The "Duh!" thread (aka the Doh! thread)

plot-paris

The only painful part of it is that you have to continuously hold down the shift key. It would be nice if Caps lock toggled the feature.

true, some sort of permanently locking a movement direction would be awesome at times (appart from locking it to the three main axes via the arrow keys)...

GoldenFrog

My DUH moment was when i realised there was an arc tool. Needles to say, that was my first day using SU. Hehe...My other one was when i learned about the follow me tool. Great DUH there! But, I've greatly improved since then

xrok1

@plot-paris said:

@gruff said:

The only painful part of it is that you have to continuously hold down the shift key. It would be nice if Caps lock toggled the feature.

true, some sort of permanently locking a movement direction would be awesome at times (appart from locking it to the three main axes via the arrow keys)...

Wish granted!

my duh moment just happened, i forgot to attached the jpg to this post the first time.

Gruff

@unknownuser said:

Capture.JPG[/attachment:1ouv5aid]

I do not see that dialog anywhere in my 7.1 std SketchUp.
Is that a Pro feature?

Ecuadorian

@gruff said:

I do not see that dialog anywhere in my 7.1 std SketchUp.
Is that a Pro feature?

You set up that in Windows, not in SketchUp, in "Accesibility" options in the Control Panel of XP. But I'm not sure about its usefulness in SU.

pilou

Wanted to now all plugs by Tig
Just today thinking to use the search Advanced engine
[PLUGIN] + TIG + Title ONLY + Ruby Discussion
= 3 pages of true gem ! Something like 75 brains storming
Of course you can make that for any other Ruby Gurus: TBD, Fredo6, Chris Fullmer, Didier Bur, Jim Foltz, Thomthom, Matt666, Whaat, Wikii, Gohch, CPhillips, Kyrill2008, Morisdov, AdamB, Todd Burch, Rick Wilson... sorry for the forgotten
I must find an another tricky method for find all Gurus
(and will be added at the list as soon as)

xrok1

@ecuadorian said:

@gruff said:

I do not see that dialog anywhere in my 7.1 std SketchUp.
Is that a Pro feature?

You set up that in Windows, not in SketchUp, in "Accesibility" options in the Control Panel of XP. But I'm not sure about its usefulness in SU.

you can lock the shift key for inferencing, which is what Gruff wished for

jeff hammond

@gruff said:

When viewing a model in XRay mode.

If you hold down shift whilst using the 2D drawing tools the new 2D geometry is forced onto the nearest face (closest to your eye.). Even snap points to (Behind) geometry is projected to the nearest face.

good one!
i didn't know that

Gruff

New Duh. (Sort of)

Select a face then right mouse and select Align Axis. (Let's call it AA2F) We've all seen it but did you know that what it creates depends on how your face happens to be oriented to the screen?

In a nut shell AA2F aligns the Axis to the lower left most edge.

Draw a hexagonal face. Choose the top view and use AA2F. Rotate the view of the hexagon
reselect AA2F. Your Axis will shift position around the hexagon vertices.

This can actually be used to your advantage when dealing with a face that has different features dependent on different edges. As a case in point see the attached Guitar head where I needed to align and create features parallel to either outside edge as well as the center line of the whole thing.

Guitar Neck Test

olishea

I've only just realized you can click alt/ctrl when push/pulling.......duh!

Align

@thomthom said:

A more recent Duh I had:

Being able to select only a few edges from a face and offset them instead of the whole face.

how do you do this?

thomthom

Select the edges and and activate offset...

EscapeArtist

@plot-paris said:

wow, cool. didn't know about that eihter. but what I would even more like to see is a push/pull like this:
[attachment=0:37plearv]strange_pushpull.jpg[/attachment:37plearv]

It exists! Here: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=23341

Ecuadorian

I was working in a "mysterious" file that did not allow me to pushpull anything, and I was about to post the mysterious file here. After checking, "Snap to length" was set to a very high value. Duh!

Chris Fullmer

I just found one for me tonight. I change the model axis pretty often when I work. But I never noticed that you can activate the axis tool (or change axis inside of a component tool) and click twice somewhere and it will move the axis to that point without changing its orientation. Normally I would have clicked once, then lined up the the axes and click and line up and click. So a double click (not too fast though!) is much faster for moving the axis.

Chris

pilou

Select an element (lines, surface)
Open Entity Info yes
Then when you select with Shift , Shift + Ctrl or Ctrl
all surfaces or length lines are added , subbstracted, modified, visible and updated in the Entity info!

Gaieus

OK, this is a very painful duh:

My system seemed to crash and I could not even start windows in safe mode (Mac users, don't sneer, please) so I decided to at least try to repair my system. It didn't allow me as whatever imaginable I entered, it didn't accept it as the password of the system admin.

So I reinstalled (I have a recent backup of my documents at least). Then I realised that I didn1t even have a password and should have just hit Enter without entering any password.

So basically this is what I wasted my Sunday for. I have a deadline tomorrow.

plot-paris

oh, that is a really bad one, Gaieus! I am not sure if I should burst with laughter , feel terribly sorry for you or just blush with embarassment, because that could just as well have happened to me

plot-paris

another one. after importing a messy 3Ds model and cleaning it up with Thomthoms cleanup-script (thanks again, thom), I started entering every single one of the over 1500 groups/components, to smooth their surfaces.

then I just discovered, that you can apply the smoothing to groups/components, without entering them. so you can select all the groups at once and only have to do the proces once! (doesn't work with nested groups though)

thomthom

@plot-paris said:

then I just discovered, that you can apply the smoothing to groups/components, without entering them. so you can select all the groups at once and only have to do the proces once! (doesn't work with nested groups though)

I recently discovered that as well!
In regards to CleanUp - it does have a function to smooth the geometry it cleans up. If you use CleanUp Entire Model you have a field "Smooth Edges by Angle".