[BUG+WORKAROUND] High Scale Viewports

Hi all,

Since a long time now there’s a bug on high scale drawings that has been pestering me when using Layout from day one.

I’ve been doing all my construction docs in Sketchup+Layout and I draw every detail in Sketchup using SectionCutFaces.

It’s a very effective method of drafting 2D details at 1:1 scale using your 3D model for reference and then iterate back on the model until it matches details.

Sending model to Layout allows you to have both model and details at any scale you want as long as your raster hatches look good at those scales.

However there’s a bug with Layout viewports that makes a small viewport with a large scale of 1:1, 1:2, 1:5 or even 1:10 to misalign the raster image on from the vectors in a Raster/Hybrid rendered viewport.

The thing is that it’s this hatching that matters at this scale so I had to find workarounds to the bug wich were always cumbersome and convuluted:

  • Scale up and down the viewport randomly until the error was not that drastic/visible (lots of trial and error);
  • Scale up the viewport to a bigger size than what I needed and then Clip mask it (a lot of work for many viewports and not that much flexibility);
  • Ditch Hybrid mode altogether and use Vector only detail drawings (looses informative raster info.)

However, I’ve just found a workaround wich I want to share with you guys, in case you also need it.

It also has it’s limitations but it’s way simpler than the above, it’s flexible enough to be used for a lot of scenarios and can probably shed some light into what’s happening in the backstage, eventually helping Trimble fix the bug:

  • The workaround is simply to use square based viewports or 1x2 rectangular based viewports:

Take a look at the gif for more info:

I hope someone at Layout team picks this up and investigates it deeper.

NOTE: Crosspost from here:

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=65251&p=598399#p598399

I’ve found that rectangles of 2x1 still much more unstable than squares and even squares aren’t guaranteed to work.

They are the shapes that fail the least but they still fail sometimes and the smaller the viewport, the worst they behave.