Is Layout 2 worth the upgrade to SU7?

kwistenbiebel

Hey, thanks for all the tips.
You almost convinced me to upgrade to SU7......but having multiple pages crashes and corrupts the file ?
That's not good. I think I'll wait for a fix.

Do you guys think the Googies will fix it in an update, or will we have to wait for Sketchup 8?

Gaieus

Well, that's Richards experience - although a documented one AFAIK (and he was also very active testing

remus

Id guess they're going to patch it.

jeff hammond

@kwistenbiebel said:

I didn't have a reason to leave SU6 behind....Should I?

nothing to do with LO but there are two small changes that make su7 a lot better to me..

one is that you can now cross a line with another line and it breaks it.. the other, and this is the big one for me, is that you can now draw a line of a set distance on top of an existing one..

imagine you have a line that is 6' long and you would like to make that line 8' long.. with su7, you can draw a line over the 6' one and type 8' into the vcb and it will be 8' long.. with su6, you'd end up with a line that was 14' long.. it added to the length instead of replacing it..

that example isn't to bad because i could simply add 2 more feet but if the existing line is something like ~5' - 4 5/32" then you have a problem..

Gaieus

Oh, and the texturing tools! Making textures applied unique and then edit them (like in PS) real time! Adding all sorts of dirt and individual irregularities while they update on save in PS. That's really cool.

Richard

I do though think a few things where broken in 7!

Inferences for me are fairly doggy now, sometimes I just cant get one!
The scaling of objects then explode to correct texture scaling now requires texture resetting, which isn't great if you had manually resized the texture before scaling.
I finding certain situations now where I just cant get a face to create even if I make a triangle.

Hope fully an update may fix the layout multi page issue! I know the googies addressed the issue by disabling the opening of corrupted files in the final release. I think to hopefully rely on the backup though if an autosave occurs after the corruption I find that file is also corrupted.

Richard

As Gai suggested I gave a fair bit of feedback during testing, stacks of new feature requests! One being the option to export images back to SU from LO, projected to the model relevant to the model window in LO. I could see this as a great way to create detailed very low poly models.

A low poly model could be created in SU, imported into LO and textures, window images etc be complied for each elevation and then exported back to SU and automatically projected to selected faces.

Richard

@gaieus said:

Oh, and the texturing tools! Making textures applied unique and then edit them (like in PS) real time! Adding all sorts of dirt and individual irregularities while they update on save in PS. That's really cool.

Dam - you know I'd never really tested that feature much! I just gave it a go and note that even if you use a small texture tile then select a face, make texture unique and then open for external edit it actually has created the texture for the whole face, that is DARN cool!!!!! I always thought that would just open the original texture! Dumb is me!

This is a darn cool feature for creating weight maps and the like for rendering and sort of overcomes my suggesting regarding export back from LO (though I still think that handy for creating a texture for the whole model!).

Gaieus

You know, Richard, that when you rename the *.layout file to *.zip and open it, you can dig down to (I can't tell now which) subfolder to find the LO viewport images of the SU model you inserted into LO in quite hi-res png format (actually, if you turn off background in LO, they also come with a transparent alpha channel).

Now why couldn't you use these images to what you want in SU - like re-texturing and such? Just make the LO view in parallel projection and with a standard view and there you go, you'd hardly even need to position those textures (just size them correctly upon import) as they should fit perfectly this way.

Edit:

Here is a tutorial about tips how to extract these images from the LO file:
http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?p=91691#p91691
The tut is for another purpose but is well applicable in this case as well.

Richard

Hmmmm? Great tip I'll check that out mate, thanks for the eyes up!!!!

At the moment I use PS to do much the same thing and very accurately.

Create your low poly model,
Create a rectangular box stretched clear of and surrounding the model,
Paint the box with 100% transparent material,
Export parallel projection images of all faces,
Edit images in PS > use magic wand to select white outside bounding box > invert selection and crop, any other edits then save!
Make texture of saved images > paint to correct faces > adjust texture in free pin mode and drag to each corner > set as projected > sample and paint to model!

This positions your texture 100% accurate!!!!!

Gaieus

Well, you can't entirely spare all the work by extracting the images from the LO file but at least they are already there and no need for meticulously selecting, inverting and all.
Al;so note that that tut was made for LO 1 and ever since they implemented "turning background off" in LO 2 so it's even less hassle.

Eric_J

@kwistenbiebel said:

I would purchase the upgrade to SU7 just for Layout and use it in a SU6 combo. Is that possible?
Kwistenbiebel

Did this question get answered? Gaius wrote that he didn't think that the combination would work, but the other responses defended SU 7. I tried out the free version of 7, but twitchy, unreliable snapping and inferencing and many more frequent slogs through Molasses-of-Zoom drove me nuts. Fast.

Otoh, the rasterized images from LO keep me from using it at all....

Eric

Gaieus

Well, from SU 6, you can send your document to LO 1, from SU 7.0 to LO2.0 and from SU 7.1 to LO 2.1.
Since LO 2.0, there is also a vector rendering mode of LO (together with editable line styles and weights) as well as dimensioning now in LO 2.1

I really do not want to convince anybody (I am not here to do it) but at least one could try.

bjanzen

I'm not aware of any issues. Just tried it on my Mac File->Insert from SketchUp 6 file, and it was fine. Of course if an asteroid comes crashing into the earth because of this, well, let's hope it gets yours and my lawyers and leaves us alone...

b

Richard

Kwist!!

Mate with the 2.1 updates to LO it is definately the tool of choice for developing floor planning.

Associative dimensions now allows for the moving of walls etc to ensure room sizes and spaces are maintained as one wishes..

Mate it's a Godsent!! Google Ontheball Developers Sent!

sketchupjockey

@thomthom said:

@richard said:

But and there is always a but! Take care! With multi page docs there is a dreadful bug that will delete pages and then permanently corrupt the file and backup! Now I'm tending not to work in multi page docs after I lost 30 designed floor plan layouts!

What triggers the bug?

I just lost multiple pages for a Construction Document set running LayOut V 3.0.3161 I am afraid to redo all of the work and pages only to have it happen again. I will post the error message but essentially this is what it says: "Missing Pages- Some pages in this document are missing, but LayOut may be able to recover the rest of the document. You may want to revert to a previous backup if something important has been lost.

The previous backup copy is also corrupt.

Am i goint to have to have a separate Layout folder for each page of my construction set? Layout Error message.jpg

Richard

Larry mate sorry to see that happen to you dude!

It is an issue that does come up every now and then with LO. And yes best to keep pages to a minimum. I lost 16 full home designs this way - luckily I had exported images of each page otherwise all the actual design work would have been lost (about 2 months worth).

Now I keep pretty much to single pages. Or at least save every now and then as a updated version.

bjanzen

sketchupjockey - send me the file in a PM, or I can try to talk you through trying to recover the file. LayOut files are zipped so unzip the file and look inside the pages/ directory. How many pagexxx.xml files are there? That's how many pages actually got zipped up in the file? Are you saving to a file server or was all work local?

b