I remember I used to avoid offsetting curves with the Offset Tool because it never offset from the cardinal points and always messed up alignment, producing imperfect results. But now it seems it’s no longer the case (latest SketchUp version). I have been scratching my head for the last hour, trying to understand if it is me that remembers it wrongly, or the Tool has been improved. I could find no previous documentation in the release notes indicating any change done to the tool.
Experimenting on offsetting a regular 24 side circle by 2cm, with the cardinal points aligned to the axis, I do remember that the Tool used to offset from the segments of the circle, and never from the cardinal points. However testing it in SketchUp 2023, it’s now actually offsetting from the points:
See the status bar down left: [Alt] = (toggle) Allow overlap / Trim overlap. (didn’t do anything differently for me in SU 2018 but now it does.)
Something may have changed over time, yes.
Interesting, there have been so many discussions over offsetting an arc in the past.
Yes it looks like offsetting a ‘Half Circle’ by say 500mm means 500 mm between corresponding endpoints whereas in the past this was 500 mm netween segments. With more time I’ll look into this later.
@Wo3Dan Glad to hear I’m not hallucinating!
I did play with the Alt toggle but it merely cuts away overlaps if you have sharp corners or similar things.
Interesting, there have been so many discussions over offsetting an arc in the past.
That’s so true! I myself have been avoiding offsetting curves and arches like a plague for so many years. Precision and clean geometry work has always been of utmost importance for me and SketchUp has been able to offer it best, except the Offset Tool. But now it seems they fixed that issue too. The interesting thing is, this is relatively huge and impactful news for the software. I am surprised it has not been marketed or mentioned in any other way.
This means I can trust the Tool now to produce perfectly aligned cardinal points, and don’t have to manually draw curves anymore.
We can start a discussion again about how to define ‘Offset’ on a series of segnments.
To me offset means setting the distance between original and new segments, measured perpendicular. Circles and arcs for many have been a pain when it comes to ‘Offset’.
Now you do have a choice (for circles and arcs (metadata of selection seems to be important)) between
distance between segments
distance between corresponding endpoints (towards the center)
by toggling between Trimp overlap / Allow overlap with the [Alt] key.
Although it already is mentioned in SU 2018 I can’t get it to work overthere.
