Standard View Behavior Changed in SU 2022
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This is very frustrating. While I can see the utility of orienting the top view to the axis, the north up axis is all I ever use for top view and now it is very problematic to change it back. This was implemented poorly. The old way should have been left as an option.
So how do I recreate the original north up axis? I know there are plugins to show north up. but I would like to know how to easily do this with SU's native tools. I'm on Pro Subscription Version 22.0.353, Mac.
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@dave r said:
Axis orientation can be a scene property if you have it set to be saved so you can change it for other scenes as needed.
This doesn't help if you change the axis and then update a scene unwittingly/accidentally. There is no way to easily change the top view back to the original axis if the axis was changed and you don't have another scene with the original axis.
I smell plugin as the solution, but I hate plugins for things that should be native, especially when it was native for many, many years.
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@szumlanski said:
There is no way to easily change the top view back to the original axis if the axis was changed and you don't have another scene with the original axis.
What's wrong with right clicking on an axis line and selecting Reset? That's been a native thing for more than 20 years. It's available as far back as SU 3.1, anyway.
You can update one or more scenes so their camera orientations match an existing scene while leaving their axes screwed if you want to do that.
@szumlanski said:
I smell plugin as the solution, but I hate plugins for things that should be native, especially when it was native for many, many years.
There's no reason you can't continue creating scenes with the same model orientation you've been used to. It sounds like you are looking for a plugin to protect you from yourself. There are already native tools to do that.
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@dave r said:
What's wrong with right clicking on an axis line and selecting Reset? That's been a native thing for more than 20 years. It's available as far back as SU 3.1, anyway.
In all my years of using Sketchup, I never knew there was a right click context menu for the Axis. Thank you, Dave, for pointing that out! The reset option solves my issue.
That said, if you could align the view to the axis using the context menu all along, I don't see the point of changing the behavior of the top standard view button and menu item. Old habits die hard for longtime users and it seems unnecessary for this change to have occurred. They just as easily could have added a standard align view, and not changed the top view behavior.
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You've always been able to align the camera with off-axis geometry even in the plan view. Apparently there were enough users who couldn't figure it out, though, and made feature requests, and the feature was added.
Poor software developers. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
If you actually learn to use the feature you might find it useful.
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@dave r said:
If you actually learn to use the feature you might find it useful.
If they actually made it intuitive I would have known about the feature. Implementing the change in this way made it even less intuitive IMO.
Regardless, I'm happy it's there and again I thank you for the help.
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FWIW, it is described in the Release Notes.
@unknownuser said:
Standard Views respect model axes
In previous versions of SketchUp, Standard View commands -- Top, Front, Right... -- did not respect customized model axes. So, you would need to use the Align View command to produce camera views for properly aligned elevation and section views. Now, the Standard Views will behave as expected to produce properly aligned views to customized axes. One other small change: the Align View command is now accessible in the Context Menu, even if other entities (like edges or objects) are also in the selection set.There's some other good stuff that might not have made it on your radar. Some interesting features added in SU2021, too, like a Stamp feature for Move/Copy.
Good luck with it.
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@dave r said:
FWIW, it is described in the Release Notes.
The crazy thing is I usually read the release notes religiously before installing an update, but I missed this one feature. I did see the lasso tool, which I think is a great addition.
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Did you catch the thing about the Tag tool?
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@dave r said:
Did you catch the thing about the Tag tool?
I did, but I have not found much use for it yet. But my models are typically not very complex. The way I use Sketchup is more reliant on repetitive tasks and a workflow based on muscle memory to speed the task of doing solar panel layouts on existing residences brought into 3D space from flat imagery. That's why the axis issue was such a hassle for me. A decade of doing things the same way is hard to change.
I currently have over 6,000 Sketchup models created using the same repetitive process (except for the last infuriating change with the Add Location window that added at least 6 keypresses or clicks to my prior workflow). These changes have real implications for people. Software engineers sometimes don't consider how changes might affect users. But on balance, the continued development of SU and the addition of features over the years has been great.
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