Not sure about the group but I’d like to have some image visibility controls when I insert an image as an image and not a texture. Much like one can do in AutoCAD. Sure I can do it in a graphics program but inserting but it’d be nice to have some adjustability in SU.
I would like to get the scenes system overhauled similar to how tags were redone a few years ago.
It’s a problem when scenes go way past the screen boundary and a management nightmare currently.
Scenes should be able to be set into distinct groups/folders for different use cases such as for (not a complete list - just showing concept):
layout/documentation
client demo/presentation
scenes per level/floor
working scenes
animation
Other
I could see the scene bar at top turned into column dropdowns per category when clicked on… And sometimes maybe even completely hidden say for such as client demos not wanting to show the working scenes or documentation scenes. Maybe only some categories show when in presentation mode on ipad etc.
Scenes should be allowed into multiple categories (same for tags actually. We should be able to give multiple tags per object as well)
4 Likes
I also have a wierd one now that I think about it.
I would like to not have to create an entirely new section cut to see in reverse direction. I would prefer to have it set by the scene on which direction it’s viewing. Currently, if I change the direction for a section cut then it breaks all my scenes using the other direction… So I need to create 2 sections to see both directions from the same cut space.
5 Likes
Multiple Section Fills!!! Let us assign more than one fill to a section cut, and let that fill be a material, not just a color.
This could be easily done by creating a Section Cut Fill column in Tags. That seems simplest, or perhaps each group or component could be assigned a Section Cut Fill? There are many ways to make it work.
Just imagine how delightful (and fast!) it would be to automatically make beautiful section cuts and construction details - without manually drawing the section or detail as its own Sketchup object.
(Yes, I know this is a long-running request, and yes I know about the Curic and Skalp plug-ins. They do not do this, they automate the work-around we use now, which is to assign materials and colors to section cut geometry that exists as its own group or component.)
5 Likes
There kind of is one: At the left of the scene list is a button with a magnifying glass icon. Clicking on that produces a drop down for the scenes you have.
I agree that having them separate isnt a problem. It would be nice if simple things like how tags are organized its not a big deal but they are " alphabetized" one way in SU and are different in Layout. I love how a few versions ago Layout gained the ability to manipulate view ports. It takes fewer SU scenes. As an example I can make an Isometric view port out of a Ortho Plan view within layout. Features along those lines have brought the Apps closer together. I suppose its a separate thread but I would like to have Layout view ports look more like SU scenes. I havent figured out how to get line quality to pass through the same yet. This happens with things like sketchy edges and render type styles. I tried an Ambient Occlusion scene and It didnt really look right in Layout. Im sure I have more to learn about style setting to improve this.
This is not a way to manage scenes. It’s simply a dropdown list of all the scenes or a way to search your scenes. You can also scroll your mouse over the scene bar to scroll left or right into the scenes but it doesn’t allow one to manage scenes for specific purposes. It could and should be better.
1 Like
I do not disagree. Obviously, I misunderstood your complaint, thinking you were disgruntled at the awkwardness of the scene index. And I wasn’t aware of the mouse wheel scrolling feature. Thanks for pointing that out.
So we have THREE ways of looking for a particular scene, TWO ways of managing what’s in them, and no good way to manage what they do other than lengthy descriptive scene names. Clearly, some kind of functionality similar to how tags are arranged in folders and sub folders would be nice here as well.
Indeed. But this is the way of many things in SketchUp and Layout. As I’ve been so often scolded: “Get used to it; that’s the way SketchUp is,” or “Try this handy dandy work-around or that one.”
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I certainly would like it on their radar as an attack avenue of improving the product! I don’t think it would be that hard to implement as well. I’ve done similar stuff in powershell and I’m no coder.
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Mirror Material.
Right now if you want to present a mirror that actually appears to reflect a room, you have to duplicate and reverse the model and place it “behind” the mirror object (which would be an empty frame.
A Mirror material would project a reflection of the scene from whichever face it is “painted” onto.
Regards,
James Mireles
Houston, TX
1 Like
You can do it in vray.
from 2023:
The request still stands, for many years now, it feels like a reasonable thing to have the search bar in the component browser perform a search of the in model components. With hundreds of components it’s often hard to find one. Another option would be to select a component in the model space and then see it selected and highlighted in the component window list, but that does not work either.
8 Likes
Alas, this would require replacing the simple shader in SketchUp with a real renderer capable of ray tracing. You can ask, but given all the compatible renderers already available from other sources it is very doubtful Trimble will take this on.
Would it? Or it could just reflect the geometry along the surface (not that different from a viewport with a different view angle). It wouldn’t necessarily require actual light rendering. It’s just a matter of mathematically redrawing the same model on that surface perhaps.
Probably this is a sort of definition of ray tracing.
It’s not. Remapping the viewport in the sketchup style is a far cry from simulating the photons of light bouncing around 
Looking back to 2021-2023 Wish Lists - a LOT of the items have actually been addressed in 2023 and 2024… The software has made a leap in 2 years. However… its not stable just yet.
So…for 2024.1… After the 2024 display bugs have been ironed out…
And a fix for the massive performance downgrade that we get when orbiting in Perspective mode.
And fixes to the Text tools, so we can Copy text from the Entity Info window, and also Leader text not being buggy…
My vision is this:
Softened components, and images (ie, components that have been assigned a material) would be rendered in raster mode and could be set so that LayOut does not snap to them, basiclaly they are there within LayOut, but LayOut doenst try to analyse them.
All other objects/geometry in the model (e that which you can see lines or flat faces) would be snappable by LayOut.
Im really trying to figure out good ways to leverage the new rendering engines of both LO and SU, to increate modelling realism (and use ambient occlussion to good effect) …but without making LayOut a mess of stray dimensions and snapping chaos.
SketchUp:
For the Offset to create Arcs when an Arc is offset. And not to make so many stray edges that need cleaning up.
- Section Cut edges to be able to adopt a different colour to one another.
- A Section Plane organizer/selector in Layout (similar to scenes, but just for section cuts).
- Presaved styles for paragraphs in Layout.
- LayOut Layers to actually make LayOut objects draw in front of one another according to that order.
- LayOut Layers to allow rendering by Vector, Hybrid or Raster, independent of each other.
- Layout dimensioning is still hit & miss on a complex model. I keep snagging on to pixels that I dont intend to snap to.
2 Likes
Another solution to that might be this - we can already select which tags to display in Layout. One COULD extend that to allow for adjusting if components on that tag are swappable or not with a simple additional checkbox for each tag in Layout.
I apologize right off the bat: I have more than one improvement request.
Improvement One:
I would like Layout Section cuts to be snappable. I know that one can make a slice that produces a group that sort of goes along with the section, but man, is that a kludge. Now my component list is full of weird sort of familiar but different components that are nothing more than the outline of the fill in the section cut. OK you don’t need the fill on to get this group, but that’s really what it amounts to. This method works if you never modify the section location or the objects that section cuts. Maybe if SketchUp put those slices in an automatically created envelope, (such as a tag?) then finding errant slice groups that are no longer current would be easy. But why must we go through all this rigmarole to just be able in Layout, to snap a fill or a pattern outline to the geometry of the section
If SketchUp can find the cut edges of the section, why can’t Layout?
Improvement Two:
Please, oh please, fix the overly generous padding around text entities in dimensions and callouts. Or give me a way to edit them. Or make the padding NON OPAQUE, so that a dimension such as 1’-0" will fit between dimension leaders without obscuring one or the other.
I thank you for your consideration of these points.
4 Likes
Oh, I forgot the most important two bugs!
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Something is going wrong whereby the axis of components is flipped upside down, so when we use Camera > View > Align Top, it actually shows the bottom of the component.
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Fix the graphics issue that causes sketchup to render very slowly in Perspective camera mode, and when the view is orbited on oblique (to the ground) viewing angle.
This only happens (or is noticeable) on large models.