I tried TIG's "Height above datum", which is great, but the text box added is always semi-submerged below the surface and hard to read. I can move/rescale the leader for the text to be visible, but new datums added are submerged again, which is not practical.

Do anyone have recommendation for a way to display my SketchUp models to clients?
Ideally with these features:

• Nicer light/shadow (Ambient Occlusion, soft shadows etc)
• Full screen display
• 1st person navigation (e.g. WASD/mouse like FPS shooter games)
• Spacemouse compatible flying
• Otherwise compatible with SketchUp files (textures, alpha masks etc)

I work on a city plan with a lot of small buildings, each a sub-group or component.
They all have axes that match world coordinates orientation, but I would like them to have axes that match their own rotation. Entering each group and changing axis based on a corner takes a lot of time, does anyone know of a plugin that does this faster?

Do I understand correctly that this technique lets me transfer SketchUcation plugin store plugins in a single bundle, but not any from the Extension Warehouse? For the latter, I take it I have to install each of my 20 plugins individually when migrating from SketchUp 2020 to SketchUp 2021?

I spend a lot of time making a plane at level 0, multiplying it up X number of times by 1 meter, intersecting then deleting them as soon as the model is altered. A plugin that generates iso lines for any group/component with one or two clicks would be a life saver. Does anyone know of such plugins?

Thank you!

Awesome! Thank you both so much.

Very good tip, thank you! Unfortunately, at least in the SketchUcation plugin store, it says
"Note: Not compatible with SketchUp 2021 or newer". We just upgraded to 2021. Are you using an older version og SketchUp or am I missing something?

I often need to reduce triangulation on meshes selectively, eg. merging two points together. This often works, but as shown in the gif below, it often bugs out and refuses to snap for some reason. Ideally I should be able to click on two points and have them instantly merge together (alternatively by clicking on the vertex connecting them), using as few click as possible as I do this type of cleaning a lot.

https://i.imgur.com/qtZxbPZ.gif

Any plugins or other tricks to recommend?

Does it work real-time (I can move objects in SketchUp and immediately see them move in Enscape) and let me use light sources such as spot lights through SketchUp? If not, it doesn't solve the issue I have with Lumion, which is that I have to use Lumion to place light sources.

I'm currently using Lumion for quick renderings, which is realistic enough but I would prefer to do lighting in SketchUp so I can test various options easily - especially since I've started using VR to place out components (such as light sources) and exporting lights to Lumion is slow.

I understand that LightUp and Kubity both let me do instant real time rendering inside SketchUp. Does anyone have recommendations/experiences with a simple, quick, easy-to-use extensions with somewhat realistic results that can be used e.g. for planning interior and exterior lighting?

I'm trying to UV map bark onto a tre. It is important that the direction of the mark matches the direction of the branch.

Native Sketchup only lets me map straight up/down, with works with a straight trunks but looks ridiculous for branches.

• SketchUV tube map is ideal, but unfortunately only works with quad mesh.
• Cylindrical map works in some situations (B) but is a lot of work and works only with straight branches.
• Turning a branch into a group changing axis direction to match branch works (c) but is tricky to pull off and the correctly applied UV disappears if i explode the branch group.

Any clever ideas to do this more efficiently? (I'm applying bark to many dozens of tree models)

Thank you pbacot, that was exactly what I needed! Can't believe I haven't come across this before.

Thank you. However I was looking for a video series covering all the basics, not jumping into advanced/plugin stuff.
Also I would prefer to avoid paid videos as there are tons of great, free videos on Youtube. The problem was sorting through the best ones. I was hoping someone had done this for their office.

In nay case, I've landed on 2-3 video series which seem great, in case anyone else is trying to find the same for basic training - (especially to help improve self-taught users who struggle with layers, axis locking, useful shortcuts etc)

Basics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J6rOkDqoOk&list=PLwZH6ZK5t-XgFVzuqZxmmDTNV_kgFsF4w&index=1
Another covering the basics. However some repetition of material and slightly different perspective is probably healthy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGdLwE4Ue-c&list=PLMK2xMz5H5ZvY28MrKdFPmNJbODwLgSqj&index=1

Bit more advanced and looking primarily at archviz (especially towards the end)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg5ZLblFcpk&list=PL-oTylNdhHop0HdsCeYw0a1reLMpA_XTk&index=1

I am proficient in SketchUp, but was tasked with training some of my colleagues (landscape architects).

I will teach them myself all the specifics of advanced plugins and file conversion etc, but would prefer to just send a link to some video playlist covering "best practice", especially the habits/tricks that are hard to discover by playing around as my colleagues are self-taught (low proficiency). I can't find the old (official?) Google SketchUp tutorials and those are probably low-res/somewhat outdated now.

Most importantly:

• axis, planes and axis/plane locking
• Groups/components
• Layers and geometry vs group/component
• Switching to top view/parallell, saving scenes, FOV etc
• shortcuts and modifier keys to copy/paste/paste in place/array etc
• Sandbox tool
• Perhaps a tutorial using all of these tools for some model, encouraging the viewer to follow her steps.

Basics such as the default tools etc are also good to have covered but those are less important/generally easy for self-taught users to understand.
It's very easy to find long lists of videos on this forum, but these lists to be way too long, I was hoping to avoid going through all of that to find the best/most relevant 2% as I am sure others already have. What is your go-to "basics/best practice" playlist? (total run-time between 1 and 10 hours)

A crowd is only an example to explain what I mean by facing the same point (as opposed to the same direction). Face me will not work in any of the cases where I've needed this function, among other reasons because I want them to always face this point independently of camera position.

I have tried both of these, and neither can rotate multiple objects simultaneously towards/away from the same point. Again, think of a large crowd all looking at the same stage. What these plugins do is rotate objects a fixed amount (or randomly).

I'd like to rotate multiple components around their axis towards (or away from) the same point. for example, to have a large crowd of 3D people all look towards the same stage.
Another example is to have 5 different chairs around a round table all face towards the table, or to make distant 2D trees all face the model origin (since "face me" components placed in SketchUp won't work in Lumion).

This operation can be performed in Lumion by pressing "K" while rotating, all objects will now have the X (or Y) axis face towards the mouse coordinates.

I'd like to stress that I don't want to rotate components one at the time, nor towards the same general direction, but towards the same point. (CFT plugin doesn't achieve this)
I've needed this a bunch of times, so I'd be surprised if no one has made an extension/plugin for this. Thanks!!

I have a component, e.g. a tree model with sub-component (branches) and sub-sub-components (twigs).

I save the tree component as several separate file and alter some details, e.g. bark and leaf texture.

If I import the various trees into the same file, then all revert to looking the same. Renaming components does not help, only exploding. However this is very impractical due to all the nested sub-components.

Any tricks or plugins to make all the components in an imported file unique?
(e.g.: exporting as a different filetype, saving as an older version of SketchUp, auto-redefine all component ID, delete local component library etc)
Also, how does SketchUp keep track of component "ID" to decide that two different components from different files are actually the same (even when they look different)?

Experienced SU user here, with a very annoying bug since last week. Tools such as move and push-pull suddenly stop working after 5-10 minutes. Push-pull appears to work, but then "lets go" before extrusion is complete. Move tool seems to snap but then object refuses to move at all.

Perhaps this is related to GPU? I tried to update graphics driver, nothing changed. I hope I don't need to uninstall as I have a million plugins installed, including some with limited numbers of installs per license (e.g. Artisan).

"fast feedback" feature somehow seems to make it worse.
No new plugins installed since this started happening.

Any idea what could be the problem or what could fix it?

Specs:
Lenovo Thinkpad with Quadro p5000
i7-7820HQ @ 2.9Ghz
64 GB RAM

I'm trying to make a basin for a water feature. I've defined an area which I want lowered a bit. However, when I lower it, the triangulation becomes really weird as shown below. This can be fixed by adding a bunch of lines manually as shown. Any way to achieve this automatically?