Hi Dave,

Thanks for your reply.

No, all of the viewports I'm trying to dimension are set to parallel projection.

Hello,

I've been using Layout now for a few months and thought I was getting pretty good at it (with the help of the feedback from those of you on this forum). But recently, I've run into problems with controlling the scale of the dimension. I thought that I could toggle between auto scale or choose a scale in the dimension box. I know that if I'm using a sketchup model in a viewport, I need to make sure that the scale is set appropriately as well. Lately I've been trying to dimension sketchup models in a viewport and the auto scale button is grayed out and the dimension scale reads "not scaled". Sometimes, I get the right dimension. But most often, I get something totally wacky. I've tried to copy styles from a dimension that "works" (unsuccessful). I've tried updating the model reference, and resetting the viewport scale. No luck. I've tried many iterations and sometimes it works, so I move onto the next dimension, but if I could figure out why the auto-scale button is graying out, that would probably allow me to fix it for good. Just don't know why Layout would do such a thing to a dimension.

Thanks for your help!

Frank.

Hello,

I've been having some unfortunate experiences with importing Excel into my Layout drawings. I like to use spreadsheets, especially for things like structural calculations, but on several occasions, the import would get all scrambled, and then I tried to re-size it, the characters would collapse into a very tiny mess of characters, and then I would get a bug splat shortly thereafter. This last time, I noticed that I had some inconsistencies in my font styles and sizes within the imported data. Once I corrected that, everything worked great. And, although this doesn't seem to cause a bug splat, I found that merged cells don't import very well either.

So, two lessons learned: (1) Don't try to import a bunch of mongrel fonts (I hate inconsistent fonts anyway, so maybe this "helps" me) and (2) don't try to import merged cells.

Hope this is helpful.

Frank Borik

Auto Scale was the answer. I KNEW it was probably a simple setting, but just didn't know where to look.

Many thanks!!

Frank

Hello,

I've run into a problem that I can't seem to solve with Layout dimensions. I'm making a floor plan for an addition and when I start to dimension the Sketchup model in Layout, all of the dimensions are doubled. I checked the source Sketchup model, and the dimensioning there is correct. I also set my scale to 1/4" = 1', but I don't know if that has anything to do with the problem. I've never had this problem in several previous Layout drawings, so I'm guessing it's some sort of setting that I messed up somewhere. However, I am at a loss and at what to do next and I'm at all stop with my drawing. Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

Thanks!

Frank.

Hello,

I've been desperately trying to calculate the energy needs of my home, specifically trying to figure out cooling loads (and hence, how big of an A/C unit to get). Living in California, I'm going to have to comply with CA Title 24 energy requirements, and it turns out that they have a pretty good program to model the thermodynamic performance of a building. Upon further research, I found that their model was based on models developed by the US DOE, and that they had a SketchUp plug-in called "Open Studio". I've installed the plug-in, and I've skimmed through the tutorial, and it appears to be exactly (or more than) what I was looking for.

So, two questions:

1. Does anybody have any experience in using this plug-in? I'm interested in any tricks or problems that you may have run into. Search of the discussion boards on this forum showed some frustration with making it work with Macs (I have a PC), and then some older posts which refer to older software versions.

2. Is there an easy way to apply the plug-in to an existing model? I've done quite a bit of work putting a remodeling design of my house into a sketchup model for the purposes of making plans for the required building permits. It would be great if I could figure out how to do an energy analysis based on the work I've already done. However, the directions in the Open Studio plug-in seem to indicate that you have to start from scratch. Probably not too big of a deal because all I have to do is to copy components into the new Open Studio model. Just wondering if there was a way to impose Open Studio energy calculations directly within my existing model.

Thanks for any help or advice you may have.

Frank

Hi Jack,

I'm very happy with a custom-built computer I got from a company called JNCS. They're out of Syracuse, NY, and they gave me the most bang for the buck. The guys on this Sketchup forum were instrumental in setting up a good system. Here is the link for the thread:

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=50941

Here is the link to the JNCS website:

http://www.jncs.com/index2.php

They're a helpful bunch and a small business, so you'll get a lot of personal attention on how to customize your system.

Hope this helps!

Frank

Wow, thanks Philip! I learned a lot from your example. First, component wrapping comes BEFORE axis changing. Next I really didn't understand how to propagate a variable through nested components. The trick is parent! I know what the ! means, but I was having trouble figuring out how to make a reference within the nested components that made sense. I probably could have constructed something, but your solution is much more streamlined (and intuitive). Finally, I had not thought about using a logical sequence to drive the values of the variables. In hindsight, the solution is pretty straightforward, but for the life of me I couldn't figure it out. All in all, pretty clever!

Thanks, again, for your extremely helpful post. I'm off and fixing a number of other DCs that I made that have similar issues.

Frank.

Hello,

I'm trying to animate a set of fold-up stairs for an attic. The first problem that I wanted to overcome was having to animate the articulated nature of the stairs without having to select each nested component. I looked at the DC discussion site and noticed a similar topic posted on 30 August, but because nobody responded to this post, I figured I may have better luck in the general discussion group.

At any rate, my problems worsened. I order to place the entire component into my main model, I had to copy and paste it from my working file, and rotate it by 90 degrees. Bad move. I now started to see some very unexpected behavior. The first thing that the component did when I tried to animate it was to reorient itself to the original axis. Then, it wouldn't unfold. Each time I clicked the component to animate, it just "bounced" back to its original position. I tried to go back to my working file, deleted all the animation, rotated the component to align to the main house model axis, reset all of the component axes to align with the baseline axis (changing X to Y), and then reconstructing the DC animations. So, I solved the mysterious problem of the first DC "reorienting" itself, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why these components "bounce". I've included two files. One in which I have the behavior I expected, and one that "bounces". My understanding of how axes interacted with DCs was that the axis of the component determined the behavior of the DC that was embedded in that component and that parent or children component axes had no effect. I'm now not so sure.

So, two things that I need help with: (1) Why don't these DC's animate (i.e., "bounce" back and stay in the same state) and (2) is there a way to make an articulated DC that unfolds/folds nicely with one (or several) clicks and does not require a deep dive into nested components?

Thanks for your advice and help.

Frank.

This one works, kind of....

This one doesn't work at all...

Hi Rich,

The drag-and-drop works very well. Didn't think of that. I still need to double click on the import, but after I do that, it lines right up.

Not sure why the wordpad and re-save into .rtf cleared things up. I tried a similar thing thinking that there was something going on with Word 2013 (which is what I used to develop the .rtf). Similar problems, although you wouldn't think .rtf would care where it came from (I thought it was a standard format).

No matter. I'm up and running and I'm smarter about how to use the Layout insert function. Or at least smart enough to be dangerous!

Thanks for your help!

Thanks, Rich. That worked great, and I now know how to better upload to the discussion group.

In the meantime, I was able to get the import to work (somewhat). What I did was double click the text to open it up, and Layout selected it all and realigned it. I had to mess around with some unwanted text wrapping, but after some effort, I think I have some work-arounds in place. At least I'm getting what I want into the layout document. Still, if I try to expand the selection too much, I get a bug splat. Third one today!

Thanks!

TOC.zip

Hello,

I've been trying to work with some RTF imports from MS Word into Layout and I'm having a tough time. I go to "insert", select .rtf, and then select the file I'm trying to import. I get data into Layout, but it is always messed up (e.g., tables get jumbled) and sometimes not all of the text appears. Twice, when I tried to expand the box in Layout, all of the text contracted into a very small, unrecognizable blob, and then, boom, I had a bug splat. It happened twice during this session with the same symptoms.

So, does anybody know of a "trick" that allows me to reliably import text into layout (preferable in a tabular form). I had some reasonable luck copying and pasting from Excel on another project, but my understanding was that .rtf was the way to go. In my case, it doesn't work very well. I'm wondering if merged cells have anything to do with it? (Just a shot in the dark.)

I would have attached a copy of the .rtf file I'm trying to import, but the discussion group does not allow uploads with an .rtf extension (or .docx or .doc for that matter). As an aside, is there a list of allowable file extensions for uploading to this site?

Thanks!

Frank Borik

I'm pretty sure it's on it's own. The way I did the troubleshooting was to open up a new model with the outliner open and see if the "group" appeared. I would then disable a plug in, close without saving, and then open a new blank model again to see if the group reappeared. I did this methodically for each plug in that I have and noted the results. I then did it backward (i.e., reenabling each plug-in) using the same routine. When I was satisfied that I had found the plug-in causing the group to appear, I then disabled all plugins except the simple loft, and verified that it, alone, was causing the group to appear.

Believe me, this is a nothing. The group that appears has no effect on any model or sketchup process whatsoever. It is merely something that I noticed and was simply curious.

HTH!

Frank.

CLF Simple Loft appears to be the culprit. I've concluded this after iteratively disabling my installed plug-ins. When this one is disabled, no more phantom groups!

Thanks, Dave and Rich, for your response. To answer Rich's question -- I'm using a default template (Product Design and Woodworking, Unit: Inches). I'll bet it is a plug-in, though. No worries because, as Dave pointed out, it's totally benign.

Thanks, again, for your help!

Hello,

Ever since upgrading to SU 2013, I've noticed that a phantom group always appears in the model (in the outliner). I've seen this happen with both new models from scratch, as well as models previously made in SU 8. They seem benign, and I usually delete them, but sometimes they come back, so I've pretty much stopped worrying about them. They seem to have zero impact on the models themselves, so at this point I'm asking the question simply out of curiosity.

Thanks!

Frank.

Hello Everyone,

All of your advice was spot on. Dave, the idea of selecting a face normal to my point of view and then selecting "align view" worked excellent for the elevation scenes. But because all faces are "normal" when looking in plan view, I used Gerrit's idea doing a rough alignment with the orbit tool, and then context clicking on one of the axes and "aligning view". Worked great. And... I DID remember to save those scenes! I will definitely check out the extended views plug-in, although what I learned about the "align view" option was extremely helpful.

I still wonder why the standard views won't work for me. Even when I re-align the drawing axis, going to the standard view seems to "reset" it (it works OK however when I try to edit all the sub components). I tried reorienting the north arrow, but that only made the sun shine incorrectly on the model. However, I have things set up the way I want them now to move forward with the design, so at this point the question borders on the rhetorical.

Thanks, again, for all of your help!

Frank

Hello,

I recently tried my hand at geo-locating and extracting a terrain contour from Google Earth. On my first attempt (many months ago), I was frustrated because the drawing axis got aligned with the Google Earth axis, but recently, I figured out that I could change the drawing axis. So things went very well, and I placed my house structure in the model and went about detailing the exterior landscape. But when I tried to generate standard elevation projections using the standard camera views, all I got were views aligned with the original (non-aligned-with-Google) axis. Plus, I saw the drawing axis jump back to the original location when I used my pre-arranged elevation scenes (based on the standard camera views). Is there something I'm missing? If not, then is there some kind of work-around so I can get dead-on elevation projections without having to approximate with the orbit tool? I tried saving, but nothing seems to have worked for me.

Thanks for your help!

Frank.

Dave,

I'll send you a file that's only 8.1 MB. I have another that's 4.4 MB (just over the message board limit), but it's not as cool.

Thanks!

Hi Dave,

Must be electron magic. It has happened to me on several occasions on two separate models. It doesn't happen every time, but often enough to be quite annoying. I found that the autosave feature was very useful in these instances.

I'll keep an eye on it, and I'll start reporting this to the Sketchup folks.

Thanks for your help!