I have this mysterious black box showing up on my scrapbook tray. Anyone seen this before?
Sketchup Pro 2019
Windows 10
Asus Q504 12GB Ram, Intel i5 processor
Thanks!
Andy
This looks like possibly a graphics card issue. What is your graphics card? Please complete your profile.
Three things to try.
Reboot your computer and open LayOut again.
Close LayOut. In SketchUp go to Window>Preferences>OpenGL and untick Use Fast Feedback.
Update your graphics drivers from the graphics card manufacturer. Don’t trust Windows to tell you if the drivers are up to date.
Anything change?
Looking into this further, I see that it is related to some specific scrapbooks or more likely a limitation in the display of scrapbooks that are longer than average. If you make the tray panel shorter in height or wider, you can get rid of the black.
@trent, have you seen this before?
FWIW, these scrapbook pages were originally set up with the paper size set to 10" by 18".
Thanks for looking into it Dave! You are indeed a Sketchup sage - after looking into it more on my end, it is definitely linked to that set of scrapbooks (downloaded off of another forum somewhere in the past). Resizing the tray does it for me, but I have to do it everytime I switch a page in that series. I am in the process of creating a bunch of my own scrapbooks so I will probably just abandon that one and make my own version. Any hot tips for creating new scrapbooks?
Also, I updated my profile. My graphics card is a “Intel HD Graphics 620”
Thanks again!
Thank you.
I would tend to break up the scrapbooks into smaller collections of stuff compared to those that are causing you problems. Figure out what size you would need the symbols to be based on the paper size for your template(s) and the most common scale you’d show your project in. Size the symbols to match. Make the paper size for the scrapbook page as small as possible so that the symbols show clearly in the scrapbook. The paper size doesn’t need to be much larger than the area covered by the symbols. I would tend to keep paper size to something like 3 in. square or so. If you are making multiple scrapbook pages, name them so that the names show in the dropdown list in the Scrapbooks panel.
The fellow who made the scrapbooks that are causing the problem made pages for each category of symbols in one LO file. If you split the contents of one page into multiple smaller pages, you can refine the sorting to make symbols easier to find. Then split his entire collection into multiple LO files.
Also, he added descriptions for the various symbols. That looks nice and would be useful for those who don’t know what the symbols are. If you know what the symbols are, don’t add the descriptions. They just consume space in the scrapbook window but don’t add anything useful to your work flow.
In addition to saving the LO file as a scrapbook, save it elsewhere, too. It can be handy to keep them available in case you want to send them to yourself or to a colleague for use on another computer.
If you have some need to edit a scrapbook later, you can open it with the Edit button in the Scrapbooks panel. You can open that bunch of scrapbooks to copy and paste the symbols into your own project if you want to save yourself a bit of work. Don’t be afraid to discard symbols you might not need anyway.
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Thanks again Dave, super helpful!
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@ajharlan, I’ve been dealing with this LayOut bug too. If you have a scrapbook taller than it is wide, it can produce these unwanted black bars on the right side. I just came up with a workaround and wanted to share it here in case anyone else has this problem. Who knows when the bug will be fixed…
Here’s the workaround: If you add a square shape with a solid white fill, covering the entire page, and overflowing off the right side of the page, it will prevent any black from appearing, because it will show the white square instead, making it look like it’s simply the page background. Since the scrapbook scaling goes by the page size, not the page contents, the scrapbook will still scale the way you want it to, but the white square will cover any of the parts that would show the black bar. You just obviously need to place the shape on the bottom layer and lock it.
Nick Sonder and I have been working on getting some of his detail models put together for sale, and feel like a 2-column, 3-row configuration is best. We were getting ugly black bars appearing in the scrapbooks.
I agree with Dave’s suggestions above, as well.
This worked great for me, thanks for the workaround Matt! Looking forward to seeing what you and Nick come up with. Our design/build company in Wyoming has been using your workflow for the past year or so, it’s been a great resource.
Cheers,
Andy
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That’s awesome awesome Andy. Thank you, glad you like our book, and glad this workaround was helpful to you.
Thanks everyone for making us aware of the problem. The images and discussion on this topic have been useful in reproducing this in the office.
Adam
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