I don´t agree on most of your statements, I haven’t had any issues with my sketchup and layout workflow, now the plugin vbo5D has solved a lot of extra steps specially when exporting 2D DXF with all the tags as AutoCAD layers, that was my only issue with large projects. Having said that, I don’t recommend Rhino for Architecture, Revit is imo an extremely overloaded program, that is overwhelming for new users, Archicad on the other hand has the same capabilities of Revit but its UI is a lot more friendly and the learning curve is way less steeper than Revit´s one. the negative point of this softwares is the price, they´re extremely overpriced.
2 Likes
This is super interesting. I am also an architect, doing small but detailed projects in NYC. Would be helpful for context to hear what people are using SU/LO for when they post. I’m not a hobbyist, nor am I making drawings of furniture or simple objects. Nor am I doing 200-page highrise drawing sets. I also love SU. As an architect I need a model that turns into a bunch of different drawing types, and I need absolute control of the information I issue. I am responsible for hundreds of thousands into millions of someone else’s construction, so there is no room for ‘close enough.’ I don’t do standardized projects so flexibility of documentation is more important to me that automation. My brain is not able to stick to a linear progression so I need to go back and forth a lot between design and documentation, and like the OP I’m not willing to give up on the information conveyed by old-school hatches and 2D drawing. I’m also a sole proprietor so file-sharing across a team is not critical for me. I’m old enough that ‘I grew up’ drafting 2D autocad, so I used to model in SU then export to .dwg and do my drafting there. I know other architects who do this using SU and Rhino. But I found that keeping double file sets to be too painful so I switched to SU+Layout. I’ve done three or four projects that way now. It has been painful. It continues to be painful, though I’m still committed. LO has been absolutely miserable for me, though its getting better. I have no interest in the ordering complexity and rigidity of Brightman’s system. I tried Skalp but holy S#$it that software drove me nuts. But, after using it, and after absorbing how Sonder makes his drawings, led me to drafting 2D section cuts and details inside the SU model. Something of a hybrid. And a work in progress. Where are you in the world? Might be interesting to get on a call or zoom to compare notes.
5 Likes
FWIW: Seattle’s New Aquarium. You might get an idea from the video. It is posted on the SketchUp YouTube page.
1 Like
Take a look at this:
IFC / BIM / Sketchup+Layout Advanced Workflows Group - SketchUp / Pro - SketchUp Community
2 Likes
Encouraging to hear you are fighting through this as well. My clientele and project scale and needs seem similar to your and so your goals are very similar to mine. So interested to see your post.
In truth, i am still at the early part of this process. Sketchup for me is a design tool that i have never really used for plans and sections. just pretty pictures and perspectives. So while I would love to hear about your workflow and process, it would be somewhat one way at the moment.
I dabbled with ConDocs a while ago, but just couln’t bring myself to go there. Recently I have started with Curic Section. An excellent tool. But exports to LO are just pixelated. Maybe that is just a problem with getting drawings out of LO , though, so will look in to what you say about working directly out of sketchup.
In principal, though, would love to share thoughts and approaches via zoom
Hey Y’all
Cassidy here. PM of Graphics at SKP. I just love how passionate you all are about SKP. As a long time user of SKP and Layout I totally understand your plight. My background is in Film. I have done hundreds of Models and Layout documents and I feel your struggles first hand.
Here is the good news…
Your requests have been heard and we have something in the cooker. We feel that it will help upgrade the workflow between SKP and Layout. I hope y’all are part of our Labs group, or on CenterCode as a Alpha/Beta tester. If not let me know and lets get that sorted.
Thank you all for your love(and some hate) of our great software. All this feedback allows us to make it even better.
Thanks
Cassidy
11 Likes
This sounds very promising! I’d love to be part of these Lab-Groups if they are Sketchup->Layout-related. Sketchup 2024 was the best Sketchup for me so far. I am on an M1 Mac and I must say - performance is not a real issue any more (faster will always better though). Can’t wait for Layout to exit its experimental engine stage (don’t use it yet - to buggy - but promising). As was pointed out here and in many other threads - we just need small changes. A bit of love here and there.
- A solution to hatch-fills for different materials
- Style-overrides for different tags IN ONE viewport because this would get rid of stacking
- Control of the Outliner in Layout (this would get rid of the silly practice of basically duplicating the outline in Tags manually in order to have fine-grained-control over what to show in Layout
- Setting a section cut FROM WITHIN LAYOUT! Copy how Vectorworks does it. It’s easy. Sketchup easy!
- Multiple Sheet-sizes in Layout - I am just stumbling across this again where I am doing Layouts for parts and I have a few parts that are just to big to fit on the paper so I need to create a separate Layout file just for these parts. Not cool.
- Open Layout to plugin developers!
1 to 5 would already move mountains, 6 would let us really take off.
Before you say goodbye, look in to Medeek and Condoc.
2 Likes
If Nick Sonder can make it work why can’t we?
2 Likes
Nick’s method is not quantum mechanics but it takes a little effort and perseverance to get it up and running.
But I would say Nick seems to specialise at a certain scale of domestic project – more complex than mine – and I can see larger scale – multi-unit or commercial – perhaps not quite fitting into his method.
Hence the current popularity on this forum of Cyentruk’s 5D extensions?
And dare I say it… bloated SketchUp models. But, hey, we now have draft mode in Layout and there’s the development of the experimental graphics engine.
3 Likes
I have worked on many complex and large scale projects (all built) over the years. These experiences helped me a bit while developing the workflow, starting from the original VBO. The core of this workflow is built around tags/layers and nested grouping feature to easily control visibility without using the stacked view method. Once the objects are classified into tags, we can do a lot with automation.
And fortunately, the nested grouping hierarchy that we build is similar to the IFC hierarchy.
But the main purpose of the workflow is to focus on building a central information model and feeding data to that model. This serves as the final product that is delivered to the client as a digital asset in skp format. From there, it can be used to create derivative products such as 2D construction drawings, 3D presentations using VR and AR, as well as quantity measurements and cost estimates.
The end product in our mind is a central model, not a set of 2D Construction Documents.
4 Likes
I dont have a problem. I dont use Nicks techniques exactly but something similar. It seems the people that criticize layout are trying to make it work like some other software rather than going with it as it is. Recent years have brought big improvements and it looks like more are coming. A person needs to look at how they do things. Styles and the weight of components make a huge difference. Its taken me some effort but I produce great drawing sets quickly with only sketchup and layout.
1 Like
I do think some of the criticisms are fair - the lack of section hatching for example, is a pretty big limitation and also a feature that most other drafting softwares have. SketchUp can currently display a color fill on hatched objects - it doesn’t seem to be THAT far of a stretch to imagine that it could display a hatch fill instead.
The fact that lineweights have to be controlled with separate styles is kind of an odd one as well. It’s quite non-intuitive to try to control different lineweights with styles and separate viewports rather than just being able to adjust them on an element by element basis.
I don’t think these items are an issues of people “trying to make layout into other softwares” but rather pointing out significant quality of life issues that if solved, would make SketchUp significantly better.
Some of the sets I’ve seen created with SketchUp and Layout are quite good for sure. It’s not that it’s not possible, but smoothing out this workflow I think would go a long way towards addressing some of the common criticisms of SketchUp.
8 Likes
I’m curious how this would work, knowing how SKP handles section cuts and even cutting through surfaces.
If you have 2 objects touching back to back - like a wall and cabinets - how does SKP know which line style to show where they touch? The thicker line would always graphically override the thinner line, no?
I’m all for more options, but I wouldn’t want give up free modeling, being locked into a ‘system’ in order to make some of these things work.
1 Like
For line weights, tag properties would seem a good place to maybe do this? Similar to how they introduced dashed lines for instance, which was a welcome addition. or else via overrides in LO. I understand your point on the hierarchies. But generally speaking the thicker line weight wants to ‘win’ in most scenarios i can think of. a heirarchy based on the location of tags might address this also. Or a value given to a tag for what is prioritized (like MicroStation does)
As a non a coder, it does not seem to too far beyond the realms of possibility to achieve this, or other such graphic changes, without affecting the modeling interface so as not to affect modeling freedom. But maybe this is more complicated than I understand. Certainly don’t want the settings and dials and miserable process of revit to start to take over.
StudioSKP 
mentioned some changes in the pipeline, so curious to see what these may be and whether they are working towards something.
@JustinTSE I wasnt saying Layout is not in need of improvement. I like the suggestions some make and I bet some will happen. The SU development team does listen. Section cuts could definitely use improvement, ive used Curic and Scalp and dont love those extensions either. It doesnt stop me from doing sections. I play the card im dealt.
Absolutely or is it? I think tag properties is the logical place and I would say it could be taken further so it includes material, section fill, pen colour, weight and linetype. But this will never please everyone. You are then faced with how to manage overrides in LO, or do you enable Tag Properties to be set with the Scene settings. It all gets very complex very quickly, and will inevitably be followed closely by a steady stream of forum questions like “Why is this red and half my lines are dashed….”
You can argue all day long about the merits & failures of various options, but I have a feeling the only solution is the one that Trimble sees benefiting the most users with the least effort. You might also like to factor in what was revealed at Basecamp and ask how much future there is in 2D presentation? It won’t disappear, but the effort to manage each vector of every element like 2D CAD may be a questionable gain.
3 Likes
I really don’t think 2D is going away anytime in the foreseeable future for planning and building regulations approval – at least here in the UK
And I’m not going back to the future with this…
I think the thing that frustrates me the most is the fact that everyone seems to tiptoe around the subject, asking questions like “hey, wouldn’t it be nice to have vector hatches” instead of the real question which is “why don’t they tackle the massive amount of low hanging fruit improvements that are right there?”
- dimensions that don’t randomly break even with practically no change to the model
- random artifacts in displaying viewports after a mass render
- callouts / labels that don’t take half a dozen double clicks and constantly bug out and act unpredictably
- viewport generation that isn’t one by one, tedious, mind melting work
- lineweight control that doesn’t require doing ratio calculations or pixel / mm conversion
- section fill that doesn’t bug out randomly
- section hatch fill without requiring the user to become intermediate fluent in Vietnamese
- an end to the “make a tiny model change → spend 5-10 tedious minutes updating the reference and rerendering every viewport” death spiral
It’s a delight to model in sketchup and a misery to set up layout sheets. Period.
6 Likes
I’ve used SketchUp since version 6 for HVAC and plumbing engineering. Had high hopes for Layout when it came out, but Layout could never handle the complexity I needed for a 250-unit apartment project, for example.
For years, we exported DWG and cleaned it up in CAD before making PDF construction docs. A real pain in the neck, and it took days for big projects.
So I wrote some workarounds:
FlatText - Puts text right where you want it to go and gives WYSIWYG output. Not as pretty as Postscript, but I don’t have to clean up my annotations any more.
DPLIneStyler - For my dashed lines, not to mention lines with letter symbols. Especially in plumbing, line style is everything. And frankly, SketchUp’s dashing doesn’t do what I need.
PrettyPrint - Gives me control over line weight, color, and shape (round end, square end, etc.) in my PDF output. The line styles are based on line color, not tag, since I use tags for other things.
Now I crank out decent-looking PDFs straight from SketchUp Pro, in minutes instead of days. No more CAD cleanup. So worth the time they took to write!
I’m sure there are other great plugins out there as well. These were ones we developed in-house for our own use, then I spun them off as standalone products in case someone else found them useful.
2 Likes