Hello, i have 2 issues: i’m trying to create a fill pattern for floors in my LO plan. i’m not doing this in SU because there are modeling lines i need to hide. My problem is that i need this fill pattern to go around free standing columns and i can’t see how to do this. In most arch software, you simply draw a second set of closed lines and the program knows to exclude these from the filled region. How to do this in LO?
Issue 2: i have compound curves for some walls and i can’t get LO to complete my fill. It refuses to acknowledge that one curve leads to a straight line and then to another curve. i can’t get it to recognize this series of lines. Are there some tricks for this?
What version of SketchUp/LayOut are you using? Please complete your profile.
A feature request has been made to be able to cut holes in drawn faces within LO but until such time as that gets implemented, you need to use a workaround. One way yo do this is to draw a sort of channel to connect the hole to the outside. You can see that on the left, below. Then move the edges of the channel together so the channel doesn’t show. Turning off Stroke cleans up that appearance.
Depending on your model it might be easier to use tag visibility to show or hide content in the model in a way that precludes the need to draw in the hatch pattern for your floors. Maybe you could also combine tag visibility with the drawn floors and place the hatched shape on a layer under the viewport so the columns appear on top of the hatched floor shape.
Why can’t you just draw them as separate objects (groups or components) and then move the column over top of the floor. So draw the floor and apply the texture and make it a group/component. Now draw the column as a separate group/component and the move it to the proper position over the floor.
What am I missing/not understanding?
Thanks Dave, i completed my profile.
i thought to draw the column over the fill, but would prefer to minimize the number of detached elements from the model. if i could draw around the column, i would be able to recognize if the viewport moved (it’s happened). Also, wouldn’t i have a problem dimensioning if the column weren’t part of the model? Won’t i have a scale issue?
Can i do the channel idea mentioned by DaveR if the column is round? Will it complete the circle by moving those lines?
It can be done with a circular hole, too. It won’t be a perfect circle but it will be near enough.
You might go back to my suggestion of using tag visibility in the viewport and add stacked viewports. Three layers: top one has a viewport that just shows the columns, a middle layer with the drawn shape of the floor with hatching, and the bottom layer another viewport that just the floor plan without the columns. In that situation if the columns needed to move or you need to add or subtract columns, you would do that in SketchUp and update the reference in LayOut. The change to the columns would automatically show and you won’t have to edit the drawn floor hatching to compenstate. And you can dimension the columns as needed.
Just out of curiosity, why can’t you just draw the box the just draw a circle within it?
You can but the circle won’t cut a hole in the rectangle which is the effect the OP is after.
Guess I didn’t understand that. 
One might think it convoluted but I often use this curious feature of Layout to do what you are asking about ( at least if I understand you correctly ):
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Just revisited this and it’s important to note that this doesn’t work on Layout’s pattern fill ( at least for me it doesn’t ).
Yeah i use the method of creating geometry in SKP then copy & pasting it into LO then exploding it.
But there are linitations, if using it for a clipping masl because a clipping mask cant have multiple holes (columns).
Layout should enable a more complex shape or group of shape to be used as a clipping mask.
Its quite a common requirement for landscape and building designs.
i’m going to try this. But overall i find documenting a building in LO to be difficult. People say it works like SU does and we shouldn’t judge it by other programs, but i find it to be the opposite. SU is intuitive and effortless to use; LO is a pain in the butt and fails in so many areas. This exercise i asked about should be simple and obvious, but there’s no consensus on how to do something so simple and commonplace. FYI i spend my day hours working in Revit but have used many modeling programs over the years.
You could try what I described with the stacked viewports. That’s easy if you’ve set up your SketchUp model correctly.
if the thing you are making a cut-out for is a column or something that comes in filled in your viewport, I would just place the Layout hatch beneath the model viewport, instead of drawing around things. For that to work your “floor” tag must be turned off for this viewport, and turning that tag off must not reveal some other model geometry.
By comparison, PowerCADD has the same issue, and I’ve used strategies like @DaveR describes in that program for ages. Adobe Illustrator on the other hand can have holes in things in part because it’s in the DNA of Postscript. Job one of PS is to put letters on a page, and lots of letters in the alphabet have holes in them, so it was built into the language from day one. What’s the graphics engine underlying Layout? Is it also OpenGL? Objects in SketchUp can have holes in faces. I don’t know how realistic it is to expect this to be added as a feature in LO.
Not at SketchUp now, but must see today what I get if I draw a face with a hole in SketchUp and explode it in LayOut.
I would guess we’ll get holes in shapes drawn in LO one day. Still, at least for the OP’s need, I think it makes more sense to put the hatched shape of the floor under the SketchUp viewport instead of drawing it over the viewport. It’ll take less time and effort to draw and if/when the model gets edited and those elements on the floor move, there’s no need to go back and edit the hatched shape to compensate. I suggested this in my first post but so far as I know, the OP is still afterdrawing the hatched shape on top and putting holes in it.
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