Hi everybody. It’s been somewhat of a year since “snaps” were introduced to Sketchup. I like the idea of the feature but haven’t come around to integrating it into our library of components a lot yet. Looking around the forum there is not a lot of talk about it. Anybody actually using it in their pro-workflows?
For me the things that hold me back of fully embracing snaps seem to be:
Time to update my components aka being lazy about it.
I find it irritating that they basically look the same as regular snapping points, I kind a wish they would show their orientation at first glance. The current implementation makes snapping things to other things a bit of quesswork how they are going to orient themselves.
I find it irritating to my workflow that there is no easy way to modify rotation. Sometimes it’s great that the snapping point is making sure the other object is flipping/rotating as intended, sometimes it’s annoying. Don’t know how to solve this but this way I usually need to kinda adjust the position / rotation of the object a bit after having “snapped” it.
My first goal for getting startet with snapping points was a better way to do piping. It seemed ideal. You have pipes and you have bows (30°, 45°, 90°) that can “snap” together. But a 90° bow (to take one example) still needs to be oriented in the third axis to make sure that the pipes will go into the direction they are supposed to. This is where the current snapping system fails me because it will not only snap to the surface of the corresponding point but “re-rotate” the component as well. Every. single. time. you. need. to. move. it.
Maybe if one could rotate the object around the last snapped point with the arrow keys (like in 15° increments or something like that) it would feel more natural. Or like holding shift to say “snap but don’t reorient!” As said - not sure how to solve it.
Still I am curious - are some of you out there that have gone “full snap”?
I use them on piping components for my water treatment plant models. Putting snaps on all the elbows, tees, pipe ends, etc does make things a bit easier.
That’s interesting - basically what would have been my starting point. Everything that has “circle-centers” are good candidates for snaps. How do you deal with the “reorientation-issue” I was describing earlier? One more thing I noticed of why I didn’t implement it quite as much as I wanted to, is that I “kinda have them already”. I have a “snapping-line” (a regular line) in almost all of my standardized components. It’s on a special layer called “positioning-helper” so I can turn them on and off. They fulfill two purposes:
They give me a precise grabbing point to snap them to corresponding other components.
They are my little helpers in Layout because they stick out far enough for me to use to attach dimensions to them with far more precision as would be possible if I try to guess the right point in the component.
So that might be another idea for snaps. Make them “Layout-friendly”, by giving them a “stronger magnet” for the dimensions tool as would regular points.
I think the Snaps feature is cool but not very useful for the vast majority of my modeling. Since I generally model everything in place where it’ll be in the model, adding snap points isn’t worthwhile. The components I do make for reuse are always created with their origins located at the required insertion point so I’m not dragging in components and then moving them around to get them placed where I want them.
I work similarly to @DaveR because most of my models are furniture or cabinets. I find that a combination of a well-chosen component axis origin and glue-to properties makes it easy to place knobs, handles, and other reusable stuff. The rest I also usually model in place.
I was super curious about this. Snaps was announced, I looked at it, I got excited - mainly because it was SOMETHING NEW and God - do we complain that Sketchup doesn’t do enough NEW.
And then we “Pros” go like: Weeeell - we already have a workflow/work-around for that, no point bothering. Must be frustrating seeing so little adoption of this in the user community.
On the other hand - it wasn’t EXACTLY in the list of missing features we all keep bitching about. For me snaps feels like a nice Version1 Tool that needs some improvement for me to be useful. I work exactly like you guys as well.
I have not use snaps that much, as you say I generally already have workflows that deal with placement of most common objects. However, one place I find they really shine is in multi-part modular systems that need to be quickly assembled like the above mentioned piping system. In my case I commonly design using prefabricated aluminum truss systems. Using snaps on the individual pieces takes care of alignment and clocking automatically making assembly much quicker.
I find them useful for odd shaped objects. I place real components in my Architectural drawings. So something like a toilet is quickly places with a snap that has the correct off set from a wall. I put them on my Cabinet components but didnt like it so much. One tip for those that havent figured it out is to bring the component into another model add the snap to the component and save as back to the component file so it isnt burried an edit layer into the component. But that might work to have them not active when first dropping the component then edit into the component if you want to use them.
I want to use snaps for my timber frame shop drawings to speed up brace placement / etc - but from what I understand the snap affects the overall component bounding box size so it would throw off my material take offs (for example - I would have the snap at the intersection of a post and beam within the angled brace component - so this would be outside of the ‘timber’…)
That’s an awesome example! Thanks for the visualisation! You do have the same problem that I have - essentially (it’s nice to see here) Snaps only work well on a predefined “plane”. It works super well with one-directional components, but your little L-shape only works in your example because this happens to be the direction you wanted to go in your example. If you wanted to go the other direction or UP you would need to rotated manually after snapping.
True, snaps are simpler to use on objects that don’t have an orientation or at least have a consistent orientation relative to each other. But I do find they are useful even for more complex assemblies. In the example you sited, the snaps on either end of the L-shape turn the piece in opposite directions so it’s easy to orient the turn by choosing which side snap you grab. And for rotation out of plane one does need to use the rotate tool but snaps still help this operation. The snap itself is an inference-able point so it’s easy to find center with the rotate tool and if you inference a snap the rotation plane automatically conforms to the orientation of the snap plane. Notice in the example below I’m not locking any inference, the rotation tool turns red when I inference the snap. So in effect it becomes a single click pivot point which is still an advantage.
I’ve embedded them in our wall components, but they don’t show except for the tooltip if you can guess where they are. They don’t show as they are embedded in a non-scalable sub group. If I embed them within the upper level of the component, the component cant be scaled (essential for these components). If scaled, the bounding box returns to original size, thus the component is now broken!
Ah - yes - this “guessing where they are” is also one of my problems with snaps. You really need to know where you placed them… I wonder if the Sketchup-Team will put some more polish to this or if snaps will die the slow death of neglect.
