Dear All,
I just watched Aaron’s video on Coordinate input, which I didn’t even know was a thing.
Which made me ask “Hmmm, I wonder if there is way to know the coordinate position of my cursor?” I would think this could be helpful in avoiding the “line that goes elsewhere” problem.
Is there a way to display your cursor position relative to the absolute or ‘local’ coordinates?
Thanks,
Da Cookie
There isn’t a way to display the coordinates of the cursor but you should need them for that. Inferencing is designed to help you.
Thinking about it, modeling with coordinates displayed and trying to make sense of them on the fly seems like it would be way more work than just using inferencing.
Plus, the coordinates of the cursor don’t necessarily tell you where the inference engine will snap to. You could end up trying to make tiny cursor movements to place it where the snap will go anyway!
Knowing where you are relative to global or local 0,0,0 I think could be help avoid drawing lines to points that are not in plane or on point with complex objects. Just knowing which of the 8 coordinate areas you are in could be helpful. Maybe my idea is not the solution, but just moving slower. Maybe I will come up with an example.
One problem is that a curser sitting in open space in the SketchUp modeling space could correspond to a line of points between the camera and the infinite distance. And in 3D space the difference between two pixels on the screen could be just about any distance or random measurement. Really the only thing that makes sense in the end is relating all geometry to other geometry, which is basically what the inference engine does.
After some thought, and reading these comments, and some more thought, I think my idea is a bit daft. Thank you all for your guidance and patience.
Don’t forget that you can orbit, pan, zoom, hang scene in the middle of a drawing operation or a modification like Scale, Rotate, Move, etc.
For example, after selecting the Line Tool, you click to start a line then, as you move the cursor to place it where you want to end that line, before doing that second click, you can do anyone of these orbit, pan, etc operation in any combination you want, and then click to finish the line.
That goes for rectangle, circle, polygon, arc, offset, etc.