Regarding speeed I’m not sure that groups vs components makes much difference, although the SketchUp online help suggests components are better in this respect: “Multiple instances of a component are lighter weight than multiple copies of an entity or group.” (Improving Performance | SketchUp Help). I tend to mainly use components and only use groups to temporarily isolate some geometry or groups of individual components.
Regarding the use of Tags, there is no rule that you have to use them. You can keep it simple (particularly when learning) by ignoring tags and control visibility via components (and/or groups) alone. As long as you have a well disciplined model with appropriately named components, then you can toggle them on and off in the Outliner. It’s one less issue to think about.
You can also control visibilty via scenes so you can combine various component visibilities depending on what you want to show for a particular aspect of your model. Whatever you make visible/invisible in a scene (e.g. front elevation, ground floor plan etc) will remain so unless you subsequently update the scene.
@Box I have been using SketchUp since v3 of @last days and have never heard of this method. I’d be interested to understand why geometry should be “untagged”?
Hi @Devine. I’ve been using SketchUp since V3, too. This thing of keeping all geometry untagged (or with Layer 0 assigned to it) has always been the “rule” at least since then. Tags/Layers have never provided separation for geometry. That’s only done by putting the geometry into group or component containers.
Tags/Layers are primarily used for visibility control of objects (components/goups) and if the object has a tag the geometry inside will be hidden when the tag’s visibility is turned off.
You can give tags to raw geometry but then you have to chase the active tag as you are working in the model or you wind up creating all kinds of trouble for yourself. By leaving Untagged as active and leaving all geometry untagged, there’s no chasing to do. In fact you have no need to know what tag is given to the object to edit the geometry inside. The workflow is much easier and you don’t wind up creating problems in which some geometry in one part disappears when you hide another.
Dave is replying. I will have a little typing speed test with him!
Reverse faces can be a problem when it comes to exporting and rendering.
Geometry not on untagged has a problem because if you move that geometry, any connected raw geometry within other tags will also move. Layers, and now Tags, imply that the geometry is isolated from other geometry. It isn’t.
BTW, Dave won the typing speed test.
v3 of SketchUp for me as well, though I didn’t buy it until v5.
Interesting. Thanks to @DaveR and @colin. I think I have simply developed a workflow over the years that draws geometry and creates components in the same Layer/Tag. Maybe I don’t have copious amounts of tags to worry about chasing the active one. I also don’t mind geometry visibility being affected by named tags that I created because that is the intended result from the outset. To be fair my geometry and components are almost always on the same created tag, so I don’t experience much frustration of the incorrect objects being visible or not. At the same time, I’m probably not gaining maximum flexibility from SU. However just to be sure that I’ve understood correctly, please confirm the following:-
→ Untagged geometry nested in a tagged component still toggles (visibility) when the components tag visibility is toggled?
If the group or component has a tag there’s no reason to also tag the geometry, though.
I think the main thing is you are creating more work for yourself than you need to by tagging the geometry.
That’s basically it. If the object (component or group) has been given a tag, the visibility of the stuff inside the object will be controlled by the visibility of the tag. Turning off the tag visibility is sort of like the Romulan’s turning on their cloaking device.
Here’s another example showing what the warning message about visible geometry merging with hidden is talking about.
You can see the confusion, faces can’t be created but some can, things you have just drawn can’t be deleted, edges that should be one segment are strangely fragmented etc etc
