Agreed, and a right click context menu is a must with full shortcuts because as you know in Arch-viz, time is always of the essence to stay profitable and scheduled. Because Sketchup already does hidden line mode fine in everyday use, I think it’s not fundamentally a matter of being hobbled by “lines” vs “edges” it’s likely just going to be a matter of tweaking the code behind the existing dashed hidden lines representation feature for how the program is told to represent them. It should be, for a code guru, not that awfully difficult. We forget Sketchup is always by default projecting every edge as a 2D trail of pixels all the time, we just need to educate it how those pixels need to be displayed. The change then occurs not at the edge level but the graphic interface level for a rendering option, not a geometry option. I use the ancient Smustard plug in “dashed line” which does a great job for small scale items, but creates messed up edges that don’t work well for other uses. Stop-gap, but very handy. So far, it works in 2018 pro. Oddly, slower than it did in 2015 or 16.
The more native this dashed line is to Sketchup, it stands to reason the better it’d work and without the cumbersome bitmapping etc inherent in Style builder which is great for other less technical illustration. This needs to be 100% parametric and with quick direct access, updatable with styles etc. then it’ll be top notch. Most of us us templates to generate construction dox and rely heavily on not reinventing the wheel. Yes, a line in the advanced object, group, or component dialogues would be very handy, much like those in place but with parametric control such as exists already within the dimensions dialog etc. We’ve got the pieces just not in place. I see a bun a patty and all the sides, let’s make this a burger because it’ll sell.
Rich section can make dashed lines and retro projection of the geometry behind the section plane. Surely Sketchup could meet everything we’re asking for. It may not be in their best interest to add more complex and professional tools to the program.
For line weights, layout should simply show the same as the sketchup shows, when we turn on deep cue, in the vector mode as well.
This assessment is not as strong in your post as the statement about the copy command, and even if it’s true doesn’t justify the statement imho.
It is probably true that Sketchup Team developers might push down priority on development for features that have existing workarounds or plugins. I agree with that too, if those plugins or workarounds have some measure of efficacy.
Two examples:
I often read about requests for rendering inside Sketchup. I also read that people would pay for Sketchup if they had integrated renderers. This is imho silly as there are an incredible amount of very high quality rendering plugins. So why develop a render system integrated into Sketchup if it would needlessly consume development time?
Sketchup Team developed a long requested feature for section fills in SU 2018 along with some cosmetic changes to sections display and minor changes on how they can be managed. However these new features still have so many shortcomings in their workflow that they cannot replace existing plugins like Section Cut Face, Skalp and Dibac.So why have the Sketchup team wasted valuable development time for section system that offers little more than what we had already?
Line Style system is needed… and it should be well developed.
I guess we all have different weightings for wishlist items. You have no beef with the existing Copy command. I have no beef with the new section fills feature.
One of the biggest attractions of SU (for me at least) is its intuitiveness. It works as you would expect most of the time and life is made much easier than some competing software by things like the fantastic inferencing engine. So when there are things that are common in competing software that do make life easier, you have to wonder why they don’t exist in SU. That’s all I’m trying to say, really.
Maybe LayOut could have an option of dashed or hidden lines with alternating black and white dash patterns, rather than the regular “black - space - black” it would be “black - white - black”. I have used the word “black and white”, but these could be tuned into any two colors, depending on the need and context.
This workflow would allow you to make “normal” edges/lines in SketchUp, and then easily traced over in LayOut with the correct linetype. I know this is nowhere near perfect, but just thinking about the problem a little differently.
I’d like to see a demo on hidden lines in sketchup if possible. I have used in layout, but not sketchup. After reading your post, I looked in Youtube for a demo on hidden lines in skecthup and was unable to find anything.
If lines are edges, is it possible to introduce lines as another entity? I get frustrated not being able to change line styles and colors. I have tried very hard to like Layout and it’s a poor substitute for a cad package. The one thing is does well is update the drawing if the sketchup drawing is changed and linked to the layout drawing. I end up exporting to dxf and doing the detail drawings in autocad. But it’s cumbersome.
It’d be under the views or styles tabs. If you’re in SKU 2018, Try styles,
back edges (under the edges tab of the dialogue) and this should turn on
dashes indicating lines otherwise hidden by opaque faces. In Layout, it’d
need to be seen raster render mode for that view of your model. Happy
sketching, and tune in to “the Sketchup Essentials” on YouTube for lots of
great how to videos from basic to advanced sketchup techniques. Just the
recommended/reviewed freebie plug-ins he reviews are worth the time it
takes to watch some.
You can choose pretty much anything in SU, right click, and choose Hide. That entity will then seem to disappear but it hasn’t actually gone. I use it all the time to work on things that are concealed behind something else that I want to keep.
Maybe but I doubt developers would want to. It would be alien to the whole concept of 3D which is the raison d’être of SU. Of course you can draw a single line in SU, but SU treats it more like an edge of a collapsed plane. You can also draw a set of lines that do not create a plane and group them.
In any case, what people seem to want is a means of displaying a line/edge other than in a solid unbroken form. I don’t see the point of a new entity unless you can give it special display properties. But even if you did, it would have limited usefulness.
It’s true that having a separate package for presentation purposes does have its limitations. It’s not as seamless as Model Space and Paper Space in AC, say. But it’s integration with SU is very good and the joy of it is that it allows you to pull in almost anything to include in your output. When I last used AC, what you could pull in was very limited and didn’t work very well (that may have improved).
For those yearning for a broken line style in SU, I have come across this plugin which seems to work quite well:
Like other versions of this, it only produces dashed lines and the line is not fully editable. But it could be handy as a workaround whilst we all wait for something native.
Just for fun, I thought I’d have a go at doing something similar in Dynamic Components. The result is below. This is stretchable but to make it so I have had to cheat and add a short vertical line at the end of the dash. There may be a more elegant way of doing that (now there’s a challenge!). I figured that most people would want to use this for 2D plans so the vertical line would not then show.
That doesn’t work with textured backgrounds or to export to CAD. However I’ve used that workflow myself in a way that’s currently possible in LO: you simply draw a dashed white line over a black line and it hides only parts of the black line under it. The effect is what you want
It’s already possible to do that with Layout thought they aren’t connected to model.
If that connection is what you want it would be a matter of using Sketchup PIDs and some sort of parametric drafting to create connections and relationships with Sketchup’s geometry on a Layout’s viewport.
The request here is for changing the linetypes on the model’s edges themselves.
A correct way of on these styled edges, for me, is that they would have to be managed independently from the Style menu so we could change their display by scene.
Bit late to the conversation here and agreed, linetypes, thickness, 3D extrusion (like 3D Text too) and even arrowheads would be cool so I could do analysis diagramming in SU without having to export.
I would do any complex linework/types in CAD and bring into SU, but for non-CAD users, and if you don’t need something dynamically changeable, PathCopy extension works to create quick dashed line. I just made a component of one segement, the told PathCopy to apply to path. Then adjusted a couple corners that were too long/short manually and grouped. Making a component helps as if you want to extrude, which I just did, you only need to change one segment. Again. Not a great work around but really not more than a few mins prep work to get a decent result with some flexibility.
