Layers, please! Projects cannot scale without them

Post by lmcarreiro on Apr 16, 2025

Without layers (like photoshop) to organize the hierarchy of objects, it’s really hard to scale projects beyond a certain point.

With layers and having every object bound to a layer, a lot of cool features could be made over them, like:

• lock/freeze all objects in the layer
• toggle visibility (show/hide) of all objects in a layer
  • having a layer hidden would help moving/editing objects on others layers if it doesn’t try to snap them to objects that are not visible
• group all objects in a layer, so you can move them as a single object (the existing group feature is really hard to select the objects you want in the group if they are spread and mixed with other objects you don’t want in the group.

Post by Johan on Apr 29, 2025

Welcome to the Arkio community @lmcarreiro good to hear your feedback

We’re currently working on Layers for Arkio 2.0, starting with layers for imported files from our plugins. You can try this out for yourself by installing the Arkio Beta.

For Revit/Rhino/Sketchup/Archicad models, layers have a hierarchy per model. We currently don’t show layers yet for native Arkio geometry and objects but this is on our roadmap for future releases.

Locking/freezing geometry is not possible from the layers tab, but you can use Arkio’s pin tool to pin down objects and prevent them from moving.

Post by lmcarreiro on May 2, 2025

Hi Johan. Thank you for the response. I have tried the latest beta.

• I don’t import a lot of objects, so the layer as it is right now is not useful for me, but I’m glad you have on your roadmap the addition of native Arkio objects to the layers.
• The rounded shapes look great, thank you!
• I hated the move of the Section tool out of the menu, I used that tool a lot while in human scale, but I saw you already have plans to move it back!

Other two things not related to beta, but I think it would be two low-hanging fruits to make the app better.

Sometimes we like to work on higher precision, but the “measure” tool and any other size label, when the value is above 1 meter, it’s rounded to the first decimal digit. It would be really useful to have the option to opt-in for more precision, on the second or maybe third decimal digit (for metric system).

Here in Brazil a new construction method using eco-bricks is becoming popular, it uses 250mm x 125mm bricks that are bound together without cement. To project using that, you must create all rooms with sides multiple of 125mm, which we can’t do on Arkio.

The same happens on wall thickness and height, the slider snaps on 100mm/150mm/300mm for thickness and 1m/2.5m/3m for height and we can’t choose anything different than that.

Would it be possible to work on 5mm precision, choose how many digits to round the numbers / size labels (or the option to not round at all) and choose any number for walls height/thickness?

Thanks.