Construction lines of fixed length - how to draw?

thomthom

Hi Jim

Use Jim's Construction Line Tool: http://sketchuptips.blogspot.com/2008/02/plugin-construction-line-tool.html
Gives you full control over drawing construction lines.

david.

You should be able to do this with the Tape Measure tool by just dragging with the left mouse button (ie, holding the button down while moving the mouse). Works for me, no plugins required.

Rich O Brien

You'll get a cline with cpoint using David's method when you hold and drag from an endpoint.

You'll get an infinite line if you drag from an edge.

fredo6

@jim4366 said:

Okay suppose I'd like to show rotation axes on odd angles as below. With 3 clines, one each from cpoint to each corner of the triangle. No lines are on any standard axis or plane. The tape measure tool only gives me infinite lenth clines in this case. Which looks messy.
But, elsewhere, this guy Taffgoch does it. How does he do it?
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Jim,

Just in case this is useful, The Line tool of ToolsOnSurface includes

the possibility to draw plain lines and construction lines
a protractor (and VCB input) to fix angle for next segment
you can type the length of segments in VCB
There is a lock direction inference mechanism (incl. perpendicular and 45 deg.)
if you double click when drawing the subsequent segment, they are given the same length at the previous line
Also, ToolsOnSurface works with NO surface

Fredo

LEGOsketcher

Hi,

I've installed Jim's Draw Construction Lines plugin. I works fine but I can't type any values in the VCB - is this a bug with the newer SketchUp versions? I'm using the latest 8 pro on a 64bit Windows system.

cheers, LEGOsketcher

thomthom

Works fine for me SU8M4, Win7 64bit.
Are you sure that a tool-window does not steal the focus, like the material-window?

Jean Lemire

Hi Jim, hi folks.

Why not use ordinary edges that could be colored or textured or even made as dashed lines. This last operation can be done natively but it may prove a waste of time. There are plugins to create dashed lines.

Just ideas.

Jean Lemire

Hi Jim, hi folks.

I forgot to write in my previous post that edges are more robust than guide lines (finite lenght or infinite length and guide points. They do dont vanish when one choose to delete all guides.

Also, guides or edges they can be put on a layer whose visibility can be controled and thus can be hidden to avoid to much clutter.

Just ideas.

thomthom

But if you make a dotted line with real edges you end up with the inference engine snapping to each of the tiny edge segments. Can quickly become noisy.