Scene and section manager desperately needed

Hello world of sketchuppers!

I use ketchup extensively and have been having serious problems with the sketchup/ layout workflow and I was hoping for some changes to it at least in the 2015 version. Am I the only one who is in desperate need of some solutions to the below?

  1. the Layout viewports do not always remember the last saved parameters in Layout. For instance the viewports in layout could correctly remember sequences of scene toggles (essentially combined scenes) intended for the creation of a final view different from any of the scenes created in Sketchup. Unless i create a scene in Sketchup for each layout viewport I get totally unpredictable behaviour and it is causing me a tremendous waste of time. Having as many scenes setup in Sketchup as viewports in Layout is not always practical, and certainly not without some scene management tool in Sketchup. I often end up with an exponentially larger number of scenes than I need because of this.

  2. Scene management in Sketchup is truly primitive and has not changed since inception. You need to enable some form of collapsible folder structures within the scene window to help us manage large numbers of scenes, especially if you cannot solve the problems at point 1 above.

  3. With so many scenes and no decent scene management, the scene tab menu quickly fills up. one needs to be able to only show a selection of scenes in this menu, i.e. the ones that are only used most often. Otherwise, without some form of management, this menu is totally useless for both modelling and viewing purposes.

  4. Section cuts management is also a big problem as I often need to move between section planes for modelling or visualisation purposes. Currently i can only activate sections by activating specially created scenes, which of course, adds further to the number of scenes already needed, which is already a problem as above. One would greatly benefit from a separate sections management window in Sketchup, similar to the scenes’ one and which is also accessible in Layout.

I have raised these on the forum and written to ketchup directly many times but it seems that there is no incentive to do anything about it. I do not understand how such simple issues cannot be dealt with as it would improve the workflow dramatically and can only make you friends. Furthermore, all the above problems can be solved without sacrificing any of the user-friendliness that already characterises Sketchup. Why should it sometimes feel like hitting a glass ceiling with this software when it doesn’t have to be like this at all.

1 Like

Amen. A thousand times over. Scene management is a must…I’d love to continue using SU and Layout for my larger projects but it is hardly manageable.