I am going to ask a general question, would we ever see an upgrade to the Sketchup dimension tool?will we ever see a native text editor and be able to import text.
I love you guys…but it is kinda lame!
Is there a very tricky code that prevents Sketchup from importing dimensions and text? I can only guess it cant be that simple, Even A-CAD to Rhino or TurboCad import text out of scale at times and nothing is ever perfect from one source to another right.
I am curios how this affects other peoples workflow
@DaveR im going to beat you to it, yes I heard you this is for layout
I never use text or dimension tools in SketchUp for projects. I use them once in awhile when teaching but not enough to even keep those tools out on a toolbar consuming valuable screen real estate. Dimensions and text don’t belong in my models. For me they are paper space entities. So a change in the SketchUp Dimension and Text tools is unimportant to me. I would like to see Dimensions in LayOut being able to follow the perspective in a viewport but I understand that is very difficult to make happen and there are alternatives.
As for will there ever be an “upgrade” to these tools, you won’t get an answer to that unless it happens. The developers aren’t allowed to talk about future development of features nor the time table for those features.
Like DaveR I never text or dimension in SketchUp - it’s all done in Layout
Others will have valid workflows in SketchUp but for me I just don’t see how routinely texting and dimensioning in SketchUp is an effective workflow to producing presentational documents.
When SketchUp was first designed, it was regarded as a pure 3D modeling program. Limited text annotation such as dimensions was added because there was no other way to show such important information when presenting a model. But dimensions are only one small part of the annotation and documentation of a model for presentation.
Faced with increasing demand to be able to do serious documentation, the developers no doubt considered an integrated “paper space” facility similar to CAD. For whatever technical or other reasons, they chose instead to create a separate program to handle these 2D presentation aspects: LayOut.
That choice carried the implicit belief that all annotation work should be done in LayOut. So they stopped further development of equivalent capabilities in SketchUp. The Dimension Tool was retained, no doubt because it was already ingrained in people’s workflows and perhaps in various extensions, but they really didn’t want you to do serious work that way. For that reason, it has sat largely unchanged in SketchUp for a long time now. I doubt they will give it any priority now.
Ironically, as numerous posts in this forum complain, something in the way LayOut was built causes it to perform very poorly on large, complex presentations. The developers are working hard at improving LayOut. Having no insight into the internals, I don’t know whether they are fighting a losing battle against a fundamentally inefficient design or if there is some magic that will fix the issues.
I use layout daily, however it would seem to make sense to be able to dimension and annotate more inside of sketchup, with that said, yes i have come accustomed to doing it all in layout.
Is it a very large change to be able to read annotations and dimensions imported from .DWG