Just had a bad day dealing with a dimensioning problem flagged up by my Client. Can any Experts advise me what might cause dimensions to pick nodes in 3D space and then display the slope dimension between those points on a “Top view” orthogonal vector drawing. Generally LO seems pretty good at giving dimensions that align to the view plane, but I seem to be getting caught out by this deviant behaviour every so often.
Think of it as dimensioning the edge of a 3-4-5, triangle, expecting to get a dimension of 4 and seeing 5!
Sorry, not authorised to share. I have been playing with a basic model of a 3-4-5 wedge, and I think I can narrow it down to the Camera placement. There is a point at which a parallel view, subject to orbiting will switch from Ortho to 3D dimensioning. This can most easily be seen by switching from Top to Iso view after dimensioning. In the Iso view the dimension presents as if it is horizontal, but it is clearly providing the slope dimension.
I have a feeling the problem may lie somewhere in my Scene creation ruby script…
In Layout I place guide lines on a layer for aligning dimensions notes ect. But if your view port is isometric or in perspective That wont work. (you can place a layout guide to an edge but it is lost in any rotation) I would create guides in SketchUp and use SketchUp Dimensions as a reference. Tag them so they can be hidden in Layout but use this layer to snap Layout dimensions. Angular dimensions are a challenge in Layout and the Sketchup Dimensions dont have great formatting. In Layout use ALT SHIFT to place dimensions with out constraints.
Certainly if the scene in your viewport has a camera placement that is not a standard view (excepting ISO), even an orthogonal view that has the camera rotated by ˚1 then layout measurements have the potential to pick a node in 3D. This can be very hard to tell if the camera rotation is very small. Sometimes this happens by accidentally opening the viewport for editing and moving the camera, the ability to do this can be turned off in Layout settings, or by sloppy panning in SketchUp and updating the scene. If you are setting up true standard views in parallel projection and saving them as scenes then referencing those scenes only, unmodified, from within Layout this should not happen. You can check this in the SketchUp Model pallet of Layout by looking for the standard view name, if it says none, the dimensions are unreliable.
Thanks for the feedback and the confirmations. I have just noticed that on the LO pages where I was getting the “false” dimensions, if I turn off the other layers / stacked views, the dimensions stop presenting alternative values. I’m going to wrap this up as a user issue, that originates with stacked views and in future I will turn off any irrelevant layers and be a bit more vigilant with my dimensioning.
