SketchUp 2016: Inference updates and feedback

Yogesh,

thanks for the response. I’ve tried reporting bugs through that link, but
it requires a serial number - we’re a firm of over 500, and have a network
license, not a serial number. ironic, isn’t it?

@cpeterson_com, I will send you a private message.

Yogesh,

I found a serial number. putting together an exhibit now.

thanks

Some more feedback on the new functionality of the shift key. I use the shift key a lot in combo with middle mouse button to pan. However since this update I find quite often that after I’ve released the shift key, some random unwanted inference lock has become active and I need to press shift again to unlock it.
Is this expected behaviour or am I just not paying enough attention to what I’m really doing?

2 Likes

it happens a lot with me too. really annoying.
I think it’s to do with the timing of when you press and/or release the shift and when you press and/or release the middle mouse button: it’s normally when I’m working fast that it happens to me… I can’t seem to replicate the behavior when I want to.

1 Like

Yup, having the same issue, needles to say that if you try to work in a speedy fashion, this get’s quite frustrating.

Try to get addicted to the mouse only navigation.

Shift sticking sounds like a bug. Can anyone post steps to reproduce this issue?

I was able to reproduce this sticking inference issue. It broke in the 2016 maintenance release. For reference its filed as SU-34079.

Great catch! Thanks for reporting it!

@Bryceosaurus,

If I may ask: did the team ever consider to add some sort of a quick-patch solution? For people using SketchUp daily, bugs are annoying. Especially if something gets broken that breaks your happy workflow. Mistakes can happen though - no problem. But its frustrating knowing you will have to wait for quite a while (several months until M2, or half a year until M3 / …) before a fix is implemented.

Just curious.

We don’t have a good solution at this time. If a very serious issue related to security or crashing is found, we will spin a new release to fix it. Unfortunately this issue wouldn’t warrant an emergency release.

We also do heavy testing before any release which includes both automated testing and using beta testers. It’s frustrating we missed this particular issue for the 2016 M1 release in March.

Is there a way to temporarily disable inferencing? I am trying to sketch out a corporate logo with lots of curves and a large circle. Sketch up constantly trying to inference everything makes it frustrating trying to accurately pick a starting point.

1 Like

No. This option has been requested several times before, but to date there is no way.

Make sure you have Length Snapping turned off.

Help! Has anyone found a solution yet? I make complex models and this problem has gotten so annoying I can hardly draw. It is absolutely and totally frustrating!

What exactly do you mean by “This problem”? Are you tracing an image or having issues related to face orientation locking? Or something else?

Cheers!
~Bryce

Bryce I think the core of this topic is how to cope with situations where potential inference points are so numerous and close together that snapping to the right one becomes difficult. Rather than zooming and orbiting to reduce the ambiguity, these users want to be able to turn off (or selectively enable) inference snapping.

Personally I think this is a “be careful what you ask for” situation. 3D modeling without inference snaps would lead to many more broken models than we see already created by people who ignore the inferences.

@Bryceosaurus
Hey, I know this is an old thread but I was unable to find any other place where to give feedback about interferencing in SU 2017. The down arrow is very cool but there are some cases which give me a hard time: eg. drawing a line that is perpendicular to a face, or drawing a line that is perpendicular to another line but is not the perpendicular SketchUp thinks I need.

It would be great (at least for 2018, if not in an update for 2017) to have these features:

  1. Line perpendicular to a face: Constructing the end point of a line, when the down arrow is pressed while the cursor is On Face (blue mid-angle square), the interactive point would stick to a line that is perpendicular to the face and comes through the start point.

  2. Plane perpendicular to an edge: Constructing the end point of a line, when the down arrow is pressed while the cursor is On Edge (red square), the interactive point would stick to a parallel line (this is already implemented). When the down arrow is pressed for the second time, SU chooses a perpendicular it thinks is the most important (this is also implemented). When the down arrow is pressed for the third time, the interactive point is locked on a plane that is perpendicular to the edge and comes through the start point.

.

I hope you understand what I mean by all this as I’m not a native speaker and I struggled a bit with the description :slight_smile:

The second feature is more complicated but indeed very useful. If you think three times the down arrow is too much, then replace the second press, because SU is not an oracle and often guesses a wrong perpendicular.

I think these features are very important and have a variety of use cases, without them it it very hard eg. to create a perpendicular transversal of two lines in general position.


One last thing: would it be possible that SU prefered sticking to vertices instead of sticking to axes? When I need to connect two vertices that are not parallel with an axis just by a tiny little bit, I need to zoom in really, really close to be able to make a line between them. When too zomed out, the end point sticks to the axis. This is even worse when the model is too complex and plane clipping occurs – this means I have to change models axes to make the line visibly non-parallel.


Later than last: I think what @brveldkamp and @patfan1222 mean by disabling interferencing is disabling sticking, so that you’d be able to lock onto something manually, but wouldn’t be forced to eg. stick to an axis or connect to a nearby vertex. This would however make modelling much more difficult… Maybe you could add options like “Stick to axes” into preferences, so that they could be selectively (or even through hotkeys) turned on and off.

or how about a snap override, no more time wasted hunting for midpoint or intersection would be awesome.

It’d a long time since I used AutoCad, but I seem to remember a pop up with check boxes, where you could choose what types of inference to use (check the box) or ignore (uncheck the box).

The SU equivalent could include end point, midpoint, intersection, on edge, on face, parallel to, perpendicular to, on axis, centre point, origin point, cpoint, guideline, and maybe a few more that exist but I rarely use or forget at the moment.

3 Likes