Drawing Angles in Sketchup

SketchUp Feature Requests
1

Sketchup needs to allow drawing angles with Degrees, Minutes, and seconds. My company often needs to create site plans from the subdivision final plat on file with the county, which is in PDF form. This means the plan has to be recreated from scratch using the information in the final plat. Angles are generally given in Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds, so we have to use a conversion tool to convert to degrees. It would be really helpful if you could draw an angle and type in DMS and have it snap to that angle.

2

Hello @nlemon98

SketchUp can handle up to 0.1 of a degree of angular precision. Drawing accurate angled lines is a two-step process. To draw accurate angled lines, please follow these steps:

  1. Use the Protractor tool to create a Guide Line entity at some angle.
  2. Use the Line tool to trace over the Guide Line entity and create the line.

See this help article to learn more about creating precise angles with the Protractor Tool. As for minutes and seconds we don’t have it at this point, but the best thing you have is the decimal place. Click here to read a help article about rotating precisely.

I hope this was in line to what you needed. If not, please feel free to explain more.

Thanks for being a part of the community!
AlexB

3

Survey Tool … SketchUp Plugin by J. Wehby
Simply type in your distance and DMS bearing to draw property data…

1 Like
4

5

Will this Survey Tool work in 2015 Pro?

6

[quote=“durrroy, post:5, topic:5687, full:true”]
Will this Survey Tool work in 2015 Pro?
[/quote] Yes, works fine for me…
Is is 9 years old but it is a fairly simple drawing-tool…

1 Like
7

A couple of additional observations:

So it is, but I think the two-step process involving guidelines is rather cumbersome, and you have to get rid of the guideline afterward, really making it three steps.

I find it much more straightforward to draw a line of the requisite length on axis and then simply rotate it around the appropriate end by the required angle.

Unfortunately not, although that is a somewhat common issue with drawing apps. Fortunately, there are a plethora of sexagesimal-to-decimal converters out there, so although it’s an awkward extra step, dealing with sexagesimal angles need not be a show stopper.

-Gully

1 Like
8

This is one more example of why copying and pasting into the measurements field should be possible in SketchUp. Instead of typing the converted result into this field.

9

Too true. Although, what we really want is a smart VCB that is capable of evaluating mathematical expressions and performing unit conversions on-the-fly. As I have done before, I point to the Google command line as an example.

-Gully