Navigating viewports

I have logged this under Feature Requests but maybe others have found a good way to do this already.

I often have to create sections in my architectural drawings to show construction. I set up a scene in SU to do that and then import the scene to Layout. All fine and dandy.

Now I want to home in on a small part of the section and show it at larger scale. Of course, I could create scenes in SU for every zoomed detail but that would create an unnecessarily large number of scenes. What I want to be able to do is to simply zoom in and enlarge the scale of a viewport. If you simply change the viewport scale, chances are you will have what looks like a blank space because it is not zooming et the point you choose but about some other arbitrary point (centre of scene?).

This is one situation where you might have wanted to open the viewport by double clicking into it, zoom in, and then relinking. Not sure double clicking is possible in LO2020.

The ideal way to do this would be to be able to select a centre around which any zoom occurs and then choose the new scale. Otherwise, you can be panning around endlessly trying to establish where you are.

I generally pull the borders of the viewport out away from center before changing the scale.

Me too and it often works. The big problem comes if you want to change scale significantly, say by going from a 1:50 down to 1:5. You often don’t have enough real estate on screen to pull the viewport out far enough. Plus, it’s all a bit of a faff. Can’t help thinking there should be a better way.

I agree that it could be better. I’m still not a fan of double clicking into the viewport and changing the camera position (you can do that in 2020 like before) but some people do it.

Can you still do it? Didn’t seem to be working when I tried it. If you could change something and then relink, it might be a way to do things.

Yes. It can be done if you haven’t got the feature locked out in preferences. I leave that box unticked to prevent it.

The wording could probably be better but ticking the box for Enable SketchUp model editing allows ZOP.
Screenshot - 3_13_2020 , 6_47_21 AM

Is that new? Mine is set by default like yours but I didn’t choose it myself. I can see the sense in having the toggle and for it to be unticked by default.

Yes. It was added because many users requested a way to prevent double clicking over a viewport causing problems.

So asking for things does sometimes get results!

I have just tried double clicking and it looks like the link is not lost now. You don’t seem to get the old “Modified” business. So you can do pretty much what I described and apparently not lose the link. Wow!

It doesn’t show the word “modified” like it used to. Instead the shading in the Camera section of the SketchUp Model panel is displayed darker and there are now Reset buttons in the top Viewport section and in the Camera section. The link is still a bit disconnected but it’s different now.

Screenshot - 3_13_2020 , 7_39_57 AM

“A bit disconnected”? I must play with it some more. I thought this was binary!

Modifying camera settings in LO disconnects the viewport from the scene’s camera settings so if you change the camera position in the model and update the scene, that change won’t carry over to the viewport. In the same way, if you change the style in LayOut and then style applied to the scene in SketchUp, that change won’t be made in the viewport.

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When I’m resizing viewports, If I know it’ll get lost when I resize, I’ll throw 1 dimension on the area in question, then when you resize, the dimension follows. So if it were cut off by the viewport bounding boxes, at least you still see the dimension and can resize your bounding box in the correct direction to get your model back into view.

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That’s a decent idea.

I’ve been meaning to do one of those animations to show it, but I haven’t done one ever and haven’t had the time to play with it yet.

Like this? Didn’t quite hit it right first time (too ambitious!).

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Exactly!

In this example it scaled and the roof ended up in the top left corner of the page. But without the dimension, you would probably guess you needed to extend it right, or up, and then finally it’s always the last option you chose. But the dimension shows you without guessing.

Does that work around help?

It does help, thank you. So did @DaveR’s suggestion to copy and paste early on. Your method is valuable if you forgot to copy early on or have lost the copy from the clipboard.

Playing Devil’s advocate, I would say that I feel about this much the same way as I do about dozens of other things where common tasks have to be dealt with by “workarounds”. A workaround by definition suggests an obstruction. It would be nice if there were no obstruction in the first place. I feel a bit mean even saying this as SU/LO is generally so intuitive. But in a workshop you expect to approach a crosshead screw with a crosshead screwdriver, not find the best way with a flat blade tool!

Simon, I can think of numerous cases where the behavior is the desirable one even though it gave you problem in this situation. Someone recently suggested adding a feature that allows model space outside the viewport to be made temporarily visible. That could be a good solution here.

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