Alternative method of moving/snapping objects - Point-to-Point

SketchUp Feature Requests
1

I love the Sketchup Inference Engine, much better than other 3D programs, but it doesn’t always work right - usually when the objects “get in their own way”. The object you’re moving obscures the intended “landing area”, and IE goes crazy trying to figure out what you mean. So you have to use the axis snapping, usually all 3…

There’s another hypothetical method, that would save a few clicks every time - let’s call it “Point To Point”.

1.) Select P2P.
2.) Select the vertex/edge/face you want to move.
3.) WITHOUT MOVING ANYTHING, select where you want to move it TO.
4.) Press Enter or double-click or whatever other shortcut for “Commit Action”.
5.) The object gets moved to the intended coordinates.

This way, the object is not obscuring the viewport and not screwing up Inference Engine.

In other words, instead of being a worker dragging a box around and not being able to see in front of you, you’re a supervisor with a laser pointer, saying “move THIS to THERE”. And then it gets moved.

Makes sense, or am I asking too much?

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2

You may be right. But have you also tried X-ray mode to be able to see right through your object to see the target?

3

This would be a great feature or a great idea for a plugin.

4

I wonder if an extension to do this would be difficult to make…

5

I saw this idea and made something similar yesterday.

6

Yeah, I know about X-Ray, but:

1.) In a complicated project, this actually makes it harder, because suddenly instead of a few lines:

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there’s dozens:

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2.) It interrupts the workflow, to switch modes by either clicking or hotkey.

3.) In a complicated project, switching to X-ray is an immediate load on the GPU and a time delay.

4.) And then you have to switch back.

I’d much rather have 1 hotkey by which I can snap a point to a point, done and done.

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7

fredo’s move along (part of fredo tools) has a similar feature, called defer mode.

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8

You can use scenes for that.

Create one scene called “X-Ray ON” and another called “X-Ray OFF”. You can use whatever names that you want.

Make sure that you check out the box for camera position to avoid loosing a carefully set zoom, pan and orbit.

Remember that you can change scenes in the middle of any drawing, moving, orbiting, zooming operation.

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9

You’d need to hit a staring point. “Commit action” could simply be hitting the landing point. Is this a feature request?

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Does this help…?

(link starts at 0.17s in)

4 Likes
11

You cannot move a line or face to a point…
So after selecting what you want to move you would need to select a starting point like @basbva said…

12

False, click in sequence on the scenes tabs of this SU file for ideas.

Move a line or a face to a point.skp (225.1 KB)

13

What you could do, and maybe wrap this up in some sort of script, is as follows.

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14

Hi Jean, I think you didn’t understand my point…(pun intended)

What you do in your file is exactly what I said, you have to select a point ON the line or face to move to the destination. So the move is always point to point…

15

PowerCADD with Wild Tools has a Move Tool with the option to move something by the length of a line in the drawing. 1) Select object to move, 2) hold down the modifier key (you get a pickle fork for a cursor), and 3) click on the line who’s length and direction determines the move.

In SketchUp you could draw line from the origin point to the destination point, then move it out into free space somewhere, and then use the move tool to move the desired object by dragging along that line. Yeah, kind of a kludge, but do-able.

16

I wonder if there’s room to add a right-click “copy/cut with base point” and right-click “paste with base point” feature. That way you don’t have to use the move/inference tool at all.

17

In SU, you can do relative and absolute moves using < > brackets and [ ] brackets respectively.

So, instead of drawing a line starting at 0,0,0 and ending at 10,10,10 (for example), then moving the object using that line as a guide, you can use <10,10,10> if you want to move the object 10 units along the red axis, 10 units along the green axis and 10 units along the blue axis.

If you use [10,10,10] the point which you grab for the move will be set at these absolute coordinates instead.

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18

I know all the possible ways to move objects on sketchup, but this feature request likes me a lot, I’m not a developer so I don’t know if it can be done with a plugin as well, but moving object from one point to another just selecting to reference points would be a great tool, that I would use it all the time.

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19

If you put it this way it seems that your wish has been granted many many years ago with the introduction of the ‘Move’ tool.

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20

What I like about the method I figured out in the video is that you actually have a graphic indication of where the object goes.

To take it a step further one could try to find out if only the element to be moved could be turned temporarily into a wireframe. I think that is doable. For instance there is this ruby by Tig that does something similar: ruby to unhide hidden contents in selected group? • sketchUcation • 1