Overlays in LO - how to do?

unearthed

I want to do a simple drawing in LO, with buildings and landscape over an aerial (but my aerial is also my terrain - I dont see the point of having an aerial AND a terrain). But to show buildings etc I need edges on, but then my terrain appears overly complex - is there a way to have edges on in one set of objects and off in another set within the same scene?

I tried overlaying two scenes, one with edges on, the other with edges off, but the upper white area of the image blocked the one underneath -is there a way to do overlays in LO that gets around this?

Dave R

It would be a lot easier to give you advice if we could see what you are trying to do.

There isn't anyway in LO to set one viewport to have transparency so that you can see the viewport below. You could perhaps apply a translucent material in SU to the entities in the upper viewport or maybe it would work to use Wireframe for that view? If those ideas don't work, you'll probably want to export the scenes as images and combine them in an image editor and insert the resulting image into LO. Of course you'll lose the ability to directly update the views but it'll give you the control you need to create the appearance you're after.

unearthed

Yeah, well thanks Dave - while I was doing a rough to show you I (more or less) worked out how to do it. What I wanted to do was overlay as shown
gg.chk.JPG
finally got it - only sort of though as my shadows disappeared.

The trick was the raster/vector tickbox in Tray>Sketchup Model: set
it to vector for your vector objects to overlay, and it'll drop the default background
out and you get your overlay. BUT it's all very fiddly and LO is sloooow doing it.

With the scenes I found the best way was to get the underlay in, scale it etc, then copy it and use Tray>SU model>View>Scenes dropdown to change the copy to the overlay scene.

Also I found that if Rendered Auto was off then the underlay won't update.

Dave R

Ah yes, I didn't understand from your first post that you had the default background visible in the overlay nor that your "terrain" was an image from Google Maps. I was thinking you wanted some of the model to be transparent or translucent. It does appear that you've got it, though. That's good.