I was thinking about the best way to implement effective lightweight control between sketchup and layout and think that a fairly simple method could be achieved by allowing Layout to assign different line weights to different layers via different styles.This same idea has been suggested before here using the Outliner tool however I think a layer based workflow would be more user friendly.
Workflow example,
-Simple sketchup model with two objects on two layers.
-Two scenes in the model and a different Style for each.
-In layout you create a view port for each of the 2 scenes and its associated style.
-Instead of assigning a global line weight to the view port you click a button to open a layers panel that allows you to input the line weight modifier per layer (eg select multiple or single layers, input 0.20 pts for cut lines and 0.1 pts for profiles etc.). This information is then saved to the style so multiple view ports can use the same style/line weight combination.
This assigning of line weight modifier should be saved in such a way so that line weights can be set via Layout templates (if I use the same style and layers in different models, layout should recognise this and set the layer line weights to the saved values).
This would allow us to quickly create and assign different styles to different view ports at different scales and having the line weights of different elements adjust accordingly
This would eliminate the annoying multiple scenes and stacked view ports that are required to get the drawings looking acceptable from a line weight perspective.
I’m sure there are many different hurdles to implementing something like this, and i’m sure there are different ways of doing this, however I think this would work into most of the architecture type workflows that I have come across.
What are other ideas that could automate/make better the line weight process?
An idea that could be better for this would be to have a dedicated lifestyle manager that worked with sketchup and layout. Line weights, line colors and line styles.
In Sketchup you would probably assign lifestyle 1 to object 1 and in layout you could modify/override style 1.
Multiple objects could have different styles and the override of each style would be viewport dependent.
The difference is that layers organize multiple objects at once and you might want to assign different styles to multiple objects in the same layer.
Hi, I would like to make this thread current. It seems that the new layout has done almost exactly what was suggested in these original posts. Layout allows you to assign and override line weight styles organized by tags. The dashes checkbox must be turned on in your style as the “edge width” data in layout seems to live in “dashes”. (When dashes are not turned on colored lines will still show up for line color by material, and color by tag, but this seems to be less consistent when sending to layout, especially in complex models with elements that have more than one tag or groups within groups. And the colors and line weights don’t seems to be editable from layout this way as far as I can tell.)
Line styles, weights, and colors can be edited in layout and will override the line styles of your model when edited in the model tags tab within layout. This is great for setting line types, but there seem to be several issues for me. I am using lines with blank faces style and Layout often gets confused about which lines are in front, it creates artifacts or bits of lines from geometry that is behind the visible layer. Also it gets confused which line should take priority when more than one edge falls on the same line even when one is clearly in front. (I mitigate this by editing my geometry in sketchup and moving the foreground edge .02" past the unwanted line style.)
It could be helpful to have a feature that automatically assigns line weights to your viewport in layout based on the distance of the geometry to the camera. Layout has 8 standard line weights ranging from 2pt down to .1pt (with the ability to type in additional values in between).
Would it be possible for layout to analyze the model and find tags or groups that are clearly and wholly further away (or by using slightly more complex algorithms) and assign a range of edge widths accordingly? I can imagine this being done in a fairly simple way using the current logic, but I can also imagine an even more useful option that could assign different line weights within the same tag, although this would require some changes to the edge width editing system.
hmm, I am using entirely tag overrides to manage lineweights when producing 2d elevation drawings from my master 3d model. For plan drawings I have a separate 2d plan drawn in sketchup but tag overrides seem to be the best workflow I have found to produce elevation drawings from the 3d model. My intention was to avoid redrawing a new model for each elevation view but it does work better to copy and paste only the visible (front most) elements for each elevation view and make a separate scene for each view so you can freely hide or delete different components. I use a separate sketchup file so I am not adding too much duplicate info to my master 3d model.