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.
For me this is a simple project (125mb file size and about 30 layout sheets)
There are probably 25 scenes in the model and almost the same number of styles (after purging).
About 15 scenes are sent to LO, and the rest are “working” styles (for when I’m modelling or exporting to other formats), which are more technical in nature (profiles, xray, endpoints, etc).
I use LO to set up Shadows and viewport orientations on each page (eg if doing 10 different house plans I would have one scene and one style for those 10 pages, not 10 of each). I also use customizations in LO for lineweights, dashes, etc.
Projects where I’m producing more detail (such as landscaping, interiors or engineering) will demand cross sections and other technical plans which usually all more styles (fog, section styles, lighting, etc) -So it’s not uncommon to get 40+ scenes & styles, and 100+ sheets (though I may break the project into chunks to maintain stability & speed).
A few snips from the LO file (single SU model)
Not suggesting this is common or “best practice” but I don’t find the Style manager very useful in this scenario, since the information it shows isn’t clearly presented or easy to sort and filter. Its all based on the name, which is truncated to a minimal number of characters. I just end up with Default Style, Default Style2, Default Style3…and a very similar looking thumbnail for each.
Contemplating other workflows, I wonder how many of the styles can be pre-loaded into LO and used there. So SU will just be used to set the view location/extents. Btu LO doesn’t expose enough settings at present. Ideally Styles would be transferrable (drag & drop and update) between SU and LO).
And I don’t know what this “Mix” menu is all about - doesn’t seem to do anything for me.
say, you have 2 styles. one is a sketch style, the other is a default style.
you want the second style to have the line parameters of the first one.
well select the second on, go to mix. at the bottom select the first one and drag it to the edge settings.
it’ll import the edge settings only.
