SU-dimension-cutoff depending on position on paper in LO is fixed. Hurrai.
I like the option to hide/unhide nested objects in scenes in SU. And the new options in LayOut could save creating extra scenes in SketchUp = good.
all in all, these changes could make productivity a slight bit better. Thanks for that.
The changes to Outliner though have a few drawbacks;
the Outliner is extremely sensitive to clicks.When selecting / double clicking an object, many times it immediately jumps to rename-mode= unwanted - I use Entity info for that.
same for re-ordering. When starting to drag, many times it jumps into rename-mode.
If you want to deselect everything, you could click in empty space in the outliner (pre 2020). Now it selects the object on that line. So now you have to click in empty space in the main view (not nice if you’re zoomed in) OR select the top name in the hierarchy (scrolling if you have a long hierarchy).
I’m using a Wacom Intuos Pro so maybe the sensitivity is due to that. Never had this issue pre 2020 though.
I’m just going to say it. The layers to tags thing is nonsense and a waste of valuable development time that could have been spent elsewhere. How about some simple tools to group and filter them so you don’t have to use some third party plugin. And who cares what you call them all users worth there salt know exactly what they do and how to use them. Let’s those that don’t LEARN. You guys tinker with this ■■■■ while we have to pay third party developers for basic functionality. Sorry but that’s my 2 cents. “Outliner” Really?
Obviously a lot of people don’t know what SketchUp “layers” are. Pretty much every day in the forum someone has needed help after mistaken SketchUp “layers” for layers. The name does matter a lot to anyone learning the program. Also it can’t take much development resources to rename something. You literally just have to change the phrases used in the UI, not do multiple iterations to see if the behavior works in all edge cases, only to see bugfixes introduce other bugs. I’d suspect that the changes in how scenes store hidden states has required 10 times as much work to implement, if not 20 or 50.
So haven’t they now in fact muddled the water more. Where does visibility control belong now? To Tags or the hide command in the out liner? Isn’t it better to isolate a group of like kind objects together and control there visibility In one place then have random objects individually hidden?
It depends on whether you want to hide a whole “class” of similar objects or just one. If you want to hide just one object in a scene, an extra tag would be bloating the tag list. You can still do it if you want though.
Also, the water is less muddy now as scenes treat object visibility more consistently. Previously it only worked in the top drawing context but now it works inside of groups and components too. There is still a bit of mud in how objects and geometry are treated differently inside containers, but hopefully this is cleaned up in the future.
I think a large part of the Layers renaming is to do with the fact that tags are now available in LayOut too. So in LayOut you have layers like they are more universally known and tags to hide object visibility from the model.
With the new functionality having two sets of Layers in LayOut that behave differently to each other, would probably have caused more confusion. Matt Donley pointed it out in his video and I agree.
I follow Mike Brightman’s idea of using SU styles to control lineweights in LO.
So in my SU floor plan file I have several scenes per floor each assigned a different style so that in LO I can get my lineweights. As a result some of my SU floor plan files can have too many scenes for my liking!
In 2020 I can now have one scene per floor in SU and then in LO have as may stacked viewports as I like each assigned to a different style and with the appropriate tags enabled…
tag … dice … or slice them … don’t really care how SK wants to label things !
aaaahhh … but it would be nice to group them … my layer organizer / manager plugin … (or now tag organizer / manager plugin) is confused … (lol) … sure it will be updated soon.
Another idea I thought of was for adding dimensions to a kitchen floor plan, for example. Sometimes the upper cabinets or countertops will obscure points of the base cabinets, making it impossible to add dimensions to the base cabinets… Now, you can temporarily hide those (wall cabinet and countertop) tags, add your dimensions, then reset tag visibility back to the scene. The dimensions will remain anchored to the correct geometry in the model, even though they are now visually “covered up” by other objects.
I’m particularly excited about having tags added to LayOut. One thing that peeves me is having to make a scene for just say a dashed line, which I prefer to add in SU mostly.
I can now create one scene in SU with all the tags visible, import it into LO, turn off the tags I don’t need, stack the viewport and switch up the tags as required. Without looking, for my last project the number of scenes could probably be halved.
I’ve always thought the layer issue was a poor design. Whether this change will help things we’ll see. If it’s bad news to put geometry on other layers or tags, why does SketchUp invite just that? And when importing files will (AutoCAD) layers just become tags (and put the entities in the wrong place as usual)? At least someone got the idea that every user starts off getting tricked by this problem since year one. So there’s progress. Interested to see how the other changes work!
I don’t think good design means someone must earn their “salt” or be schooled by some “old salt” on how to use the software before ruining their model out of the box. Neither should a gauntlet of old salts be required online to explain this same problem for newbies every single day. If this were Blender that might make sense!
Has something changed in this respect? Currently I can open all of my previous versions of SU (from 8 up).
My renderer only works through 2018, and I don’t wish to lose functionality in it.
I don’t think it’s poor design per se but a poor presentation. SketchUp’s tagging system that allows to changing visibility globally across all drawing contexts, including components loaded from external files, is very powerful. The problems are/have been 1. calling it layers and 2. allowing newly drawn entities to all get tagged/assignment a layer. The DWG importer should also wrap each layer in a group, and tag/apply the SU layer to the group as a whole, not to geometry. this would also solve much of the merging issues.
There used to be a grace period for classic license owners, with the release of a newer version, one could still activate for a couple of days, now, if you haven’t activated the earlier version, you ‘skip’ that version automatically.
Suppose you haven’t activated the 2019 version, you can no longer activate it, since you choose not to use it. If the maintenance plan was active, you would receive the new license info for the new anyhow.
Speaking of Tags/Layers, I wish the the issue of exploding a component and ending up with raw geometry in a layer other than “untagged” would have been addresed.
