Hi everyone,
As a brief heads-up, you may notice several changes in SketchUp for Web (and SketchUp for Schools) that are related to the release of SketchUp Pro 2020. Here’s what you can expect to find as you are bouncing around the app:
- Distinct visibility control for hidden objects. Separate from the controls for viewing hidden geometry, you can now also toggle on the visibility of hidden objects (groups or components). This makes it a bit easier to use only hidden objects and scenes to control visibility, as Scenes can remember which objects are hidden. Select an object, hide it, create a scene. No, other clicks required. You can find the ‘View Hidden Objects’ toggle in both the Display panel and Search.
- Visibility control in Outliner: If you use Outliner (included in SketchUp for Schools and with a Shop subscription), we’ve added a visibility control so that you can more quickly control what’s hidden and what’s not across larger sets of objects.
- Control point grips for objects. Moving or rotating objects often requires some mid-operation camera movement. To help you get a better view for moving and rotating, we added a new inference type called a ‘control point.’ When you switch to the Move or Rotate tool, and mouse over a group or component, you’ll see these control point inferences appear at the edges of the bounding box. Mouse over an obfuscated control point, and the object you are moving will turn transparent temporarily. Fun tip here: with the Move tool, you can toggle through different control point inference options, including my favorite, the centroid! (Or, just the center of the bounding box.)
- Layers is now ‘Tags’. For now, this is only a change to the nomenclature of SketchUp’s organization utility. What was formerly a ‘layer’ in SketchUp is now called a ‘Tag’, as is the utility panel, Tags, that controls this method of model organization. All the rules of layers still apply to tags, but now in addition to using tags to control visibility, you can choose not to control object visibility with tags. (Instead, just hide an object and make or update a scene.)
Also… there are new capabilities in SketchUp for Web that we’ve launched quietly in the last few weeks. Most notably, we re-designed the file browsing and picking interface used to show the models you have saved in Trimble Connect, and we’ve made available the Revision History for a given file, so that you can view an older version of a model, copy/paste objects from older models to new ones, and restore older versions if you want. You can read more about Revision History in SketchUp for Web here.
There’s more work in-progress, and we are definitely still checking on these forums regularly to collect your ideas and feedback – if you are having trouble with auto-save on large models, we hear you! – so thanks for continuing to call out those areas of SketchUp for Web that need sharpening!
Mark