Hey @DaveR, reopening this subtopic as you mentioned this viewport orientation tip a while ago and I filed it away in my brain to use. I understand your explanation in principle, but can’t work out how you actually did it. Can you explain to me how you set up a viewport without modifying the camera properties, assuming the SU model is not aligned to the global axes (and will therefore be a wonky view by default)?
Set your camera views up in SKP and save scenes. Do not alter the camera in LO (so do not double click into a model, pan or zoom or orbit).
You can quickly align camera views to section cuts or floor or roof faces by right clicking on raw geometry and selecting ‘Align View’ - you can then create this as a scene.
Dave likes to have minimal scenes in SKP - this is fine, and works well when you only need orthogonal views of your model - you can quickly select different standard views in LO… but for beginners and for models where things might not be aligned with the world axis in SKP I think it is better to create scenes, even if you end up with a lot of them. When you master scenes and LO setup you can free style and you will better know what your project needs to represent it properly.
To clarify, while I do prefer to keep the number of scenes to a minimum in SketchUp, I still make as many scenes as needed. If neccesary I will use Align View for off-axis elevation scenes. I only use the scenes created in the SketchUp model but I do not select from the Standard Views drop down in LayOut and I don’t recommend doing that as it also modifies the Camera properties. And also, as @bmike says, do not alter the camera position by double clicking into viewports.
Set up the scenes in SketchUp as Mike indicates. You might find it useful to change the global axes for a given scene. It could make the setup easier in some cases.