I consider myself fairly sophisticated user of SU and an architect have been using sketch up for 5 to 10 years.
There are three things that frustrate me and interrupt my workflow to no end and I’m wondering if anyone else experiences these items or as workarounds for them.
First are the nightmares that occur when through no apparent fault of your own you end up with non-coplanar elements refuse to allow a plane or face to close. I try to keep my geometry clean to avoid this but invariably it happens and there are work arounds like intersect faces and bisecting planes with lines filling with rectangles to create closure versus pulling another perpendicular form through the element as well. And then what’s with all the spiderweb lines TIN lines, I imagine.
Secondly, while compulsively cleaning up of stray lines the inadvertent erasure a small line stub wipes out a ton of work behind the plane is constantly frustrating. And I take it vantage of components in groups and hiding and login other elements to try to avoid this but it still happens. As a by the way sketch up could put some distance between the hide command in and erase drop down on the right mouse button click to avoid inadvertent mishaps.
Thirdly it is incredibly frustrating to pull components out the 3-D warehouse and not be able to land them in the model. One namely me can spend hours trying to coax an element into position. I’m thinking perhaps there something in the component make up that keeps this or makes this happen. It’s a case where you want sticky geometry to work for you and it just doesn’t. As a by the way to that the catalog items available from various manufacturers is incredibly uneven and incomplete. Obviously not sketch apps fault As another by the way to that effect of the components like windows are not self cutting into walls is another time consuming frustration.
I don’t mean to be a whiner complainer but these sorts of difficult to use issues have got me to the point of looking at different 3-D modeling software options short of Revit. Maybe chief architect ?
First -I feel your pain - There’s an extension called Archtiect Tools has a function to Flatten geometry or Move Geometry to “Z” which I use a lot to overcome the issues you describe. Edge Tools has a function to detect and remove stray edges nad close gaps. Cleanup3 can simplify geomtery.
A nice SU feature would be a set of options that allows us to decide if we want to lock geometry to a plane, or to allow faces to close around stray edges.
Second- Get used to using shortcut keys for the eraser then you dont have to right-click. i agree the Eraser is too quick to delete entire components. Maybe it needs to be tuned so that when erasing raw geometry you have to unclick and reclick to tell it to start erasing other stuff as well.
Thirdly, I find the same - some components are badly created with silly basepoints. If SU staff are not able to automatically recalculate base origins in all 3dw components then all we can do to overcome this is import them into a fresh SU model , check them, then copy &paste into our original model. I find the time it takes to do this is worthwhile because the compoents that cause the problems are usually amateurish and have multiple issues that I dont want loaded into my professional working model. Also, if you aren’t already, start using the website version of the 3d warehouse because the 3d Warehouse Browser in Sketchup is pathetic.
Thanks for the response. Good tips, ah plug ins and extensions. Are they hard to learn to use? In throes of deadline now, but later. Who has time to train?! Only when the pain threshold of doing it the old way is exceeded!
Re: eraser tool
I don’t find myself using the eraser tool all that much. More often, I use the selection tool first and then the delete key. It’s usually more efficient, and you get a visual confirmation (mostly) of what’s about to be deleted. (Yes, you can still select stuff you don’t realize in back of other things, so not always without surprises.)
You can use Thomthoms CleanUp to do a “save” cleaning.
You should use a shortcut for this (“h” for hide e.g., you don’t need the hand option) instead to speed up your workflow.
It’s not the fault of SketchUp but the poorly modeled models. It’s a good practice to import it into a separate SketchUp file, do some cleanup, scaling, axis positioning, … and use that reworked version in your main model.