They display randomly. Some look good, some are way small, some are front, ISO, side, top, views, and so on. I tried the custom thumbnail thing. I selected a component and context-clicked to set a thumbnail. It went to a folder the component wasn't in. The same goes for other components. It kept on going to the wrong folder.

Thanks everyone. I especially like the protractor tool idea. Still don't know why inference sometimes doesn't work (on an actual circle), alas.

This happens to me intermittently but often enough to be a real irritant. I can't find the center of a circle or an arc. Auto inference doesn't work and a selection of extensions does not seem to work either. I'm not sure if this is due to my particular setup or not.PVC/ABS 4" to 2" Reducer

Sketchup pro 2021

Jim, This is a fantastic! Thanks.
Dave, Thanks for the help.

Same error as Bruce. I did as suggested for Bruce: removed files in the plugin folder, then renamed zip to rbz, installed, exited, restarted,and got the same error. I see grayscale in the Plugins Manager, but not a sign of it in Tools, Extensions, or context menu.

Excited to find this on Smustard, but it's not working for me on SU Pro 2016. It errors on loading. Me or has it not been updated?

Wow!Fantastic. Sometimes I can't see the birds for the trees. Thanks

I have dimensioning problems, but only when using a particular document template. All other templates used to create a new LO file seem to dimension fine. I've gone through the template and deleted everything, then purged all external file links in document setup. Basically I've got a blank template--still new files created with it do not dimension properly. Attached is a png of a 20'x40' rectangle top view, parallel projection, dimensioned in both SU and LO. I've also attached the offending layout file. Can anyone duplicate this behavior?

Bad Template

I found this link on how to align pattern fills in LO: http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000027. It doesn't quite work as you'd expect though. Unlike the texture:position feature in SU where you move the texture to align it over a face, here you have to move the shape over the pattern-fill to align it.

I wanted the batt-insulation hatch to fill the stud bay from left to right.

1. I drew a rectangle and filled it with the pattern
2. I scaled the pattern
3. I traced over my viewport to make a shape the size of the stud bay
4. I brought the shape forward then laid it over the first rectangle so the pattern was aligned properly
5. I applied the fill to the shape. The applied pattern follows the alignment of the fill in the first rectangle.
6. I moved the stud bay shape back into it's original position with the fill aligned properly.

I sure wish there was an easier way to get decent hatches in LO.

This whole hatching thing in SU and LO is driving me crazy. Looking at other posts I can see that I'm not the first or only one.

Using a tileable hatch graphic imported as a material looks great in SU, but when the scene is brought into LO at 1/4" = 1', the hatch is distorted and fuzzy (even when exported as a pdf). At 1:1 it looks okay--not great, but acceptable. The hatch gets progressively fuzzier the smaller the scale. It looks like this approach is a bust. I know Jolran's been working on a vector based plugin, Hatchfaces, for some time, but it looks like he's stalled. Perhaps the inclusion of pattern-fills in LO has stolen his fire for the project. If so, too bad. It was promising.

The LO pattern-fill an an attribute of the Shape Style is welcome but cumbersome as you have to redraw the shapes you want to fill with the line tool. I tried to explode a viewport (from vector mode) then fill the resulting shapes, but I get strange results. The resulting intersecting lines don't seem to always create a shape that you can apply a fill to. My guess is that the line tool creates a continuous polyline that defines a fillable shape, while exploding a viewport sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.

It appears that the LO pattern-fill is the only game in town that will deliver clean hatches. I created a batt-insulation graphic and imported it into LO. It displays nicely except it's not aligned properly. I don't see a way to position the hatch as you can with textures in SU.

Any thoughts on any of this?

That's interesting, it's now working. Go figure.

Thx

Can't get the 2D Line Style tool to display a settings dialog in SU Pro 2015. I removed all 2D folders and plugins then reinstalled - same thing.

Thanks for the updates Tig. I was missing Align 3D.

SU Pro 2014 v.14.0.4900
Win8, NVidia GT 750M, driver version 335.23
OpenGL #63, hardware acceleration on, fast feedback on, max texture size off

SU becomes unresponsive when shifting to x ray mode in a moderate size model while in hidden line style-mode. Haven't checked other modes. I had to use task manager to kill SU about 4-times so far. If I open the component and hide all else, then go to x ray mode it seems to work okay.

Okay, a glimmer of understanding is starting to shine into my often thick skull. A transparent background does not mean transparent faces. If I want to stack viewports so that I can see through the topmost faces onto a viewport below, on the topmost scene I have to either use wireframe or x-ray style-modes, apply a transparent material to the components, or delete the intervening faces altogether.

In my screenshots the grid lines were visible because the background was in fact transparent. Ticking the background box on the LO SketchUp Model inspector Styles tab enables the background and obscures the grid lines underneath.

Thanks very much for helping me understand.

Background transparency with stacked viewports in LO remains confusing to me.

Sketchup help states that model backgrounds will be transparent in Layout if the model's background is white. Gaieus says, "It should also be transparent with raster or hybrid," meaning, I assume, that all rendering methods should allow transparent backgrounds assuming that the LO document reference has been updated after the SU model scene and style have been setup correctly, and the model has been saved.

This isn't my experience. Let me clarify. I've attached a test SU model and LO file:

The model contains two components: a rectangle with horizontal lines named Horizontal, and a rectangle with vertical lines named Vertical. There are two scenes named Horizontal and Vertical displaying their respective rectangles.

The LO file contains two stacked viewports, one for each scene. Both viewports are on the same layer. I brought the Horizontal viewport to the front and ran thru the various permutations of the SU style-modes and the LO render-modes. I did this once where the Horizontal component material was the default, and once where the material was transparent white. I ran through each combination twice to confirm the results. I performed the tests with hardware acceleration off to eliminate the graphics card as a potential problem.

Conclusions:
Without making the component material transparent I can only get viewport background transparency using either the wire-frame or hidden-line style-modes. Hidden-line mode only works with vector rendering though. Wire-frame is unsatisfactory as it reveals the component's guts leaving hidden-line and vector as the only viable style-mode/render-mode combination.

If the component material is made transparent, wire-frame, hidden-line, shaded, and shaded-using-textures style-modes mostly work with all three render-modes. I say mostly, because some odd behavior occurs with some combinations where some faces become transparent while others don't, and when you update the LO document link, the transparent and solid faces change, seemingly randomly.

Being restricted to hidden-line / vector modes to get a transparent background in order to stack viewports is a problem. For example, if I want to stack a viewport containing light grey contour lines over a site plan viewport I would have to make the contour viewport vector rendered which makes the contour lines black, not grey.

Can someone verify or disprove my findings? I hope I'm doing something wrong.

Thanks

Test.skp
Test.layout

I discovered that the large file size was due to my SU default drawing template containing unused components. A quick purge-unused from Window|Model Info|Statistics fixed the problem. The layout file/archive contains a copy of linked .skp files which contain whatever's in the default template.

My template was about 15mb (my bad). The compressed .skp file size in the layout archive was about 6mb.

After learning that a layout file is really a zip archive, and that if you add .zip to the file name you can open it in winzip/7-zip etc., I opened the ref folder in the archive and found many copies of styles. I deleted all but one of each stile, saved the archive, then opened it in layout. As expected, only one of each style was visible. I selected each style in turn, saved and closed layout, then reopened the archive in 7-zip to, once again, find multiple copies of the styles.

BTW, in the archive you can see all the stuff that makes the layout file so bloated.

Layout has started to create copies of the Engineering Style. In the Sketchup Model window - Styles tab, when I select [Engineering style]1, it creates [Engineering style]2. When I select [Engineering style]2, it creates 3, and so on (stopped at 10). There doesn't seem to be any way of deleting them. If I exit LO, restart and open the file I'm left with 3 copies.

I tried to upload the simple test file, but the damn thing is 6mb, over the board limit. Why would a layout file with nothing in it be that big?

SU Pro 2014, Win8

Thanks Box and Tig