WHERE are the Layers in SKP 2020 Pro?

SketchUp Pro
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I’m with you Arkiteker.
You’re not over reacting- AutoCAD has Layers, SketchUp used to have layers. If it weren’t broke, why try to fix it?

I’ve used SU since the pre Google @Last days and spent years trying to get a productive workflow from this wonderful, intuitive 3D modelling tool, that is undergone so many changes.

Renaming a widget “Tags” because it… tada!.. now works in Layout, is not a reason to rename the widget. The “Layers” in Layout should have been renamed instead. Sketchup came first, and some of the native commands in SU didn’t even work in early LO, meaning it’s parentage was highly suspect.

There are 2 reasons I can think why anyone would thing to mess with a fundamental element, critical for productivity, just for the fun of it.
1- For marketing to justify annual subscription.
2- Because cannabis is legal in Colorado.

And because Layout is mentioned in this forum topic, I’ll add my 2 cents worth. Before Nick Sonder came along and showed how it could be useful (Thanks Nick, I have your book), it was like an old dog that Archicad abandoned because no one got round to shooting it.

Does it make beautiful looking documents? Absolutely. However trying to be productive and do some random, way out, freaky thing dude… let me see- like dimensioning- (Yes, I use a Vector model for this)- is a enjoyable as trying to disembowel yourself with a rusty bottlecap.

Layout is fine for client feedback or planning approval, but for 2D contract documents - and productivity- I use AutoCAD LT and just use SU for exporting Sections & Elevations. Nick Sonder’s excellent book was my last great hope that Layout would work- and while he has made it work for him, and I was too- in daily use Layout is still that old dog, and excruciatingly troublesome to dimension and annotate.

Now, where did I put that vet’s number? Oh, it’s under the Revit brochure.

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23

How many times does it need to be said that nothing has changed except the name.

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Except they didn’t behave like layers in other programs but many users tried to use them like they are used in other programs and created problems for themselves. If you’d spent as many years as Box , myself, and others teaching SketchUp users how to properly use layers in SketchUp, you would welcome the change of the name. And as Box wrote, the only thing that has changed about them is the name.

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Thanks Dave,
Layers in SU do behave like layers in AutoCAD. In fact, I have the same names for both in both programs, so when I import & export linework and geometry, I turn them off and on the same way.
Since Google bought SU and made it free, there are millions of amateurs out there having a go. People sometimes send me their house designs to be turned into Contract Documents, thinking it will save time. It almost never does. There are 3 fundamental things necessary to make SU productive.
1- Creation of Groups (and Components)
2- Oganising Groups into Layers
3- Organising preset views of the model with Scenes- with Layers turned off or on, with materials, camera angles etc as required.

I bought SketchUp from @Last Software in 2005, not knowing any of these priciples, and attempting to use it on a project gave up in disgust, as the whole ungrouped environment was like chewing gum with all linework sticking to each other as you know. (Many of the models I have gotten from prospective clients demonstrate great amateur modelling ingenuity, but no discipline, so their model is one big sticky spiderweb on Layer 0).

After some months thinking about it, I applied some AutoCAD principles and did my first full project in 2006, and the unique way of working with geometry and materials in SU resulted in an acclaimed building that I would not have produced in even AutoCAD Architectural Desktop, a 3D modelling program I had used for some years previously. Nick Sonder hadn’t produced his book then as Layout hadn’t been offered, so I had to work out my own workflow from scratch, working out how to get the wonderful model I could see on my screen into contract docs.

I draw floor plans in AutoCAD LT then export them to SU to project a drawing into a 3D SU model. Why? Even though I am an SU expert, with tens of thousands of hours of modelling time even now, iterations of floor plans are exponentially faster in 2D than 3D.

Then I setup preset model views in SU and export linework back to AutoCAD asusing layer organisation for window location finalised in SU as an Xref, and preliminary section geometry as a block to explode and edit. For construction drawings, I use LO for the perspectives for client presentation, and Elevations only, or a colured up Floor Layout with shadows.

It is simply too inaccurate to dimension from, and the dimension tool has a devlish mind of its own when it comes to angled geometry. In fact, the only dimensions I would trust in SketchUp, are the ones that I have dimensions directly on the model, in SketchUp. Of course, these are on a dimension layer!

So for us early pre Google, pre Layout pioneers, we had to make our own path, because there was none. Revit users will have their own workflows, as will Archicad and Vectorworks users if they use SU at all. So do I and other other users use SU in different ways, perhaps not the way younger SketchUp natives might? Of course we do! That’s why we get grumpy when developers move our stuff round and change things.

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26

Tags function EXACTLY the same as layers did. If the word bothers you put a piece of tape over it on the screen.

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27

And herein lies the issue.
You are contradicting yourself. Layers in Autocad separate geometry but Layers in SU only change the visibility of objects, which is why you create groups/components and organise them into layers.

By changing the name to Tag you remove the natural expectation that they separate geometry the way they do in autocad and photoshop etc and hopefully allow people to understand that that are tags used to control visibility.

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Now this is the best suggestion I’ve heard so far! Now we just need Eneroth to write the “Tape” plug in ; )
I’d pay for that!

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All objects in ACAD are geometry. I apply these principles in SU too, to create hybrid Group or Component objects that have geometry oncorporated. So I have door swings visible only in plan, but not in elevation or perspectives and vice versa, all controlled with Layers and preset views. This is how I get SU to work like CAD, with my own disciplines.
And I do similar stuff in ACAD. Any ACAD user who has been in different practices knows there are dozens of ways to skin a cat, and it takes weeks or months to learn “Well you might have doen it that way before, but this is how WE do it, here.”
And then when they start their own practice they combine all their knowledge in a new CAD soup of the day that their employees have to learn.

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So how is this different now that they are called Tags?
Is a rutabaga different when it is called a swede, or a zucchini different to a courgette.

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It’s not the nomenclature, it’s the primacy.
SketchUp was the golden goose. She had a naming system that called a spade a spade. A layer was a layer.
Then someone slipped a rotten egg beneath her called Layout, wrapped in gold coloured foil. That had a function called Layer as well, but it only related to it’s own entities and the DNA of the golden goose wasn’t apparent when the egg spawned. In fact they seemed to be hardly related at all.

But is seems to avoid confusion between the layers of golden goose down and the layers of rotten egg, one of the terms had to be changed.

Hmmm… do we change the matriarch or the juvenile?

The term Tag is known around the rest of the world as a form of excreble grafiitti, and sadly ironic it has been tagged on the golden goose.

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Talk about missing the point.
You are entitled to your opinion and as such I have nothing further to add.

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That’s just not how software development works. They put real thought and consideration into it with thorough explanations.

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That’s partly why they changed the name. Because they aren’t related, they aren’t the same. You said that once a “layer was a layer,” but it wasn’t. It was a tag all along.

Like these guys have said. Nothing about your workflow is changed. At all. It’s just a different word.

35

Point taken.

However you will see as of 8th May 2020, this post has been viewed more than 1,800 times.
I found it because I couldn’t find the fundamental, critical productivity tool, that Arkiteker couldn’t find.
This means, like Arkiteker and myself, the software developers have frustrated at least 1,700 of their customers, who had to resort to this forum to find where their tool had gone.

All because of a poorly considered name change for the sake of change’s sake.

In terms of progressive development, that’s not a win.

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Codename at that time for LayOut was ‘Grizzly’, as I recall, like Revit, just another software package.
Revit didn’t even use layers, they where probably implemented by Autodesk to morph into their CAD standards.

It is funny to see that lacking functionality (eg. locking layers) actually gave SketchUp a head start for designing and shaping in the 3D world, next to the PP, of course.

In the end, all that you can draw are edges, if drawn in the same plane, you can have a face, if all edges are adjacent to exactly two faces and isolated, they are ‘solids’.
How you interpreted them, is defined by naming, labeling, colorizing, etc.

The Tag/layer panel is now the one with the most possibilities (linestyle, color, visibility) but the Outliner (Object tree) got a symbol for (hide/unhide) too, this version.
I would like to have a special panel for classification (tags), as well, where you could control visibility.

37

At the risk of spoiling the purity of your ignorance @Box:
Layers in typical 2D CAD applications do not separate/isolate geometry.

CAD_Layers
CAD_Layers888×1168 50.7 KB

Geometry in those CAD applications is, by nature, separate.
The opposite is true of SU’s “sticky” geometry which melds together upon contact.

The core function of Layers, controlling visibility, is the same in 2D CAD and SU.
The difference between CAD and SU is the fundamental behavior of geometry, not layer behavior.

Layers | Mitchel Stangl | Working With Large Models — 3D Basecamp 2008

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Such a shame we won’t be seeing each other at base camp where I could respond accurately in person.

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39

you can add a folder in the tags, or layers under the layers, so you need to put the plugin

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Which is why the name change is long overdue.
For the benefit of the pedants here, yes it’s true that layers do not separate geometry in acad, but the perception is that they do. The geometry is already separate so it is possible to create a layer and it won’t interact with other geometry allowing you to manipulate that layer independently. The same in Photoshop. If you select a part of an image and want to move it independent of the rest of the image you make it another layer, which separates it from the rest of the image. These layers can be moved about in 2 and 3d in various ways without directly interacting with other layers and non layers.
Does anything here sound similar to anything in SU? Groups and Components perhaps, selected parts of the geometry wrapped up so it doesn’t interact with other geometry and can be moved around in both 2d and 3d.
It certainly doesn’t sound like layers in SU. Try assigning geometry to different layers and see what happens when you modify geometry assigned to another layer. Try moving two layers of raw geometry away from each other in either 2 or 3d.

So yes, the fundamental difference in the nature of the geometry is at the heart of the issue. Please forgive me for forcing the purity of my ignorance on you.

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SketchUp never had layers but had a feature similar to layers that was called layers. This was confusing new users as they expected “layers” to be layers, i.e. separate geometry which is something you need groups and components for. LayOut layers on the other hand are 100% layers. You can draw on them without having objects merge between them and be on two layers at once, and you can lock them.

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