Automagical scaling of small things (like for 3D printing)

Sketchup was originally intended for “big” things, so when I’m working with “small” things, it often seems to have rounding and other errors.

I’d like a mode where internally everything was 100x or 1000x larger - but whenever it showed mm or whatever it would take the fidelity of that mode into account so whatever I was using worked.

The follow me tool works terribly on small objects, etc.

I end up manually scaling things up a lot, then editing them, then scaling them back down, but that workflow is a bit messy.

Have you tried the ‘DaveR method’?

Make a component of what you are drawing. Scale up a COPY of it, Edit the copy, use FollowMe, etc on the larger copy, then delete the copy when done.

You can kind of do this now. Set your model units to meters, and draw and think in mm. Ie, just enter measurements in plain numbers as if they are mm.

When done, scale the model down 1000x.


But yes, it would be nice if there was a nifty built-in scaling interface, such as having a view text that said what the modeling scale was (1000x) etc., right there on the screen as a reminder.