We spend a lot of time in Layout marking our drawings, adding descriptions, etc.
One thing that is consistently annoying is snapping a point in one viewport to a point in another viewport or layout object. For example think about aligning floor line from one elevation to another so they are on the same level in layout paper.
Therefore we need better snapping for move/rotate tools so we could actually pick a point in one viewport and snap it to another object (be it in layout or in another viewport).
In autocad for example you see snap points when you hover over a line and one can select exact start point and end point for where you want to move object from and to.
Also having an option to select which snapping is turned on or off would be very handy too. In Autocad you can select weather you want to snap to end points, mid points, parallels, perpendicular objects, etc. And you can turn them on and off individually.
In sketchup we currently only have ‘snap to grid’ and ‘snap to objects’ option.
It would also be handy to have a ‘wireframe’ view of the viewports where you can turn off thickness of all of the lines (like autocad display line weight on/off switch).
It would also be handy to have a global switch to turn off all the textures. This would not only help with snapping but also speed up display considerably.
That last request can be achieved with a style. You can have a style in your model for wireframe and use it temporarily or on a viewport in an hidden Layout layer.
Yes, I’m aware of that. However it’s not a simple one click solution (like in Illustrator outline view mode). We often have 10 or more pages that we work on and changing styles on all of them would take too long.
The grab handle is used for this (hand icon when hoovering over the center of the elements or viewports)
You can place it on every snap point that you choose.
Once placed, the element(s) or viewport(s) snap to other points automatically when moving.
A few enhancements would be nice, though, like making it more visible (other color than selection) or remembering where it was.
The green dots and red squares would also be a welcome enhancement, not only when moving the whole viewport, but also when placing (and checking) dimensions and labels.
Basically a mode for the cursor when hoovering over a viewport and it would get the same info as when hoovering over the model in SketchUp.
(Maybe more, like info of the current Tag of the objects in SketchUp!)
The grab handle is the single most frustrating barrier to productivity in Layout. It tries to snap to anything and everything with no control and it limits every modification in Layout.
The performance/speed increase with all snap turned off is very telling as to how much of a drag on the computer that dumb little thing is.
Transitioning to a Sketchup snap system has been long desired and requested. It would be great to get feedback from the dev team that address these issues.
