A couple of questions about a simple drawing process

Hi everybody.

I would ask the shorter question first.

A) How often do you work with sketchup preferences > drawing > continue line drawing enable?. Would you use it for the following exercise?

B) I would like to see diferent points about how to approach this situation, Doing the following exercise:

From the blueprint I can take for sure 2 things:

1) Circle diamenter is 8mm (4mm radius)
According to the info from another threads I need to work with the radius

2) Circle center is 7mm away from the left side.

Several ways to do this comes to my mind.

If I want to draw the circle and then move it to the right place I’m going to need avoid sticking, so I can:

  • Drawing a circle 4mm radius outside the figure.
  • Drawing a circle 4mm radius inside the figure but not touching any edge.
  • I can turn the main shape into a group or component (I can do the same for the circle if I respected the first two sentences)

I will need to find the correct location to place the circle so:

  • I can draw a guideline 7mm from the left side.
  • I still need to know how far it’s from the top or the bottom edge, so I can:
    a) (110/2) - 45, that would be the distance from the top edge.
    b) (110/2) + 45, that would give me the distance from the bottom.

I can draw a line instead of a guideline to use it as reference, I read there is an extension called linetool that would let me type where a line starts from, but I don’t think that would make the process faster, besides, I would preferece to use native tools.

What would you think it’s the easier/faster way to work in this case?

If someone needs, this is my file done: EjerBas06.skp (40.9 KB)

Thanks in advance.

I wold draw two guides: one 7mm from the left edge, the second 10mm down from the top edge.

Centre the 4mm radius circle on the intersection of the guides.

It looks as though that is what you have done already.

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Thank you john for your point.
Yes, I decided to do it with two guidelines, I was a little confused because I think I would use guidelines for lot of situations and I’ve seen that sometimes, some people show me things like: “you don’t need a guide line here, just hover this endpoint or midpoint and then move it to …” and then I feel like I’m doing complicate what it’s in fact easy. And maybe other people usually works with components or groups for things like this.
Do you usually work with sketchup preferences > drawing > continue enable?
EDIT: As I read in another thread, “if something looks hard on SketchUP, you’re probably doing something wrong” :slight_smile:

I don’t even recognise that preference, so I think I must have left it at the default - when I look, I see that ‘Continue line drawing’ is indeed checked.

In general, that saves having to draw guides. But here, there is no midpoint, endpoint, or intersection from which to use inference to find the centre. The midpoint of the top is 8mm from the left, and the midpoint of the bottom is 5mm from the left: neither of them is 7mm.

Yeah, it’s enable by default, I press ESC key when I don’t want to continue the line drawing.
But I’ve been feeling that I use ESC key very often so maybe I should consider change that preference according with what I’m drawing.
After all, it’s not a big deal to have to press ESC when you want to draw a new line from another point.

It’s mostly a personal preference. Even with it checked, I quite often find I need another click to start a continuation from the end of the previous line.

A benefit to leaving it enabled as it is by default is you quickly identify that you’ve closed a planar loop because it stops drawing then. Or you get a clue that your edges aren’t coplanar because it won’t stop drawing even if you close the loop if the edges are not in one plane.

It’s unlikely you’ll wear out your Esc keep. You’re more likely to wear the paint off the Ctrl key. I have done that on two different keyboards.

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Good point. I also was considering the fact you maybe try to draw fast and then you don’t click where the previous line ends.

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