Posts made by Msketcher

So there are actually two separate programs/apps that are being referred to here (maybe technically more, but I'm not entirely familiar with Hololens.)

There's the SketchUp AR premium feature that is built into the free SketchUp Viewer for Android and iPhone. It's pretty cool. It creates an interactive Augmented Reality display of your model, using your phone and camera as a "window" to view your model, "projected" onto a table or some other flat surface. You can walk around the table and whatnot and view your model from different angles. I've heard some reports that the feature is still appearing to be in "beta" mode, which makes it available to everyone. But eventually it will be switched to only being available to Shop, Pro, and Studio subscribers.

The desktop VR SketchUp viewer works with Vive, Rift, WMR, and Hololens. They need to do a better job at linking to the download. It appears on your My account page when you first sign up for the trial. For some reason it's not on the https://www.sketchup.com/download/all page. Here's a link to a direct download for the SketchUp VR viewer https://www.sketchup.com/SketchUpViewerVR-exe (Sorry, I think that's just a Windows link, they don't really link to the program on the website from what I've found. )

I do plan on doing a more in depth tutoiral on the AR/VR features, but you can take a look at my brief overview on the SketchUp 2019 review I wrote up. https://mastersketchup.com/sketchup-2019-subscribe

Thanks everyone! Nick and I put a ton of work into this book and we think it is really going to help a lot of people make the push to going 100% SketchUp and LayOut. I will be on chat at http://url.sketchucation.com/su2layout4archi for most of the day (I'm stopping for lunch right now). If you don't catch me just leave a message.

I'm having problems with locking axis reference while drawing a classic bezier curve. It looks like it's trying to, as the "square mark" at the cursor is filled and turns color depending upon which arrow key I press, but it does not restrict axis for me. I'm on a Mac, SketchUp 2015 Pro. I've looked at the manual and thought I am doing everything right. I swear I had it working earlier today...

@dave r said:

I did miss that. What happens if you turn off Auto Render in LO?

Auto Render in LayOut isn't really the right answer to the problem. If you simply switch to a different style in SketchUp, or "reload" the style you're on, the temporary style changes are forgotten and you're good to go.

It's just that if you make temporary changes to the style, and save your model as-is, you'll get into trouble. It's a good trap for people who don't know what's happening. Because once you open SketchUp again to check your model, your first instinct is to go click on the style to make sure the settings are correct, and sure enough, they will be. So it's confusing.

@dave r said:

@msketcher said:

...you think you're just going crazy.

Are you sure you aren't?

Sorry. It was an easy opening.

I learned a long time ago with LO to make sure that my SU model shows no un-updated styles; that is, no styles which display the circular arrows over the thumbnail; before saving the file and going or returning to LO. if I make a change to a style setting, I click on the thumbnail to update the style or, I right click on the scene tab and choose Update from the context menu. If the style is different from the scene's definition, the warning box pops up asking what to do with the style. Some people do turn off that warning box and that seems to create all kinds of trouble for them.

Dave, you might be missing the point. I DON'T want the style to update. I'm just making a temporary change to a style setting to help me while modeling. I don't want those temporary changes to affect my scenes, and I wouldn't expect them to because I never followed through and clicked "Update Style." But SketchUp pushes those temporary overrides to all scenes that are using that style.

SketchUp shouldn't change a scenes' style unless the style has been actually updated by the user.

@pbacot said:

Yes it happens on the Mac. The thing is if the other scenes have the same style, you've not done a style change, so you still see the style which is under temporary adjustment.

Does that really happen in LO?

Here are the conditions that will cause all your LayOut scenes to get messed up:

1. Save scenes with a specific style.
2. With that same style active, make some temporary style overrides. (Don't save the style)
3. Save your model.
4. Open LayOut, Update model reference. (All your viewports will show the temporary style overrides, even though you didn't save them to the style.)

I guarantee a million people have had this happen and didn't even know it. I know I have. The problem is it's an easy fix. Just open SketchUp again, click on any style, and you're all set. So it's nearly impossible to put your finger on, you think you're just going crazy.

Exactly, my temporary tweaks are being associated to other scenes. That's the point I'm trying to make.

@driven said:

I can't get it to do that on my mac...
the scenes switch styles even if one is in update state...

Is it only when your not in the model collection? [your in the default collection in your video]
john

Perhaps Mac is different?

Regarding "In Model" vs "default", it's my understanding that as soon as you click on a style in any folder, it creates a copy, saves it in your "In Model" folder. So you're actually seeing and editing the "In Model" copy regardless.

@rich o brien said:

But then the models loaded style would need to either undo changes to default to the collection config or load in a style of the same name with different display settings.

All styles changes need to be new styles. Hence that pop up you get when it detects changes between scenes.

Did you check the 'don't ask me again' option for that?

This really doesn't have to do with the style warning window that pops up when saving scenes. In the video, you can see that I selected a style, then immediately saved the scene, no changes were made to the style. No warning window appeared.

Think about any time you've needed to make a temporary change to a style setting. Maybe you flipped Xray on in order to see something better, or you toggled section planes to tweak the position a little.

You don't care about saving these small changes, you just did them on the fly. So why would you want SketchUp to show these style changes in all of your scenes when you intentionally avoided clicking Update style?

Imagine someone creating a LayOut document of a kitchen.

They have all their viewports set up, elevations, plan view, assigned to scenes, which have styles saved with them.

Imagine at one point in the project they open SketchUp and turn on section planes so they can tweak them a little bit. If they happen to be in the same style they saved the scenes with, and save their model, they're going to have a surprise next time they open LayOut.

In LayOut, all of their viewports will then change to show section planes, even though they didn't update the style to have this happen. Simply because they saved SketchUp with an unsaved style override, those overrides will show up in every scene that has that style in it.

Doesn't make sense to me.

"If you update that config then it writes the changes to your model but not the styles collection."

I agree that SketchUp should let us override any style property we want after applying a style to the model. That's the whole purpose of the refresh symbol appearing over the style thumbnail in order to tell us that the current "configuration" doesn't match the style definition we currently have selected. We've overridden it. That's great. I like that.

But when you activate a scene that has "Style and Fog" checked, it should show you the style you assigned to the scene, and throw away any overrides we've made to the Style.

Doing some research for a new tutorial, and a just noticed a strange behavior when saving scenes, then temporarily overriding the style you saved with the scene. I know this has happened to many of us but I just finally put my finger on it. What do you think? Is this a bug? or am I just not seeing the benefit of this behavior?

Youtube Video

I just had this idea pop into my head for a crazy workaround for creating schedules in LayOut. (I'm sure the SketchUp team will come up with something better in a future version, but this was fun to think about)

In 2015, the Label tool now has the ability read data from objects in your model, right? http://www.mastersketchup.com/pullingdata/

But what if you wanted to create a schedule for all the windows on your project?

What if there was a plugin that created a dummy component in SketchUp, and attached a DC attribute to it that listed quantities and model numbers for all the windows in your project? It would update every time you insert a new window, so the quantity would always be correct. The plugin would put this dummy object on its own layer and create a scene.

From in LayOut, you'd set a viewport that showed the dummy object (it could be a white box with hidden edges) and you'd attach a label to it and pick the DC attribute you want to read. To display your window schedule, the attribute would display something like this:

Windows
Model:WC-2304 QTY:4 Size:30x40
Model:WC-2346 QTY:2 Size:60x50

I could create something similar for other objects in your model. Maybe you'd have to "tag" certain components in your model to be included and categorized in the schedule.

I downloaded your file. Same problem. If I scale the rectangle, then immediately type 200cm ENTER, the summary display is wrong. I just don't understand why it would behave this way.

I just tried using the =current() function, and it still doesn't redraw when I use the Scale tool then type in a precise measurement.

• Scale the component an arbitrary distance = shows correct size after scaling

-Scale the component an arbitrary distance, then type in a precise distance/ENTER = size shows the original dimensions, not the new dimensions.

@ntxdave said:

I have tried several times and continually get the error message I previously showed.

Anyone have any idea about what I might be doing wrong?

If I get this to work and I have my own classifications, is there a way to provide a drop down list of the classification categories so that I can just select the one the component belongs to?

Not exactly how sure I am that this really accomplishes anything for me though.

Exactly. If you create your own classification schema, it will allow you to assign your components as different "object types" from a list. In addition to that, once an object type is assigned, you can then set attribute values according to which object type you assigned.

For example, you might have several object types in your classification schema: window, door, roof, wall, floor.

The window object type, for example, might have the following attributes available: Manufacturer, model number, R-value, style, etc.

So there's two levels of information: Tag it as a specific object type, then assign attributes according to the object type.

So once you tag your window component as a "window object", you can then go to the Component Options window and set values for each of the attributes.

The problem right now, as I see it, is the default schema is IFC2x3, which is utterly confusing for someone who doesn't know what IFC is. And it's not easy for the average person to learn how to create their own schema. Hopefully a solution is made to simplify the creation of custom classification schema.

The advantage of adding this data, is that in LayOut 2015, the label tool can now READ that data from your viewports and display it in your LayOut documents. I'm sure we'll be seeing some plugins pop up for SketchUp that will create some nice reports of classification data as well.

I'm sure there is a furniture object type. I just feel like there is a lot of confusion when people unfamiliar with IFC look at the classifier tool. I'd like to create a simple schema that I can use to teach the basics of the Classification tool, and maybe get people to think of some ideas on how they can create their own schema.

It took me a while to even realize that the Classification tool and IFC were two different things. I thought they were one in the same. I also didn't understand that IFC is a filetype, and the IFC2x3 format is something different as well, and it happens to be a schema that SketchUp uses by default. So I feel like if I can just separate IFC and IFC2x3 from the picture all together, I'll help people recognize the power behind the feature, and (hopefully) make it less intimidating to venture into.

Awesome!!! That is really helpful. I don't fully comprehend it yet but I "get it". I also just learned that SketchUp will add a lot of the formatting automatically when it is saved as a SKC file. I'm going to play around with this for sure. Thanks Alex.

@krisidious said:

You mean like PlusSpec's BIM tool... Love it.

[attachment=0:ihcqjh9z]<!-- ia0 -->BIM.JPG<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:ihcqjh9z]

PlusSpec is amazing, I love it too! Windows and doors have never been so easy and powerful inside SketchUp.

@alexschreyer said:

Technically, you can create your own schema and load it. I haven't tried that out, though.

Alex, I'd love for you to try. You're probably the only person I know who could figure it out. This is the SketchUp help article http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000045. Pretty useless in my opinion for a novice programmer like myself.

I'd love to see just a simple example, instead of using the IFC schema as a starting point. For example, I'd love to start out with a very basic schema that only has ONE object type. Then, that object type would have the following attributes:

• Name
• Model Number
• Manufacturer

I think if I had something really basic like that in my hands, it would start to make sense in my head.