When using the keyboard arrows to “nudge” and item in Layout it moves it 3/4" (or more when holding shift). Is there a way to make that increment 1/16"?
I thought maybe it had something to do with the grid and grid snap, but the grid boxes appear to be 1/16"x1/16" and it takes about 4 arrow key nudges to move an object through a grid box. But if I throw a dimension on there, it changes the dimension by 3/4" with every nudge, so I’m at a loss and the internet doesn’t seem to have much info that I can find.
Blockquote * Give it a nudge. If you just want to nudge a selection 1 point at a time (a point is 1/72 of an inch), press any arrow key to move the selection. If you hold down the Shift key and then press an arrow key, the selection moves by 10 points.
This is not adjustable. It is also not affected by the grid snap interval.
There are other ways to move entities in LayOut that can be useful for putting things exactly where you want them. Which one you use depends on exactly what you are trying to accomplish.
I’ve got a corner in a room, and I have an object that needs to be x inches off one wall and y inches from another wall.
I can drag it really close, but then to get it exact – after blindly dragging in layout – I’ll go back to SketchUp, make a guideline, and then back in layout snap the object to it. Which, in terms of efficiency, is like chopping down a tree with a butter knife.
I’m assuming there’s a way to do this in Layout, but I can’t figure it out.
If the thing is drawn as a Scaled Drawing, you can open the Scaled Drawing, select the object, and move it the desired distance using your real world dimensions. Here I’ve moved the square 3 scale inches over and 3 scale inches down from the corner.
It’s a few steps for such a simple thing, but it works.
What if it’s not a scaled drawing? In this case it is, but I don’t use scaled drawings much. I just tried the same thing with just a regular rectangle and it moved it way off the screen.
If it’s not a scaled drawing or you move it without opening the scaled drawing, the move distance is paper space. You’d have to calculate the scaled distance as paper space distance. Seems like a good reason to use Scaled Drawing in LayOut Or just model it in SketchUp.
FWIW, it wouldn’t hurt to stay on top of correct tag usage. All edges and faces should be created and left untagged.
Have you been exploding groups/components that have tags? One unfortunate (there is a reason for it) result of exploding a group is the contents of the group are given the tag of the exploded group, rather than Untagged. Best practice when exploding anything is to immediately untag everything while it is still selected.
Can’t say I remember or understand fully why it was deemed important, something to do with wanting nested groups to retain the layer of the parent. Someone else may have a definitive reason for you.
@Box is correct regarding exploding nested groups/components. Doing so makes the sub-components receive the tags. As he wrote, though, if you explode to raw geometry, you should immediately untag that geometry while it is still selected. In practice, though, you shouldn’t need to explode groups/components to raw geometry all that often.
With the introduction of version 2 or 3, it was no longer needed to explode components to edit them(!)
With the rightclick > Select > all on same layer, you could easily group them again.
This relic from the past can cause various problems like misunderstandings of what is visible, but the main issue is when you start editing raw geometry that has several tags. It doesn’t prevent merging and it is also unpredictable what tags the geometry gets when extruding or intersecting (in combination of the setting in the tagpanel of the active tag)
There are no performance issues when geometry ‘inside’ objects have different tags. It’s better to have them all on one tag specifically for organizational reason’s, maybe, but there is no benefit in having it on another than the tag of the container.
For this reason, why not have them untagged in the first place.
Copies of Dynamic Components do behave the ‘oldfashioned’ way, btw.
But that might be another can😀
I use the ‘nudge’ extension in Sketchup (available from Sketchucation). You can stipulate the amount of nudging… save the scene and update the model reference in Layout.
If I maneuver my model in Sketchup, I update the scene, save the model, flip back over to Layout, update the model reference. It usually takes a few trial and error kicks at it to get the result I’m after. A little convoluted, but, in lieu of a ‘nudge’ command in Layout… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
