TLDR for those looking for a solution: Uncheck ‘Background’ in LayOut’s style settings.
I finally figured out something that’s been troubling me for a long time, but I’m still wondering if I’m missing something, or whether a feature request is in order. When creating condocs, I frequently stack one viewport on top of another, so that I can show different layers of a building, or show some elements in a different weight/color, etc. But at some point (last year?) this stopped working for me – the top viewport would block the other one, even if it is set to ‘vector’ rendering. I checked all the SketchUp style settings, to no avail. Then I noticed in LayOut’s style settings, a little “Background” checkbox. That fixed my issue – now, the top viewport is transparent, as long as it’s rendered in Vector.
It seems like this should be a setting in SketchUp? But maybe not, since that setting wouldn’t affect working in SketchUp – only background color matters there. It was just weird for me to need to change it in LayOut, since I try to make all style settings in SU – set it and forget it.
Hmm… I already had sky disabled. And enabling sky (in SU) for both viewports doesn’t cause an issue with viewport transparency. Just that ‘background’ checkbox in LayOut.
Interesting – I think we’re talking about a different types of transparency – With Sky enabled, I can’t see the LayOut background (the “paper”), but I can see through one viewport to the other (if I uncheck ‘background’ in LO). I had to give the background some color to realize this. So, the Sky setting isn’t relevant to the problem I was having, but it’s good to know.
It’s possible since version 2022 to manage line weights, styles and colors on a single viewport for different tags of your sketchup model, you can tag the elements you want to show on a different line weight and color then on layout on the sketchup model tray go to tags and edit the style there without having stacked viewports, you can also hide different tags directly from layout, it’s one of the best features added recently. You must set the line scale to 1x to be able to see the changes you do to the tags, if the line scale is too small will be hard too see the line weights.
@francisquitof
I forgot about that feature – guess I reverted to old habits. I was very excited when it was introduced. And yeah, it would have been a good method to use in this situation.