Where is, Snap On and Off Toggle button or a shortcut key?
What exactly do you want to do? In LayOut you can turn Object Snap and Grid Snap on and off. You cannot turn off inference snapping in SketchUp if that’s what you are looking for so there is no toggle button or keyboard shortcut for that…
Why? What is the wisdom behind it?
I have a image of a house imported from a JPEG and I am trying to show a retaining wall. Something I though will take few minutes but SNAP is letting me do what I want.
With the SketchUp model spacing being three dimensionional, without snapping you’d have absolutely no control over where in space the cursor is.
Show us what you are trying to do. Share the SketchUp file. There’s probably a way to do what you want.
I think DaveR is correct, that there is most likely a way to do what you want with SketchUp as is; however, coming from a previous life using AutoCAD, I can appreciate and would request allowing people to have options to CAD how they like by giving them the control of what Snaps are active and whether or not you want Snaps on or off as well as inferencing and orthogonal locking. I have personally struggled sometimes with SketchUp snapping or inferencing to entities I don’t want to snap nor infer to and it takes me a few extra seconds to muscle the work around to get it to do what I want.
Overall SU is fine, but occasionally having some choice in how it works would improve my workflow on specific tasks. Example, like only snapping to centers of circles, can come in handy when you need to copy something to the center of a many circles for some reason. By enabling “center” only, you can confidently snap to all the circles centers without zooming in as much and know you are not accidentally snapping to any of the other options. The key is coming up with a user interface that lets you change the settings quickly.
As a side note, in AutoCAD, if I remember correctly, when snaps were off, it would default to the xy plane. This would come in handy when you wanted to quickly eyeball entities that did not need to be connected to anything else.
Below is how NanoCAD (an AutoCAD Clone) allows users to select which snaps are active or not as well as toggles for ortho and inferencing (Otrack).
A simple menu along these lines would be nice to give options for the different ways people like to CAD.
Excellent suggestion.
The above should not be a case at all when we are working on the two dimensional plane. Snapping to any elements in the third dimension elements should not be allowed. Also why can’t I turn it off to snap it to a raster drawing in the background. It is working an absolutely haphazard manner.
SketchUp is never a 2D thing, though.
A raster image has nothing to snap to. There is no geometry in it.
It may not be working the way you want it to but it isn’t haphazard.
Again, if you share your file we can probably help you do what you need to do.
FWIW, there are converters out there that can generate vector files from raster images. That might be an option to explore.
Thank you.
It may be my lack of experience that I am having difficulty. I have done my work, could have been easier.
The transition from a 2D or 2 1/2 D (what I call one that is 3D but always draws on a 2D “working plane”) app to a true 3D app can be challenging. Deeply ingrained notions of how to go about things have to be unlearned. If you stick with it, SketchUp’s way will soon become comfortable. If you try to force SketchUp to work the old way, you will get frustrated!
When you are drawing a line, you can hit the Command key (Mac) to toggle off linear inferences. I assume it’s the Alt key on Windows (?).
If your retaining wall (or other geometry) doesn’t end up exactly where you’d like, you can always move the objects. And if it’s precision you need, you can type in the exact distance you’d like to move. Once the Move command is active, type in the distance in the lower right. Likewise, you can type in coordinates just like in AutoCAD using .
I’m a long time AutoCAD user and use both SU and CAD in my daily work flow. Personally I find inference to be one of SU’s best features. I think it may just take some getting used to. I hope that helps. Good luck!
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Keep using the software. Learn how it works and you’ll get much much faster…
learn.sketchup.com is a great place to start.
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