A rather small but somewhat annoying difference I’ve noticed having updated to 2017…
I used to make a group out of some entities, and then right click make component, without having to name it… now it seams that naming of components is compulsory… which is a pain, and it also causes the program to hang a little whilst it does so.
Now I know this may be useful for other reasons and the ‘what’s new’ article described this as an improvement and that it has been a feature request! But I would like to know if there’s an off switch/ toggle for this option, and if not within the program, if anyone else is of similar mind… would the creation of a plugin be able to solve this?
You aren’t required to give it a name. Just hit Enter. I’ve never understood the logic of the extra step of making a group if it’s going to be converted to a component anyway. In older versions of sketchUp, you just wind up with a bunch of components all called “Group”. You can’t tell them apart in a list and it basically makes Outliner useless.
If you’re going to make a component anyway and you don’t want to type a name for it, just hit G then Enter. Only two key strokes and at least the component has a different name; i.e. Component#1, Component#2, Component#3, etc.
The benefit of the Create Component window opening now is that you can enter the name of an existing component and get the option to replace the existing ones with the new one. This was done as a way to mitigate the action the Solid Tools take of converting components to groups when the modify the entity.
Didn’t it used to give it a default/different name before ? it just didn’t bother you with the dialogue box…
In my work flow, I don’t name anything (use layers not outliner to manage). In my opinion outliner is useless and a waste of time naming stuff…
Maybe it’s just working across our slow sever, but on creating the first component it hangs for a while doing something in the background, then admittedly it doesn’t hang on subsequent component naming in that session.
Whatever the benefits with outliner, it’s just a shame this feature cant be on a toggle on/off in the preferences… does anyone else share my opinion ?
@alanhughes1984 in my opinion, the outliner is essential! I can make nested hierarchies and easily toggle design options. For show/hide of ‘big’ categories, I use a few layers (2d/3d/trees etc) as well.
That’s nice about SketchUp - everybody can use their own preferred workflow.
The Outliner is indeed useless if everything has the same name. But then again so would an index in the back of a book or recipes or any number of other lists of things. Since everything in Alan’s models have the same name, making a list of his groups is pointless. Of course he doesn’t ever have to look at Outliner, either.
