![]() Regarding the component edit options, they are excellent mechanisms when what you need to edit is (or can be made into) a Component. To me, it is just as easy and lower risk to do “unhide last” as to remember to restore layer0. In that situation (unless, as he already noted, you have TIG’s plugin installed) you have to remember to retag the Group with layer0 before you explode it or the dreaded “primitives off layer0” mess will result. As a result, tagging an instance with a non-visible layer is fast, easy, and safe.īut what about when the entities in question are just an unrelated bunch of “stuff” that are blocking your view of where you want to draw? That is, they have no long-term reason to be collected as a part and the Group will be exploded immediately after drawing the other geometry. I make Components of it at the earliest possible moment. In my workflow, I only work with “free” geometry as a starting point. ![]() If the Group or Component is a genuine “part”, I will always use layers to control its visibility. I suppose it is a question of personal workflow and it depends a lot on whether the Group has some fundamental reason to exist versus being just a temporary thing. Use of the Hide command to temporarily aid visibility while modeling generally leads to confusion.Reason being, Hide/Unhide is context sensitive after one go. SketchUp Plugin and Extension Store by SketchUcation provides free downloads of hundreds of SketchUp extensions and plugins SketchUp Plugins | PluginStore | SketchUcation It also adds a context-menu item which resets all geometry in a Selection to “Layer0”. It also assigns “Layer0” to any geometry affected by Exploding a Group/Component-Instance, irrespective of that “container’s” own Layer It also automatically makes all new geometry on “Layer0” even if the current Layer is set to be something else. You CAN reset the current Layer, BUT at least you were warned of your folly ! I made this Plugin which alerts you if you try and reset the current Layer away from the logical default of “Layer0”. There have been requests to take the “active” layer buttons away, or at least to make them less conspicuous. Even though Layer0, which contains all the raw geometry, is set to active and therefore visible, when you turn off the layer of some higher-level containing group or component, all the subordinate objects it contains are also turned off, all the way down to raw geometry. You control the visibility of an entire branch of the model by controlling the layer of the topmost (outermost) group or component that defines the branch. Groups and components can be nested as deeply as you wish–although I prefer a flatter model structure just to make things easier to get at (easier to get into their context so they can edited). That is, the hierarchical array of gozintas (this gozinta that which in turn gozinta that) is built using groups and components. Not only, as Dan said, do groups and components isolate and protect geometry, they are the main structural/organizational tools in SU. Other functions you may have associated with layers in other programs are generally accomplished using groups and components. ![]() Layers have a single use in SU: to control visibility. Perhaps to a greater extent than you think. There are plugins available that address this (including one of mine). ![]() if you explode a Group, the contents will be placed on the layer that the Group was on, overriding their original layer. Note: due to a peculiarity of explode, hide the Group, don’t put it onto a non-visible layer. When you are finished, unhide the Group and explode it. When part of your model is getting in the way, the best answer is to wrap it in a temporary Group and hide that Group. This nearly always trips up users coming to SketchUp from other CAD tools. When contents are on anything but layer0, confusing interactions of visibility result and the confusion can lead to modeling errors.Īs Dan already stated, the other common confusion is that layers do not isolate geometry. If the contents are on non-visible layers, they remain non-visible. But this override does not work the other way: if you put the container on a visible layer, this does not override the visibility of layers the contents may be on. If you put the container (Group or ComponentInstance) on a non-visible layer, its contents remain on their original layers but are also made non-visible regardless of the visibility of their layers. When things are nested inside Groups or Components, there is a one-way relationship between the way that layer visibility affects them. This is one of the two most common points of confusion about SketchUp layers.
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