I see your point, it was just the first thing that came to mind.
Getting closer. “Layer” also can often imply Z-ordering. But I’m not sure if SketchUp cares. It depends upon the camera location what is in front of what.
Isn’t that the regular per-entity hidden/visible property? It’s indeed confusing to have two independent visibility controls, but not so clear that it is “odd”.
Agreed, “odd” was not the right word. Curious would have been a better choice. There could have been a “Visibility Manager” dialog that works exactly like the Layer list dialog without having Layers at all.
I suppose that defines a Layer as a “Visibility Set” for Drawingelement objects.
Maybe, but once again that terminology suggests that the Layer is a container that knows about the DrawingElements, whereas actually all the Layer knows about is visibility (and a few other things such as name, color, page behavior). The DrawingElements refer to a Layer to find out that aspect of their visibility simultaneously with other DrawingElements. So they are “associated with a Layer”, or have a “layer property”, or something like that…
Just to compound the confusion, the notion of an “active” layer is a property of the model! Neither the Layer itself nor the Layers collection that contains it knows whether it is active.
maybe ‘Layers’ could be re-named ‘The Rabbit Hole’ or ‘The Bermuda Triangle’…
john
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Wonder if that is the problem with a 4 leaf clover I got from the wearhouse . . when I exported it to .STL file it just went to a 1 k file opened or tired to in Slic3r and it said EMPTY FILE nothing in it, . . as the sketchup file it was 499 k and like 5 foot 9 inches across ! . . I use Tape measure to check it in Sketchup . . What happened to the file . . Thinking of going to Blender and see what happens with files
New forum member. This is a helpful discussion. I thought I understood “Layers” in Sketchup, based on my Adobe Illustrator experience. Wrong. The term is the same but the concept is different. The SU “Outliner” bears more resemblance to Illustrator’s “Layers” even though “stacking order” is irrelevant in SU.
Thanks for helping me understand SketchUp Layers a little better.
I would be very disappointed to have the active layer button removed. My workflow uses many layers and I don’t find it so hard to manage. If I move a group or component to a new layer X it most certainly “lives” there and no longer on layer 0. If i erase layer X without directing the layer to dump it’s object to the active layer (a great use of the active layer button) then the object is deleted, it is not still living on layer 0. It’s true that managing layers inside nesting objects can be tricky, but building things inside an alternative active layer helps to simplify this and the ability to control visibility in nesting objects is important. I also agree that temporary grouping and hiding is a great way to access areas of a model quickly, it’s the beauty of SKUP that there are multiple ways of effectively using the same program.