Here’s the sort of thing that we building designers have to do a lot but that I often struggle with in Layout.
The attached drawing shows the outline of a plot and the farm track leading to it. I want to offset the line in a different colour retaining the red line. I then want to edit the new line.
At present, whatever I do, nothing will persuade LO to allow me to offset the line. Sure, if I keep ungrouping down to the lowest level, I can offset individual bits of line but I don’t fancy the time it would take to do all that. There must be a better way.
Yes, a very long farm track. And the site is actually very close to a highway to its immediate east. But there is a dip in the land between site and road and you know what that means… Yup, once in a 1,000 year risk of flood! Client didn’t want to tangle with the Environment Agency and so took the easy route. Well, easy but very, very long. Popping out to the shops will involve a cross country trek, probably with a tracked vehicle. But probably cheaper than tangling with the EA.
Actually, after posting, I did manage to do an offset but dang me if I can remember how. At the time, I think I had to have one foot on the ceiling and another in my bathroom with both arms crossed and operating my keyboard with my nose.
My basic policy is: To the greatest extent possible, don’t draw in Layout.
In this case, if you know how to draw offsets in SketchUp, do it there, even if it is just 2D and even just lines at that. For site plans from SketchUp, I typically have a bunch of 2D drawing elements floating above the model on a layer/tag just for certain orthographic plan views. All prepped and ready in SU, all you have to do in LO is place the viewport and pick the right scene and/or tags.
I agree that it would be easier to manage using a SketchUp model but it’s not a big deal to open the groups for editing and use the Join tool to join the edges. Then Offset will work just fine in LayOut.
Well, mine too. Drawing anything in LO is like trying to do fine carving using a machete. But sometimes it looks the easiest option. In this case, I think I started by importing a DWG of a site plan. The line of the drive did not come in as a nice continuous polyline but a series of individual lines joined end to end. I confess I don’t even remember how I created the line in LO but I do know that I found a way that made it fairly simple in the end. I think I posted here about it and had good advice about how to do it without having to join sections or trace over.
No? There are literally hundreds of bits of line in the original. But I see you did it OK. What was the process you used? Is there a difference between Mac and PC?
Many of the “bits” were already joined. I just went along and joined the rest. Nothing special. As others have indicated, doing it in LO would make it easier. You could use Weld or Autoweld.
