This feature may already exist in some form but I haven’t found it.
If you work on something with many lines off axis, it can be very hard to snap to points, especially if the lines are only just off axis. It means you have to keep zooming in and out or you have to keep changing the axis orientation. Neither of these things make for speed. What I would like is a modifier key that can temporarily turn off snapping to axis so that points have a stronger gravitational field.
You already mentioned changing the axes orientation. That’s a good approach.
You also mentioned lack of speed (when changing the axes? I guess)
This may help:
Change axes orientation so these lines become off new axes quite a bit
Save a scene with these new axes, nothing else, especially no camera position!
The changed axes are just one click away and do not take extra time.
Set up a shortcut key to reset the axes, also just one key stroke away.
It’s not likely that Trimble is going to do anything about inferencing and snapping to axes. It’s part of SketchUp’s strength. But who knows.
I often work with a multitude of curves where alignment could be an issue…
so, I scale up by 100 times and only scale back down when I need to output the file…
it also avoids the small faces issue…
john
Yes I do mean that it takes time to keep changing axes. It’s fine if you have a lot of things parallel or perpendicular to a given axis, but if you’re working on a drawing of a medieval house, say, there may be no two walls parallel.
I am certainly not asking for anything to be changed with inferencing in general as it’s a great feature of SU that speeds up drafting in most cases a lot. I was just wondering whether hitting a modifier key when trying to lock onto a point near (but not on) an inference line could temporarily disable inferencing so that it was easier to select the point. The way I do it is to keep zooming in and out, but that is inefficient and still results in errors sometimes.
Have you tried with a saved scene as mentioned previously (bold)? That will at least help in reducing zooming in and out again in many cases. One simple click on the scene tab.
I can see that a saved scene would work but in the kind of drawing I am talking about you might need dozens and have to remember which was which. Not practical I fear.
I kind of “discovered” that with a custom short-cut for the axes tool, constantly changing axes can be a practical method (tap the shortcut, click at the beginning and end of the line to draw, click somewhere else to place the blue axis - with some practice that can be done very quickly).
Or if your drawing allows for it place the axes across the corners of the rooms (appx 45° to the walls) to mitigate the conflicts with the inference engine. This could be done with a scene.
Personally I appreciate the inference engine for that it comes without any modal configuration, I see this as clear advantage compared to other CAD programs, where it is almost impossible to remember which mode is active or not. But I face the same issues with small angles…
There are some really good suggestions here, so thank you. I will definitely try them.
Gut feeling is that a simple modifier key (if that is as simple to implement for developers as I assume) would still offer the quickest solution to my problem.
Maybe the problem can be considered from the other end:
There are already keys in SketchUp for the user to enforce axes-inferences (shift or arrows).
So how about modifying the inference engine so that when points and axes come close to each other (and only then), preference would be given to the points by default?
The user could still lock the axes if needed, that would make life easier for those who work with irregular shapes, and those who work with orthogonal shapes should hardly notice anything.
I might not have the full picture on it and it’s not easy to figure out all the situations the inference engine might need to face. But after spending a full night thinking about it, I still wonder whether this behavior would not be desirable even in other situations than old buildings renovations.