After I’ve set things up, i’m finding myself turning off Ambient Occlusion when modelling, since it gets a little complex visually, plus it slows my system down.
Very similar to shadows and fog, in that respect.
Perhaps a tick/until box can be added to LO?
(yes, I know I should be much better at managing Styles within SKP and LO, instead of this method, but I find the Styles adjustments and management to be a very slow and frustrating process)
It’s not a bad suggestion but it could be confusing if it was implemented as you’re showing as AO is a part of ‘Face Styles’…not ‘environmental effects’ like shadows and fog.
Since that feature isn’t available yet, here’s a refresher on how to do it fairly easily:
Create two styles in SketchUp. One that has AO turned On…then one with it Off. If you don’t want to create these for EVERY model you work on, do it once, then save this blank file as a Template…and make it your Default Template so every time you start a new file, those AO/NonAO styles will be there:
Then in LayOut…Select your viewport, and change the style as desired. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy.
I’ve made a collection of styles that I commonly use in LayOut projects. I recently add an AO style to that collection. That collection allows me to use a single scene in multiple ways and most of my SketchUp files only need to have one style.
Thanks
I’m not really clear on what that means if I have lot of styles in my model (because it’s almost 1 style per scene)… are you suggesting that I would have a version of each with AO turned on?
The LO overrides (check boxes) are handy in cases where I don’t want to add a brand new style just for a minor LO rendering variation. I’m very happy with being able to turn On/off shadows, or adjust the times of day in LO - it saves a lot of admin/mental load. Just thought AO would be included as an “environmental effect.”
I do have styles in my template, but they tend rto get multipled through style changes per scenes as the model/project grows.
Dave - I havent got the hang of Styles in LayOut yet. Is this what Style Builder is used for? Maybe i need to give that a try.
I do adopt one “working style” which is a basic modelling style (edge materials, no profiles/shadows/AO/sky etc). This method works some of the time, but as documentation gets near to the completion stage (ready for submission to local planning authorities, or construction) it becomes more useful to model in SKP using the exact appearance (edge materials, profiles, shadows, xray, dashes, etc) that you expect to see in LO (or export to other formats). Hence many styles needed.
No. Style Builder is for creating sketchy styles from “strokes” you’ve drawn on a template. As for other properties of styles like Face Style, Background settings, and so on, that’s all done in the Styles panel within SketchUp.
This implies to me that you could improve the way you manage the styles in your SketchUp file. It’s unlikely that you should need more than just a few styles.
Again, I suspect you really shouldn’t need to have so many styles.
Post a sample project because this seems to be overly complicating your workflow.
I’ve done 50+ scenes for construction documents and my models have 4 styles in them. 1 of them just lives in my starter template that I rarely use.
