Troubleshooting

Ordered roughly by how often each one comes up. If none of it helps, see Reporting a problem at the bottom.

Nothing appeared after installing

Did you restart SketchUp? Menus, palettes and the context menu register once at start-up. Until you restart, the extension is installed but inert.

Check the version. Archeform needs SketchUp 2024 or newer. On an older version it refuses to load and says so once, at start-up — if you dismissed that message you won’t see it again until the next restart.

Check the Extension Manager. Window → Extension Manager, find Archeform BIM, make sure it is enabled.

Check the loading policy. If SketchUp is set to Identified Extensions Only or Approved Extensions Only, it silently refuses anything it doesn’t recognise. Either switch to Unrestricted or reinstall from the signed .rbz you downloaded rather than a copy someone sent you.

The toolbar or a palette is gone

The Archeform toolbar is an ordinary SketchUp toolbar — bring it back from View → Toolbars on Windows, or View → Tool Palettes on macOS.

The Project palette comes back from Plugins → Archeform → Project Palette. It remembers whether it was open when you quit: closing it with the ✕ keeps it closed at the next start, reopening it from the menu makes it stick again.

The editing tools are not on a toolbar at all — select an element, right-click, and they are in the Archeform submenu.

I drew something and it isn’t in the storey

You drew without an active storey. Click a storey in the Project palette before drawing — that makes Archeform place new elements inside it.

To fix what’s already drawn: select it, right-click, Archeform → Move to Storey, pick the storey.

The plan view is empty or wrong

Is a storey active? Plans are generated per storey.

Have you regenerated the scenes? Drawing does not update plan scenes by itself. In the Project palette, use the ⟳ next to PLANS.

Is the model saved? LayOut export in particular needs a saved file, because the viewport references the .skp on disk.

The IFC has no windows or doors

Expected, if you exported straight from SketchUp. Its exporter skips objects nested inside another classified object, and fills live inside walls.

Run Plugins → Archeform → Add Windows/Doors to IFC… on the exported file. The full sequence is in Your first IFC.

The IFC has no material layers

Same cause, different command: Add Layers to IFC…. SketchUp’s exporter writes no material entities at all.

“Already written to this file”

Both post-processing commands write a marker and refuse to run a second time — a second pass would duplicate every element.

Export from SketchUp again and run them once each on the fresh file. A .bak of the previous state sits next to it.

Two elements became one in the viewer

Duplicate identities, almost always from copying elements or storeys. Run the model check — the shield in the Project palette header — before exporting.

Diacritics are broken in an exported file

Update to the current version. Files written on Windows with a Czech system locale could come out mis-encoded in older builds; that is fixed.

If it persists, note the exact path of your model — we want to see it.

A tool doesn’t respond to the keyboard

Click once in the drawing area first. If a dialog or palette has focus, key presses go there, not to the tool.

SketchUp got slow in a large model

Turn Isolate on so only the active storey is drawn, and switch zone volumes off. Both cost real frame time in a full building.

Reporting a problem

Tell us:

1. What you did, in enough detail that we can repeat it
2. SketchUp version and Windows or macOS
3. Archeform version — Plugins → Archeform → About Archeform
4. The Ruby Console output, if there is any. Window → Ruby Console, then repeat what went wrong and copy what appears.

A model that reproduces it is worth more than any description. If you can’t share the project, a stripped-down file with just the offending elements is fine.