In a previous post by @Adam he says: “One of the biggest offenders in LayOut performance is in inferencing into a SketchUp model viewport, regardless of its render mode. If you turn object snapping off and move entities around your document you should see a huge difference in performance”
So having less snaps for Layout to find will greatly improve the performance. A complex drawing will NOT be so complex to handle anymore, if most of the tags are set to “DONT SNAP”, and most snaps, like “line snap” are set to “OFF”.
Strangely enough this is exactly what I want for other reasons. I dont want, in a floor plan, to think that maybe I snapped to some furniture that was placed by the corner. I want the wall corner.
Often the snaps I want are hidden by the section cut, leaving me with the vast number of snaps I never want, bogging down the performance. I keep a wireframe viewport copy of just the walls tag underneath my main viewport, so really, I could do without snapping for my WHOLE main viewport.
But really the best would be with just one viewport, where I could use just one type of snap ( endpoints), set to just one Tag (walls).
Was just listening to Joe Rogan & a quantum mechanics professor…then I read this post…and I realized that sometimes snaps are q.m. states and I really don’t have any clue how to make them turn on or turn off, they are the mystery wrapped in a quagmire, buried in an enigma…woe is me.
Turning Object Snap off can certainly make it easier or faster to move entities around the page but generally I find Object Snap desirable. You need it to snap labels and dimensions to the model. You can put a button on the toolbar to turn it on and off or, on the PC, the default keyboard shortcut for toggle Object Snap is Ctrl+/. You could change it to whatever you want if that’s not easy to remember.
For me Grid Snap gets turned off as part of my template setup as I find that gets in my way.
So my idea is that you have less snaps, and just the ones you need. That is better for performance and better for the user, in getting more accuracy and less error. You could use only endpoints when dimensioning, by default, and maybe use only face/line-snaps when labeling, by default.
A lot of geometry, say a section of a steel column, will have an enormous amounts of snaps in just that tiny space of your drawing.
What better then than turning off snapping for that whole tag, when you surely dont want to snap to reference geometry made by others in the first place. As an architect one dimensions ones walls in that plan view, and get those dimensions referenced to the building grid. Thats it.
So my plan view should have a few hundred possible snap-points, not millions of them.
Well I love it! But seriously - I work with models with MANY possible snapping points and I often find myself drawing “helper-lines” in the models that extend outward of that mess of lines just to get a good and precise snapping point for moving or adding measurements in Layout. So having some control over what snapping points are available for a viewport (or generally for all viewports) might might be a good idea. If it helps performance - it’s even better!
So then, if I knew that the nearest snap would always be from geometry on my snappable Tag, I would not need to zoom in and out so much to get it right.
I would just need to be nearby to know the nearest snap is the right one. Less need for zooming would also lead to more efficient work in Layout.
Oooooh I see, you are suggesting ideas to improve LayOut. Very nice.
I noticed you’re using a mac, and I will say that the program is much less laggy on a PC. Still not perfect though. I like your suggestion!
Sure. but then you can’t see those tags. so you would need to always turn them on and off, one by one. That would take more time than those lags. Turning off a main front presentation viewport and just dimension a simple “One-tag” (just the walls and the grid) monocrome background vector viewport with section cuts but no fill works very fast though, I can zoom and pan like crazy so long as I keep it this simple.
An ‘isolate tag’ feature would suffice, in combination with a ‘tag picker’. (Rightclick on an object in the viewport, select ‘Isolate Tag’, do the dimensioning and then ‘reset’
Eliminating the modifier-grip-thingy all together would solve the problem too.
I mean, I really love (hate) selecting a bunch of notes on my page then zooming and panning around to find the nearly invisible little bugger, to then drag it around requiring more panning and zooming to find a suitable reference location - all the while dragging the darn thing it’s trying to snap to every visible and invisible entity on my sheet and in the model and oops, I forgot to select that note too, ahhh! Now I have to start all over… On top of all of that, I still cant rotate any selection with a reference angle… Hopefully my clients are okay with square shapes only…
Right after you select an item hit Ctrl / . That is the native key command for object snap off. Then move it close to where you want it, hit ctrl / again and set it.
the gizmo thingy …when we get move and rotate, feature parity and clarity, we can have a good long party. its probably a year or two away, but worth the wait.
