Today I was using my Sketchup Pro 2019 and clicked on the Circle tool (pressing “C” also) but when it showed it was doing a triangle. I don’t know what I did to cause this but can’t get it back to doing circles. All the polygon, arc, rectangle, etc work like normal but the circle has a triangle around the point and won’t draw circles.
I need help please
F
Select the circle tool and immediately type 24 and hit Enter. Sounds like at some point you selected the Circle tool and typed 3 before you clicked to set the center point.
Tried this but it won’t change. Clicked on rectangle and back to circle and immediately type 24 but stays as triangle.
It’s still drawing triangles after you make that change? You aren’t clicking in the Measurements window are you?
Try 24s and hit Enter.
if you mean “24” and the letter “s”, tried that. Still doing triangles.
This is what the screen looks like.
The Measurements window appears to be blank. It shouldn’t be. When it shows ‘Sides’, it should show a number. Is there any chance you are trying to type the number on the number keypad but NumLock is turned off?
What happens if you press Ctrl + a few times?
Just read the screen. I pressed Ctrl + and now have 30 segments. Hm… not sure what I pressed to get it to go to 3 but now seems OK.
Set it down to 24.
Close and reopen SU and it should be reset to the default 24.
I hadn’t noticed the modifier ± thing before.
A note about the 24 Enter versus 24s Enter, right after choosing the circle tool you can type either 24 Enter or 24s Enter, and it will make your first circle be 24 sides. After drawing the circle, 30 Enter would make it have a radius of 30 units, but 30s Enter would change the last drawn circle to have 30 sides.
One fun thing, anything after the s is ignored, so long as it’s not its own shortcut key. I can type 24sides Enter, and it works.
One thing about circles/arcs I recently learned in the ‘quick win’ thread that I just never would have thought of, but makes perfect sense.
Always try to keep the number divisible by 4 and pull out your circles along an axis. (Usually red for me, sometimes green) It helps drawing on plane, having the arcs end so that your follow me profiles will be perpendicular. Or it even helps when trying to move cylinder shapes tangent to faces.
I use a multiple of 12 in most cases because that makes it evenly divisible by 2, 3, and 4.
Makes sense. I guess that’s probably why an arc defaults to 12. I don’t change it much, only when the radius is too small for the # of segments. I used to just CTRL (-) until it worked, but now do it in factors of 4. (8 or 4)
It can be mention that restarting SketchUp also resets this value. Especially for extension developers I think it is good to think of how this specific setting behaves. A lot of users change this value frequently when modeling as different segment counts suit different sizes of circle. Having to re-enter the value each time would be tedious and distracting for the flow. On the other hand someone could easily set it to a “bad” value by mistake, and then you don’t want that to be kept potentially causing problems for months or years to come. Storing the value for a single session is a good balance here. Other settings are better suited to be stored until manually changed, e.g. on the machine or in the model.
