Yes, sorry, the ticking box... Thanks!

OK - Thanks. DISCOVERED: If I leave LO's VP's as raster, the export process generates a .dwg file PLUS a folder containing the png image files. When the .dwg file is opened with AutoCAD, it xrefs the images - but you can freeze the images layer to have a wireframe visual style, if desired.

Hi there! I did renew maintainance blindly too... And I am admitedly worried about the delay. My desktop is kind of old (well, it's old... welp, it's very old), but I had a brand new laptop I got on Saturday that makes LayOut a beauty to work with. Also, I hope the YouTube channel releases Sonder's content as soon as possible, as he said in a podcast that he was showing the new and improved workflow he uses. I consider Mr. Sonder the God's child of LayOut, more than SketchUp: he surely is one capable modeller, but how he makes LayOut spin makes my mouth watering! I also use "conventional" 2D cad extensively, and I find LayOut really falling behind when it comes to dimensioning. The best example I can give you is that it doesn't allow to round off at, say, 5 cm (sorry, I'm Italian and I am really bad with the Imperial system). In my work, and I can't find any way to make it work automatically, the only way around it is editing every singular dimension. Another major flaw is not being able to suppress unwanted extension lines in the dimensions, or to stretch them all at once, not before entering edit mode for them... It REALLY is time consuming. Also, area (square meters/feet) comunication between SketchUp and LayOut can be vastly improved. Again, nothing that makes it unusable, but a lot that makes it somehow... Clumsy! I find many differences between US and Italian ConDocs (many of them I try to include in my pojects/documents), and I can see how SketchUp is clearly better suited to the US Standards. Again: it is very (very) usable for me too, and I strongly advocate shifting towards it whenever I can, but it lacks a thing or two to make it really comparable to 2D CADs for small works (which is not bad: I find every tool to be exceptional in one job and not the best in others... But my first try is always SU). Aside of that, I don't think SketchUp should be stretched further in modelling features (there's the awesome comunity we have for that, and In my works - which goes to full buildings to furniture design - I really need a need just a couple to make my day go smooth, even with topography and terrain surveys - Toposhaper by Fredo6 is astonishingly powerful). I'd go to a better and more capable BIM compatibily, and considering Trimble owns Tekla, I'd say it could be an option we'll see.

This snippet copied/pasted into the Ruby Console + <enter> will save all of the model's definitions out into a selected folder, as separate SKP files... d=UI.select_directory(title;"Choose Save Components' Directory...");(Sketchup.active_model.definitions.each{|e|e.save_as(File.join(d,e.name.gsub(/[\x00\/\\;\*\?\"<>\|]/,"_")))};UI.openURL("file;///#{d}"))if d You then need to open each in turn and set up the scene views, with zooms, and re-save etc... This can also be coded, but it is more than a one-liner...

No ideas or thoughts on this? I'm dead in the water.

thanks for the information, problem solved.

That kind of sounds like a work around for the right method but if it works for you, that's fine.

It works great. Exactly what I was after. Thank you Dave. Thank you TIG.

@gspess said: The issue I'm running into is that drafting in Arch D, all of the scrapbook items come out much smaller than would ever be useful on such a size of paper. See example here - https://imgur.com/a/HLs56LI Is there a way to pre-set them to a size appropriate to Arch D? As scaling them keeps the text like a 4pt text. It certainly is a shame within layout that a modifier key on scaling doesn't scale all content within an object!

Good enough.

Good enough.

Perfect. Thank you very much Dave.

Looking at the SketchUp model, I see those duplicated styles, too. I think you can be confident that your cross reference organizer application is the culprit. If you simply purge unused styles, you'll get rid of a few duplicates. You would need to go through and manually do the rest but it won't be that difficult. Find a scene that uses the duplicate, select the original version of the style and update the scene. When you get all finished, purge unused styles again and you should be down to five styles in this model. I would suggest that for the following scenes, you set the style to Hidden Line with white back and then reselect those scenes for the viewports on the last two pages. Don't let viewports show the scenes as modified. SEC SHORT 2, SEC LONG 5, SEC SHORT 4, and SEC LONG 4. As for the file bloat, you're right. The use of duplicated styles doesn't help but in addition to some unused styles, I purged what you see below. [image: Ufw8_Screenshot-9_17_20187_08_41AM.png] Keep in mind that components and materials you may have had in the model space but deleted or replaced remain as part of the SketchUp file. Styles you might use but replace will also remain. Since it sounds like you are combining multiple SketchUp models into one, I would recommend purging unused stuff from the files before amalgamation. Purge Unused from Model Info>Statistics is a good single step method. I use TIG's Purge All because I like to see that little report window to have some idea of what was purged. It's also undoable. I have a keyboard shortcut established for it and run it before closing a file.

Did you install SketchUp/LayOut 2017 correctly when you did install it? That is, did you right click on the installer exe file and choose Run as administrator while you were logged into Windows as your normal user?

Hows's this? The top is a screen grab from SketchUp while the bottom is from LayOut. [image: yX7W_Screenshot-9_11_20186_57_43AM.png] The difference in color is due to the fact that in SketchUp you didn't have a straight on view of the model so the shader that creates the impression of 3D is doing its thing. You missed a few very important steps. In SketchUp, you need to set up a scene for the view you want to see in LayOut. [image: Z0t3_Screenshot-9_11_20187_06_02AM.png] In LayOut, you need to select that scene for the viewport and make sure you don't do anything to make it show as modified. [image: H057_Screenshot-9_11_20187_07_07AM.png] You need only select the Scene. Do not adjust the Standard Views in LayOut, don't open the viewport to change the camera position, either. You can adjust the size of the viewport window and adjust the scale of the model without making it modified. It's also unwise to use Last saved SketchUp view since this is not a v fixed scene. In your case you have modified the Last saved SketchUp view. [image: 3mK4_Screenshot-9_11_20187_12_30AM.png] Here's the revised file.Dansbandet.layout

That thread is as close as anything I've ever seen to a scrapbook warehouse.

At this time LayOut won't do dimensions like that directly. It's on the feature requests list so hopefully we'll see it in an upcoming version. In the meantime, you can add the dimension in SketchUp or you can manually create it in LayOut.

@u5tabil said: @dave r said: Are you modeling everything in SketchUp? Or are you drawing the ducting in LayOut? One easy way to do it is to put a layer in between the layer the floorplan is on and the one the ducting is on. Draw a large rectangle on that in between layer and adjust its fill opacity to suit. I have the floor plan in sketchup, but the plan was to use layout to draw the ducting on top. How would I do what you recommended? Doing it entirely in sketchup instead then? I'd probably opt for the suggestion you made yourself! Drawings the electrial layout over the floor plan, whilst using Dave's recommendation of a semi transparent filled square over the SU view. Work in three layers so you can turn the transparent layer off whilst snapping to the SU view for your electrical work, turn that layer back on prior to exporting!

An easy workaround: Create a bold rectangular 'C' shaped object with the line tool. Fill this object with hatch and double-click the object to enable path editing to close the 'C'. Disable the object's stroke. Redraw all outlines to the object with a 'stroke' enabled and 'fill' disabled.

Pyscho, that's the one. Updating profile very soon. Soonly soon..