picker's Remove row leaves it a Cabybara panel, but nesting skips it silently and the quote flags it.
• Cabybara measures adopted parts live, so a rail you stretch later is reported at its new size.
• Grain set by hand on a stock that has none, such as the marble, is flagged in the Components Manager: the part is rotation-locked for nothing.

References: Stock Painter, Grain Painter, Face Painter, Create Panel, Components Manager.

Next: Price it with the customer.