Just made an account because I can’t find anywhere else to give feedback and I needed to shout into the void.
I really hate the dynamic zoom and pan speeds - that your zoom and pan speeds depend on where your mouse is and how far away your camera is from what your mouse is hovering over. It’s jarring when your mouse isn’t where it needs to be and you zoom in waaay too far. Imagine if scrolling or zooming on your web browser worked like this and it depended on what website element your mouse was hovering over. Absolutely deranged. If I wanted to zoom faster, I would simply scroll my mouse wheel faster. I’d love to be able to toggle this off but Sketchup as a piece of software in 2023 has bizarrely few user-configurable settings. If there’s an extension that does something about this, give me a holler.
I don’t use Sketchup daily and I’m sure this becomes a thing you just get used to and deal with it and I’m happy for you but I have the right to not like it.
can you really not dock windows like the Outliner on the Mac desktop app? I’m coming from the Windows app where you can dock and keep things fixed. this is astounding if true. and it’s only a problem because the outliner grabs focus from the actual modeling every time i touch it.
Heh. That pain is familiar. My first months with SUP was screaming at it every time I inadvertently zoomed in to distant empty space when my pointer missed or overshot the target by a single pixel. It took ages to train that out (I’m old and stupid) and even so I still do it now and again.
I WORK in ISO/parallel projection and VIEW in perspective. I’ve never understood how anyone can ‘work’ in perspective.
This is my thinking about the experience of zooming in perspective:
When scrolling the mouse wheel you zoom in/out 1% of the distance between your eye point and the point under the cursor; so if I’m 100m away one wheel click is 1m but…. If I’m 1m away 1 wheel click is 10mm and if I’ve got my face pressed up against a pane of glass trying to zoom into a room I’m spinning the mouse wheel like a madman until I’m through the glass and now crashing up against the far wall because the distance suddenly changed from .001mm between me and the glass to10m between me and the far wall …… aghhhhhhh!!
Absolutely non of those problems in non perspective mode, 1000x easier to model in with ALWAYS the same zoom distance per mouse wheel roll.
As I said I work, ie build, materialise etc in parallel but I setup my views to be perspective, or more specifically I setup my views in Enscape that are saved as scenes in SU in perspective.
The ONLY time I ‘work’ in perspective is when I’m adjusting object placement prior to rendering.
I’ve been working this way since I 1st used SU in 2004, I think it’s because I came from 3D Studio, I have the U key mapped and a mouse button to pop between the 2 modes. If I remember it was called UserView in 3DS hence why I probably mapped the U key.
Certainly constant usage gets you accustomed to the orbit center being on whatever geometry you click on. But far beyond “dealing with it” I find the ability to intentionally click on geometry to choose the orbit center a massive advantage in navigating a model quickly. Give it a chance. As far as the dynamic zoom I think Sketchup is as smooth or better than any other modeling software I’ve used. It’s a tricky balance getting easy navigation and not zooming “through” things. I work on projects bigger than a stadium and smaller than a shoe, one size fits all zoom speed would not work. I think the forum would be inundated by complaints of people zooming through their geometry to the other side.
Not that it matters, but I model mostly in perspective too, the same way I see the world, feels natural to me. Sometimes of course perspective is useful and required for docs. Isn’t it great that we can do both in SketchUp!
Absolutely, almost daily someone post a “how do I do this…?” type post here and inevitably there’s 3 or 4 completely different approaches to achieving the same result.
I’ve looked at alternatives to SU over the years but haven’t found anything as flexible or more importantly quick.
2023 is the 1st version I’ll probably skip or at least wait till 2024 to use it.
I started out modeling in parallel projection, most likely because I had gotten used to that look from the “2 1/2D” cad program I used before SketchUp. But once I started trying perspective I soon came to like it much better. I guess it took a while for my eyes to “unwarp”
One significant fact you should understand about parallel projection is that there is no way to tell how far the camera has moved away from the model contents - the view looks the same! This can lead to strange clipping and other issues that switching to perspective, doing zoom extents and then going back to parallel can usually fix.
