You mean community? some have,some are more active with their community, some take more feedback from businesses. It varies greatly.
You are literally talking to one of the Product Managers for SketchUp in another thread, and you just got here, I would call that pretty active.
I only met somebody from the Product team twice for InDesign/Photoshop when I worked with the Adobe Beta team for six years.
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It varies greatly.
Great, the product manager is here, this layer system has been around unchanged for a couple of years now.
For a long time I was very confused by the whole “SketchUp layers aren’t layers” thing.
This shows I’m not the first to mention this, and not the first to not like it the way it is, or more precisely, dislike the lack of actual layering in layers.
Yes, when you use the phrase ‘some’ and don’t specify if you are talking about SketchUp, then it’s confusing to know if you are being positive or negative or who you are referencing and in what light?
However, judging by the fact you posted this exact same thing on reddit only two hours before you posted it here, with the same sarcastic tone, then I will assume you are indeed repeating yourself and being negative.
The point here as @eneroth3 mentioned, the Layers function is not broken and works as expected, it’s just not great that it’s named layers but there is no ‘quick fix’ for something that is not broken (and useful to the majority of users).
This was a good topic on this layers feature, it goes into a lot more depth with many opinions on both sides: Make it HARD to have the active layer be anything other than Layer0 - #84 by DaveR
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if it’s working as intended, then don’t call it layers.
Yes, I already figured out you can turn things on/off with “layers”, and yes you can move them from one to another. but it’s far from efficient. The same when I import a multi-layered object, I need to take extra steps
You don’t really move objects between SketchUp “layers”. You assign a new “layer” to the object. The object is never on the “layer”, just as an object in Illustrator is never on a swatch.
The developers must have decided early doors to use terms that most people readily understand. You can see why they would do that, but it does lead to a bunch of problems. In this thread, we seem to have come to the conclusion that SU layers are not like layers in other software. But here’s the thing: in SU lines aren’t lines (they are edges) and solids aren’t solids (they are bounded voids). Users get accustomed to all that quite quickly just as someone learning a new language gets used to new words (odd that in English the word that sounds like raze can have two completely opposite meanings!). In Alice in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty famously said that “words mean what I want them to mean” so perhaps the developers were related to him?
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Fundamentally SketchUp layers are identical to layers in AutoCad and other Cad applications I know. They control visibility and appearance of objects.
What is different is SketchUp’s general approach to geometry. It interacts. Crossing lines in AutoCad won’t split automatically whether they are on the same layer or not. SketchUp edges do, and what confuses people is that this happens even when a layer is invisible.
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from the Autodesk knowledge base:
off course, the ‘objects’ would be Groups and Components in SketchUp
Also, I find @Matt explanation very clear:
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I haven’t used AutoCad but in Rhino layers are very different from in SU in the respect that they can be locked. The elements are on the layer. Locking a layer in SU wouldn’t make any sense, unless it means locking the color and visibility state, which is still very different from how other programs use layers.
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Why wouldn’t it? If you can lock all assigned entities at once? You do not see the layer itself, just the objects that are assigned to the layer.
A SketchUp layer couldn’t be locked as a whole because it isn’t a container of geometry. Sure, there could be a shorthand to lock all instances that a layer is assigned to but edges and faces can’t be locked.
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Autocad layers can be locked too. The effect of layer locking is the same in AutoCad and Rhino: objects on locked layers cannot be moved or erased. That doesn’t make the layers different - they are a means to assigning attributes to objects en masse. What makes layer locking possible in these applications is, as said, that their geometry is not “sticky”.
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But looking a layer isn’t the same as selecting all elements on the layer and bulk lock them. It is the very space they are in that is locked. In all these other programs the layer is like a box or a 3D piece of paper that elements belong to. In SketchUp elements don’t belong to the layer. The elements belong to their parent group/component. The layer isn’t a place but an abstract attribute. The equivalent of locking a layer but in SketchUp is to lock the parent containing instance.
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Found this on YT
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