Thanks for the "use a 2d program" tips. Helpful.

Parallel projection and standard views don't seem to help.

Here's an example. I'm laying out a picnic setting. Ground area done. Tree in the middle done. Table built. Trying to move the table towards the tree. Top view. I can select and move the table, but Sketchup assumes I wish to raise it off the ground and connect it to a branch of the tree.

I have NO wish to move it towards me (away from the ground) or away from me (towards the centre of the earth), I just want to move it north, south, east or west, so I can position it, rotate the model, look at it from different angles, move it again etc.

I could hide the tree, but then I can't see the tree.

This would be SO EASY if Sketchup could limit itself to working in the only two dimensions I can work in!

@dave r said:

practice
It does take orbiting sometimes
switch to Parallel Projection and choose an appropriate standard view
If you only want to move in the red green plane, switch to the top view
use the cursor keys to lock the direction and constrain it to only one axis direction.

@pbacot said:

Make a background face to define the plane

@cotty said:

ALWAYS use an inference for all movements
If necessary, you can lock and/or force a specific one
use two movements along the axes instead.

@ely862me said:

Don't forget to hold ALT while moving to break some of the endpoints or lines bondage
right click Unglue a component or a group that was created exactly over a face and is glued to it

OR... OR... simply disable moving/drawing on the third axis??!!

Seems to me it would render all of these 'options' unnecessary, and make Sketchup far faster and more intuitive to use for beginners like me that don't have everything in their model totally organised and defined and positioned and labelled, and all their secret handshakes and keyboard tai chi moves memorized. I just want to take that thing there and move it to the left, not towards me. I'm using a 2-dimensional interface, so predictable 2-dimensional behaviour would be a big plus.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but after notching up many hours with Sketchup I STILL cannot seem to make it draw or move things along my desired axes without an awful lot of jumping around in the (least controllable) depth axis first.

It seems like it would be such a simple, even expected behaviour to simply assume that, because I'm working in 2 dimensions (screen, mouse) that I wish to work in the plane I am most perpendicular to. Just ignore whichever of the three axes is closest to front to back, unless I use some specific command to employ it.

Time and time again I rotate the view so that I have a pretty square view of the plane I want to work in, but Sketchup seems insistent on attaching things to the axis I can't see, or shifting an object off of the ground plane and into some random altitude - it's almost like Sketchup assumes the front-to-back axis is the one I most want to work in!

I know that there are all sorts of inference and shift controls that are supposed to control working axes, but I can't seem to figure them out at all and surely it shouldn't be so complicated.

Grrr...

Thanks John, that helped - looks like Sketchup doesn't really do it too well, but through searching I found the 'watermark' function which at least lets me print my contact info on a drawing.

Thanks again.

Sorry, I'm not even sure what the correct name is for this, so I can't even search for existing answers...

I can get Sketchup to print a view of a model, with dimensions, and it looks great.

But when I take the drawing to a fabricator, I'd like it to have my contact details, the name of the model, the drawing date - the sort of info you see in the table at the bottom of most technical drawings.

Can Sketchup be configured to display this info on prints?

Dave, you are absolutely right, I'm so sorry - I somehow missed the comma separated form you specified. That does exactly what I need - thank you kindly!

Thanks Dave, but that doesn't seem to work - if I grab a corner in the scale tool, for a start it is really hard to get it to 'stretch' in the right direction, and even when I do manage it, typing in (for example) "50mm" makes the whole component resize to something much much smaller than expected. It's almost like it is not recognising my input as mm, even though the model functions correctly (in mm) in every other way.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Hi everyone, new member here on what looks to be a brilliant forum!

I'm struggling to properly resize a component I imported from the warehouse.

I have modelled a trailer I intend to build, and I have imported a tail light that looks similar to the lights I plan to use - but the dimensions are wrong. I would like to simply resize the imported tail light to my dimensions, but I just can't seem to find a way to do it.

If I edit the component and use the grips of the scale tool, I can reshape the light to approximately the right proportions, but I can only see a multiplier, not actual dimensions (and entering "50mm" after the operation does something, but not what I expect). If I use the tape measure to resize a dimension, I can resize that dimension correctly, but all other dimensions then resize proportionally to the new dimension. This means that I can't get all 3 dimensions to hit specific values.

I really want to specify the 3 dimensions and have Sketchup 'distort' the component to fit. Is this possible?