Using the new LayOut is nice, but I have noticed that dragging objects don’t readily snap to corners, midpoints, etc. anymore… I opened a blank Layout file, drew a quick rectangle and drag copied it out. When I try to bring it back over top of the existing rectangle, it cannot find an Object Snap. It works with the Precise Move tool handle, but seems that it’s either been omitted or deleted as a feature in this version of LayOut.
Also tried with LayOut 2022 and do not have a problem.
Is this how the new LayOut is supposed to work, or is anyone else experiencing this?
Thank you, Paul. I believe you are correct and this is the new functionality of objects in LayOut. It seems like a step backwards for ease-of-use, as I think inferring edge snaps of objects without having to use the Precise Move tool is adding unnecessary clicks. The older versions seemed to flow a bit better for me, and appears ubiquitous in other software to help align things (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, PowerPoint, Xara). I do really like this new version of LayOut, but without a quick way to pull out guides or a type of Tape Measure tool like in SketchUp, it just seems slower in workflow and execution. Hope the Trimble folks can add this back as an option.
For the corner, midpoints and centre, you need to grab near the those positions and Layout will automatically get that snap point and use it.
If you don’t grab near those positions, Layout will use your mouse-down point as the snap point.
As I said – I told the SketchUp team that I was a little dismayed about the new behaviour but after it was explained to me I better understood and I now find it to work very well.
When I read your post, I struggled to remember how snapping in 2023 worked.
Paul, you’re the best! Now I can finally grasp how this new functionality works with your explanation and wonderfully education gif examples. It’s a wonder how much I have learned through the years with animated gifs (shout out to Box)!
So, the real trick is the hover… and to be fair - it does get a little tedious with grouped objects and selection snaps at the bottom left side, but it does seem to work.
Thank you, sincerely, again for taking the time to elaborate and illustrate how this works. Hopefully, this post can serve as a way of helping others like myself migrating from older versions of SketchUp and LayOut.
Thanks for this! It’s been driving me nuts. But it doesn’t allow you to snap it to two points. I use layout to overlay lighting grids on my drawings and need to snap to the centre of a circle to a corner of a rectangle and you can’t seem to do this all in one? Any ideas?
FYI @jmeblake - just to add to what Paul said you can also click alt to toggle off the widget handle and assign a transparent fill if that helps (see Mike’s video)
I have switched back to 2023. These changes to 2024 should have been thought through better during development and testing. A colleague of mine also discovered an issue with some lines not showing visibly on views when imported into Layout. This only occurs in 2024 (not 2023) using the same model file.
The stretching behavior of viewports has changed for the worse. I frequently use temporary lines drawn from walls/ceilings/floors to shrink my viewport edges to for interior elevation drawings, however the new Layout seems to “ignore” overlay lines drawn from a snap to SketchUp geometry. I can’t draw a temporary line along a ceiling and shift the viewport edge to snap to that line, however if i draw a line that isn’t starting from any particular SketchUp linework, the Layout viewpoint WILL snap to it. What is going on there?
Yes. On my setup, stretching the viewport to that line will not give me any kind of “snap”. If I move the line with arrow keys 1 tick up, and 1 tick back down, then it will snap to the line. If I draw a line just randomly, not connected to any SketchUp geometry, the viewport will snap to the line. I have tested it in a couple of Layout files and they repeat the behavior.
Yes, it does work for viewports, but you have to add a stroke. Select the viewport, use hotkey to add a stroke, use the new inference-referencing to move it, then hotkey the stroke away. Similar to needing a fill to automatically inference from the center point of geometry.
To be fair, I wouldn’t have figured that out if I hadn’t found this thread. Thanks to PaulMcAlenan for his explanations.
I’m just liking the improvements with inference and fewer clicks for precise movement
