Hi, as an architect, I’ve been using Sketchup for literally 20 year, and I have used it exclusively to make all my documents, too, since Layout was first developed. I’ve stayed away from the forums all these years, but was told today by tech support that this forum is actually read everyday by the Sketchup team. If that’s true, may I please suggest a few features that have long been missing, and that I haven’t seen elsewhere in the forum?
Graphic and Text Components for Layout. If I make a North Arrow on one page, I can copy it to others, but what if I want to tweak the arrow? Copy and replace on the other sheets? Sure, but what if it’s a tree symbol, and I have hundreds of them in the document? I have to replace each one. In other words, Layout has Groups just as Sketchup does, but not an equivalent of Components.
Surely that’s a easy feature to add? Pretty please? We are now paying $300 a year for the program, let’s see that guaranteed income stream pay off with new features.
The components thing has been suggested and I can see a lot of benefits for such a feature. Fingers crossed for that to be added one of these days.
While we wait, an option to deal with at least some of those things, like your north arrow is to put the arrow on a shared layer. Then you can tweak it and have that carry across any pages where that layer is displayed.
Thanks, DaveR, that is an excellent suggestion, and I use it frequently for things like notes that I want shared across elevation and section sheets. It wouldn’t work for my concern about a huge number of graphical objects on one sheet (trees, for example), but it is an excellent solution for part of the problem I described.
Also, my apologies for no-doubt repeating things that have been requested many times. Finding instances of those on the forum has been a challenge for me.
Not everyone at SketchUp reads the feature request topic every day! I will tag Mark and Adam, they are two of the team that would be most interested in the suggestion.
Wonderful, thanks. Is it possible for me to tag them? I’ve been happily using Sketchup since 2002 and have a few, mostly small and easy, suggestions that ought be possible to implement and that might keep the grousing down every time there’s a new release and people claim it has few new features and hasn’t fixed long-standing issues.
Anyone can tag anyone. @Colin would get me for example, @bradodonnell would get you.
It’s worth giving the conversation a chance to get going before tagging. Its purpose is to say that only that person can solve the problem, and being tagged on something that anyone could have answered might make the recipient take less notice of posts that actually are an emergency.
LayOut components are something that we are aware that people would love to have in LayOut, and we will evaluate the priority of adding it as a feature vs other work we already have scheduled. I can’t make any promises that it will be in the next major or minor release, however.
Great! As long as you’re aware of it and considering it, then I am happy. It really would improve the program and make it a true alternative to REVIT, AutoCad, and Vectorworks. I don’t expect firms using those programs for large scale projects to switch to Sketchup, but there are many of us small fry on single family home for whom Sketchup is superior to those programs for modeling. In other words, a few tweaks could open up a large market.
Hi Colin, I’m new to the forum, and I’m old (50) and not used to tagging people. Would I @Colin you directly in the body of the text? Also, does Reply reply only to you? I don’t want to clutter up the forum.
Clicking reply to a particular post still appears for everyone, but it becomes clearer whose comment it is you are replying to. If you wanted to add information for the whole topic and not a particular post, you could click on the Reply at the bottom of the posts.
ps. What DaveR said. You would be impressed how many ‘senior’ employees are at SketchUp and Trimble in general, as well as in the SketchUp community.
Including a tag doesn’t hide a forum post from other users. If you need that you can send a personal message by clicking on a person’s avatar and then the Message button on the popup window.
I was in the worst of my late teens when you were born.
Components in LayOut could be quite powerful, especially if they adopt a sketchup-like approach to Styling objects.
Styles in SketchUp alter edges, shading, color, watermarks, etc.
Styles in LayOut could alter the apppearance of fonts, north arrows, tables, dimension and leader styles. A lot of these things are already saved into Scrapbooks, which should make things much easier.
It does. Turning off a shared layer only affects the page in question. It is quite feasible to have several shared layers , for instance for different titleblocks.
Please don’t post incorrect things like this. It misleads new users. Layer visibility is controlled by page so of course shared layers allow “selective pages”. Look at the supplied title block templates. Example:
Yep, sorry did not express that very well… you can hide the object… in a page by turn off the layer… but it is not as flexible as a component as you have to dedicate a layer specifically for that object if want to show in in some pages and not others… for example you want a northpoint on all the plans, but not the elevations , you have to create a shared layer, say “northpoint” then go thru your document and turn off that layer in all the elevations… and repeat the process for every object you want to control in a similar manner… (elevation grids, scale bars, keynotes, legends, keyplans, disclaimers etc)
I guess we all agree though… components would be a major productivity benefit in Layout
I hope it’s not bad etiquette to open a new thread for a long-standing request. Anyway, we now have another request for Components in Layout! Come on, Sketchup team, you can do it! Of course, you could give us the ability to write extensions for Layout, then someone else might create a tool for making components… (I was certain that people have been requesting that for years, so I didn’t create a new wishlist item for it.)
Styles in Layout is another one, and one I hadn’t thought of, great idea!
A more robust Layout could really open up new markets for Sketchup, especially among architects and residential designers. I’ve used it for years for that purpose, but can understand why others feel Layout just can’t get the job done.
