Better Viewport Line Weight Control

If the Profiles and Section Cuts boxes in the Sketchup Style edges settings could accept decimal input (ideally to 2 decimal places) in the same way as the Line Weight box does in the Layout Sketchup Model tray, then full control of linewidth ratios would be possible in Layout between the various line types (base width, profile, section cut etc). At the moment they only take integers, which greatly limits the options available.

Because they represent pixels. You cannot display half a pixel. The SketchUp styles are visual styles, not presentation (print) styles. (There is whole huge world out there, using SketchUp, that has no knowledge of the existence of LayOut.)

IMO, there needs to be styling overrides in LayOut viewports, that can be based upon, say em, rather than pixels. That way you can control how things get printed, without effecting how SketchUp displays similar things.

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(Moved to LayOut > Feature Requests category, and retitled.)

After playing a bit in LayOut with the Model panel’s Styles tab, and the current Line Weight control, …
I need to agree with @DavidN that LayOut could use better control how various style items and lines get “weighted” in LayOut viewports and eventually printed / plotted.

I quite sure DavidN was envisioning something like the LayOut Model > Styles tab getting expanded to have multiple “weight” controls for the various styling features. This way we can control “weighting” independently for, say Section Lines, Section Cuts, Edges, BackEdges, Profiles, EndPoints, Extensions, DepthCue, Dimensions, etc., etc.

EDIT: It would also be nice if we could choose between “weighting” the SketchUp pixel settings, and just hard override setting as some presentation unit (em, pts, picas, etc.)

I love options !

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Thanks for the useful comments. What you describe in your second post would be ideal. I thought there might be an easy way to refine the existing adjustment parameters via Sketchup but had overlooked the pixel issue.

I hope that more lineweight controls can be added to Layout in due course.

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I too love options.

What I have been wishing for LayOut is that I ought to be able to control everything related to how the model is displayed from inside LayOut, without needing to jump between it and SketchUp to define scenes and styles. It could include full typographic control of text, dimensions, line styles and lineweights. (today the only way to use dashed lines for a SketchUp-generated view in LayOut is to explode it - still, after many releases!).

Anssi

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I concur with Dan’s post regarding line weight controls and options. Would be a great improvement.

I agree with both David and Anssi above, I have been struggling with the lack of control that you have with layout over the final output of drawings. The ability, to have control over dashed (hidden) lines would also be greatly beneficial as well as better snaps. At present on Layout I get very fustrated as the sketchup interface is very slick and easy to use however in Layout you never feel competely sure of whether the drawing you want to produce can be done accurately and with out exporting it to another package.

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Yes this thread has morphed into more about general application-wide presentation control.

Just an FYI, I had (I think in the 2015 cycle,) filed a request / idea that LayOut get cascading styles similar to CSS like HTML webpages have. I supposes they could even actually use “.css” files.

Since layout files are zip archives with XML files. These CSS stylesheets could likely be embedded easily within them and still follow the XML specification.

Would be so great to generate dashed lines from an SU view without having to explode!

I agree that the speed of development of Layout is frustrating. If it was 1 or 2 years old then this lack of control over drafting basics could perhaps be forgiven, but it’s been around for a while now.

Here in UK construction the main player is Revit, which comes in at about £9000 including upgrades compared to £500 for SU pro, which can produce very high quality output. The potential market is huge! The last thing we want is to try and turn LO into AutoCAD (and SU into Revit) as they’d be ruined. However, some meaningful development and attention to the basics is long overdue. Trimble are stood in front of an open goal and don’t seem to be interested in kicking the ball.

Autodesk is switching wholly to a subscription model and they charge $2500 annually for the Revit Collaboration Suite (basically Revit + full AutoCad). The price you list might be the purchase price for Building Design Suite Ultimate that includes all kinds of stuff like 3D Studio Max and AutoCad Architecture and structural analysis software. I remember that the Premium suite was not that expensive.

SketchUp and Revit are the two tools of the trade that I like most. I wish that they would play together better.

Anssi

have a closer look at Trimble Connect, I think ‘they’ have an endgame in mind…

john