I sat down to finish off plans for an ADU we’re building and when I opened my layout file every scene is gone. I can’t put them back in (when I do they are still not loading properly). I updated everything thinking maybe that would help. No change. I’ve been building this with creating individual scenes and copying them and pasting them into the master layout blueprints.
I’ve been working on these plans for more than a year and we’re a few days away from submitting it to the city and now I’m just absolutely broken. I can’t seem to make it work no matter how I do it. Please can someone tell me what I’m doing wrong here?
Have you tried relinking the SketchUp file in Document Setup? How did you go about adding the SketchUp file to LayOut and creating the viewports? Where is the SketchUp file saved? Is it on an internal drive or saved to the cloud?
I created the scenes, moved them to layout, set the correct scale then copied them and pasted them into the blueprints with combined layouts. I have so many different scenes going into this one layout file. I didn’t know any other way to do it, but I’m all ears here. Maybe I need to create a separate file for all the scenes and make pdfs to past into a single layout instead.
The ~ in the name tells you that you are editing the backup file, which will be one Save out of date compared to the current file. Look for Combined Layouts.layout in the same folder, that would be the more recent one.
I see that the SketchUp model used in the LayOut document is also the backup copy, with ~ in the name.
It looks like I was opening it without specifying to open it with the new version of layout that I just downloaded and updated. When I selected “open with” I was able to replace the scenes with views that were intact. I’m not sure why it stopped working all of a sudden, but hopefully it stays fixed now. I’m thinking of doing all the tagging in individual layout files and oply importing the scenes into my combined layout file as PDFs after I’ve done all the labeling and marking dimensions etc. That way I can keep the sketchup updating correctly to the layout files at least. It’s just a lot of legwork. I wonder how people typically do large composite layout files with multiple scenes…
I was away from my computer for a while but evidently Colin has you sorted out. You didn’t share your LayOut file so I can’t see exactly what you’ve done but from the sentences I’ve quoted above, I think you’ve been creating your own nightmare. That workflow is basically just plain wrong and will create issues like you show.
The correct workflow would be to create the scenes you need in SketchUp, send the file to LayOut, once and only once, After you have the first viewport in the LayOut file, copy it and paste as needed within that document and select the appropriate scene for the viewport either via the right click Context menu or the SketchUp Model panel in the tray on the right.
Do not copy from SketchUp and paste in LayOut and don’t repeatedly send to LayOut and create a new LO file for each scene.
As Colin pointed out, make sure you are working with the correct SketchUp file. Don’t be editing the backup file with the ~ at the end of the file name.
BTW, I had a look at your SketchUp model. I see incorrect tag usage. You should be leaving Untagged active at all times. ALL edges and faces should be created and left untagged.
Here I’ve made Untagged active and fixed the incorrect tag usage.
You should also purge unused stuff from your file once in a while. There’s no reason to be hoarding all these components and materials.
There were four or five excessively large textures, probably from stuff collected from the 3D Warehouse. I made them a reasonable size with an extension called Material Resizer. All in all the SketchUp file size was reduced by 94%.
You should be leaving Untagged active at all times. ALL edges and faces should be created and left untagged.
I think this is making sense now. I’ve created a group, for example my sheathing. Say I need to go in and make a change to the shape of that to incorporate gable end overhangs. How do I work with that? It’s already grouped under sheathing and I want it to be a continuous structure so I need to edit the existing group. Do I continue to edit in untagged or would I make the sheathing tag the one I’m editing? When I’m working with components, adding additional studs for example, would I select to edit in that tag or add those under untagged and edit the entities?
well, the active tag or Untagged if left active, can’t be hidden with the eye icon on the left in the Tag’s panel. The red pencil icon on the right indicates which is active. Best practice is to leave the pencil icon at Untagged so Untagged is active and all edges and faces are untagged.
Groups are editable no matter which tag is active or if Untagged is active. You just open the group for editing and edit it. The problem with your process is you have to be continuously chasing the active tag as you work. If you forget to change the active tag and open some other group to edit it and add details, those details now have the wrong tag and will disappear if you turn off that other tag.
If you leave Untagged active all the time and leave all edges and faces untagged, you don’t have to chase the active tag as you are modeling. In fact, you really don’t even need to know what tag you given to the group or component. Once the group or component is open for editing, the object’s tag has no bearing on what you are doing. This makes your work easier, faster, and less prone to errors that will require your time later to repair.
Yes. That’s what I’m saying. Leave Untagged as active at all times. Create and leave all edges and faces untagged. Give tags to the groups and components in the model.
Tags don’t actually provide separation between loose geometry. That’s what groups and components are for. The primary use for tags is to control visibility of objects within the model space. If you turn off the visibility of a tag assigned to a group, the group will be hidden along with the edges and faces inside the group.
It might be easier to understand this if you think of putting tags on objects. Like putting labels on jars. Groups and components in your model are the jars.It’s the jars, not the labels on the jars, that keep the mustard from merging with the strawberry jam when they are sitting next to each other on the shelf. And you don’t put the labels on the mustard or the strawberry jam.
One thing to note, LayOut usually cannot open more recent versions. If you had upgraded from 2022 to 2023 and attempted to open a 2023 file in 2022, it would have failed. With 2023 and 2024, the LayOut file format didn’t change, so you could run into a case where you had unknowingly opened in 2023. Doing that might make you miss an important bug fix that was in 2024.
Something that also applies to Windows is that it’s safer to open the right version of LayOut, and then open the file from the welcome screen or the File menu. That way you’re sure to be in the right version of LayOut for that particular file.
Pay heed to master Dave, for he lights the path to righteous modeling, stray not into the dark path of tagging raw geometry, for that way lies madness! Thou shalt only make untagged the active tag!
