this shouldn’t be the claim of SU, striving for the better is the thing.
And in sketchup, basic fundamental usage is, scale -1, flip along, or rotate.
If you ‘learn’ how to use the software these fundamentals are inalienable.
Nobody can take these things away from you once you have learned them.
Trying to kill a request for improvement doesn’t help here, the pure existence of several mirror plugins do already document the demand for a dedicated mirror tool.
anyhow, keep on smilin’
SketchUp doesn’t have a real plane concept except by navigating and positioning the camera. A lot of 3D modelers activate a visual plane (with a grid) that helps in drawing in the same plane and the visualisation immediately shows what’s going on.
The rotated rectangle has something that looks like that upon activating which I find useful.
The drawing tools have been expanded with some arc tools (of which I only use the 2-point arc) and that rotated rectangle tool.
To keep the Large toolset in balance, we need at least two modification tools extra, mirror and perhaps an extrude tool (pushpull to object)
Btw scaling by -1 often results in bad exports.
Out of interest, I looked at current SU advice about mirroring on this webpage: Flipping, Mirroring, Rotating and Arrays | SketchUp Help
Although Mirroring is mentioned in the headline, it is only referred to after that under Flip Along. Flip Along does a great job when working on axis but can’t be used off it. A better bet off axis is often Rotate-Copy, though you may have to correct the face orientation. But this possibility is not referred to.
I wonder if it should be?
It seems to trigger a bug in STL (and I think I’ve seen, also FBX and possible OBJ) exports in versions of SU that don’t have to use an extension, especially for STL exports.
Flipped or mirrored objects, or objects scaled by -1 show as unprintable in the 3D printer slicer software. The workaround is to explode and remake the flipped object with a new component name, before exporting it.
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Yes, the bug is in the exporter and has been around since they incorporated it into the program, it is not the fault of scaling or flipping.
Installing the original stl import/export extension created by sketchup will export correctly.
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I must remember to do that, the next time I have a model I want to 3D Print.
Use copy, make unique, and flip. It works for me.