In 2D CAD you get linetypes. These are often used to represent items that are not visible in a bird’s eye view (things above or below a floor, for example). SU doesn’t have that facility because, in general, you model everything and then decide what to show or not in a given scene. However, that is still a limitation when showing traditional plans and want to indicate the presence of things like beams at ceiling level or drain runs below ground.
You can use broken lines in LO but it is very messy to have model-based geometry both in SU and LO. I was just wondering whether anyone had come up with a good solution to showing things like this in a plan scene?
I use dashed lines in LO and find that works very well. Not messy at all. Prior to LO, though, I used a plugin from Smustard called Dashed Lines that will create them in SketchUp. The plugin works by dividing a line into short segments and then hiding every other segment. It works but I find that messier than the dashed lines in LO.
You can set face style to to Back Edges but that shows EVERY line behind a face and doesn’t let you select what to show. Typically if I want dashed lines in any specific place I draw normal lines in SU projected to wherever they are visible in the view and not where they actually would be in the 3d model (e.g. behind a face). Then in LO I’d draw new dashed lines manually with those in the 3d view as a template and then I’d go back to teh 3d model to either remove them or hide them.
I have used Smustard’s Dashed Lines but the trouble is that they are really difficult to edit.
A reason I don’t like putting drawing geometry in LO is that there is no link, so if you change something in SU you then have to remember about its possible effect on the dashed lines in LO. In a very real sense, it is not “joined up”. That’s what I mean by messy.
The best I have come up with is to draw the actual drains below ground level and have a ground plane with low opacity so you see the drains through the ground plane. You could achieve much the same using the X-Ray visibility option, although then everything is low opacity.
I made some dashed line and symbol line objects as dynamic components using the copies function and disabling scaling except in the “length” direction. Works if you don’t need too many of them. Example attached. Downside is that the segment length won’t vary with your output scale. dashedline.skp (17.1 KB)