We model in 3D and communicate during the modeling phase in 3D (using Sketchup, Sketchup viewer, trimble connect and Sketchup viewer on iPad).
This is very efficient and many involved people prefer this to 3D modeling with communication in 2D.
Later, when most of the modeling and detail design phase is done and the production/building starts, 2D drawings become important.
Key for modeling, communicating and collaborating in 3D is being able to attach text and focus points using different colors and styles to the 3D model. Only being able to orbit a house, chair or gear box and walk around it, does not help.
Sketchup provides the basic tools for communication in 3D like linear dimensions, leaders (text) and 3D text (angular dimensions are however missing).
During design, we use for example predefined styles to indicate dimensions that are fixed (red), dimensions which might be made larger (green) or may be only changed to smaller values (blue).
Different font styles are used to indicate confirmed, proposed or to be answered dimensions or areas.
The main issue is, that neither styles, sizes, fonts nor colors can be set from within ruby. We have ruby scripts to create the various dimensions, leaders or 3D texts. But as the style can only be set via the UI, the script ends with a message box telling the user to which color/font/style he has to manually change the created and pre-selected objects, so that it conforms to the rules.
This is not comfortable.
Therefore, pls enhance the ruby API at least such, that during creation of a dimension or text we can pass the font/size/style. (similar to how 3D text is created)
Thereafter, I would love to see the Sketchup team come up with some innovative tools and features to revolutionize the communication, collaboration and presentation in 3D supporting the modeling and detail design phase in Sketchup.
One way to do this is to assign tags to the leader texts and dimensions (they are not geometry so it is safe to tag them). Then set color by tag. You can edit tag colors to suit.
Not really. I just wanted to mention that the SU team is monitoring GitHub more frequently and they prefer if the things logged there.
There were several cases I saw in this forum when a bug reported, then the SU staff asked to post it to GitHub also.
On GitHub there are several issues where there are a reference link to post on this forum.
So you can post your request on GitHub and can refer to here.
That is an idea for the color. The draw back is, that when choosing „color by tag“, the whole model is colored by tag, not only the dimensions and texts. Other style properties like font size, type, etc would not be doable with this.
Yes, there are not many properties of text exposed through the API. I don’t know for sure why, but would guess it’s because the developers continue to think of texts as annotation that should be handled in Layout, not SketchUp.
This request is about communication and collaboration purely in 3D.
Layout is strictly 2D. Therefor I do not believe that this is the reason why the Sketchup team does not (yet) allow to set font/size/style properties when creating dimension and text objects in 3D using ruby in order to communicate in 3D in a more automated and easier way during the modelling and design phase.
Yes, Dan. Theoretically you are right. Technically, in some reason is not possible. I can not select that category when I want to move, moreover creating new topic in Developers > Feature Requests is not possible.
Edit: Perhaps it is the way they are pushing us to use GitHub…
Technically, the GitHub issue repo is “hooked” into the SketchUp team’s internal tracking bot that automatically logs issues and closes issues after a release that applies fixes.
This forum is more free form and does not have such tracking integration.
Indeed a different ball game.
And it looks cool.
Even if there would be a possibility in Trimble connect, it means you are bound to use TC for dimensions and annotations after uploading the model to TC. So you cannot use Sketchup Pro, viewer or Sketchup for iPad anymore on their own for modeling and annotations. To be efficient, one has to be able to model in 3D and add annotations in the same tool. (Tekla Structures has some really nice features in this area. So at least the basics of it should be available in Sketchup and ruby API in order to communicate efficiently in 3D)
We don’t have the capacity to filter through every post for bug reports and requests. The GitHub tracker allows us to collect all of these requests - and we have some automation in place to ease the process. To ensure a bug or feature request is seen by the team, use the GitHub tracker.
