Here is my second question of the afternoon. I am struggling with the navigation of moving groups up or down the list in the outliner. Is it possible to move a group up or down the list so they are possibly more relevant to the list? Is it as simple as holding a modifier key? Grateful thanks to the 2 members who answered my earlier question and encouraged me sufficiently to ask another! Ant
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the list is sorted alphabetically so the only way to change the order is to rename objects. I use an sfb coding system to get the proper hierarchy (it starts with a number and next a description - like: 20 wall).
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@maxB is correct: you can’t control the Outliner’s sorting order by dragging. Note however that you can change the nesting of groups and components by dragging them in the Outliner!
forgive my ignorance but what is an sfb coding system and where do I find out more about it? Is it a standard format?
Am I understanding you correctly in that within a group with say other groups or components can be dragged up and down but the main group can’t move because it is arranged alphabetically?
See: Classification of building elements; English version to start.
You can drag a group from one parent group to another or you can drag it into or out of a parent group. You can’t rearrange the groups inside the parent group.
Got it! Thank you very much.
If you use this to try to get them displayed in your preferred order, it means you need to change the NAME of the component to a series of names that sorts - alphabetically - into your preferred order.
It’s important to note that this is NOT a numerical sort! It’s a character sort. So when you try to prefix your name with a number (the easiest way to impose order), you can get counterintuitive results like:
1 - my component name for what I want to show first
10 - my component name for what I want to show tenth
2 - my component name for what I want to show second
The common workaround for this is to pad your numbers with leading zeros - and make sure you add enough so that you don’t run out! Using that, my above example becomes:
01 - my component name for what I want to show first
02 - my component name for what I want to show second
10 - my component name for what I want to show tenth
You might have to - additionally - prefix ALL of this with a non numeric code because SketchUp (in some contexts) doesn’t like names that begin with numbers. Taking that into account, my above example becomes:
c01 - my component name for what I want to show first
c02 - my component name for what I want to show second
c10 - my component name for what I want to show tenth
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That is incredibly helpful and I will adopt your method. Many thanks to you and what a great forum.Ant
Yes, I find it quite dificult to move objects in the Outliner hierarchy as well… I constantly drag things to the wrong group by accident. I hope they can add a few simple tools here like ‘Unnest’ and up/down or left/right arrows to simply move an object up or down in a hierarchy. I guess doesn’t really work, but moving up and unnesting would be really useful.
You could try a different way. Save your file first, in case you make a mistake. Select the group you want to move and cut it to the clipboard. Find the group you want it to go in and open that group for editing then Paste in Place.
Selection of the groups can be done in either the outliner or the 3D view.
One thing that would be helpful is give groups useful names as you create them. That will make Outliner much more useful.
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Ya that’s true and I do that for most major groups, but still there’s something about the dragging process that doesn’t feel very clear. Even when trying to drag to a specific group I find it still misses sometimes, but yes names are definitely key for using outliner.
This is what I do all the time. I usually have the Outliner closed as it (sadly) slows down SketchUp. With a custom shortcut for Paste in Place it is probably also faster to cut, change drawing context through the 3D view and paste, than looking up the containers by name.
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Actually I do this most of the time too… only time it’s a bit of a pain is in cutting really heavy groups. I find it’s much faster just to move them in the Outliner in that case.
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