Precise scale about center in two axes?

[Bombarde16]

O, wise and powerful wizards of Sketchup...

Can one enter a precise ratio to uniformly scale an object about its center in two dimensions while leaving the third dimension unchanged?

That's a mouthful, so here's the scoop:  Take a cylindrical object.  I'll just use a 55-gallon drum from the 3D warehouse for fun.  Activate the scale tool, the green dots appear, blah blah blah

Click red-green scale and drag the mouse around, the object will distort in width and depth while the height remains constant.  If you are doing this totally freehand and without the precision mousing skills of an android, when you click the mouse to finalize the scaling operation you will end up applying different scaling ratios to the red and green axes:

You can force Sketchup to scale precisely by single clicking a scale handle, typing a scaling ratio and then pressing Enter.  Here, I've scaled the drum by 50% in the red and green axes:

Notice that the measurement field in the bottom left says "Red, Green Scale .5"  So far, so good.  You can likewise force Sketchup to scale an object about its center by holding CTRL during the operation.  The problem is this:  As long as my finger is on the CTRL key, I cannot type a precise scaling ratio.  Moreover, if I hold SHIFT while holding CTRL, the scaling tool assumes a uniform scale in all axes, negating the fact that I started the scale operation by clicking the Red-Green handle.

I want to enter a precise ratio to scale this cylinder about its center in only two axes.  Whither now?  I'm guessing there's a way to get Sketchup to scale about center without keeping one's finger on CTRL.  After all, pressing CTRL at any time with the Move command will put you into Move & Copy without having to hold the button.

 

[AMarshall]

Sure, this is easy.  You're going to like this answer, I hope.

You are trying to hold the CTRL key, move the mouse, and type a number all at the same time - probably while wiggling your nose too, hah!  But you don't need to.  Sketchup's default behavior for most tools allows you to type a specific value like your scale factor AFTER you've done the operation, and repeatedly also!

Specifically for your case, use the scaling tool with the CTRL key to scale the object but don't type in a scaling factor.  Just get it visually close using the mouse and click or enter to complete the scale operation. Now, before you do anything else type in your scaling factor and hit enter.  The scaling will be revised to this factor. In fact, you can keep typing new values repeatedly until you get the result you want, if you want to test other scaling factors.

Generally, this works with most other tools.  With the move tool for example, I might want to move something exactly 10 inches along the red axis.  I'l grab it with the mouse, move along the red axis some random length, hit enter to lock in the "direction" and technically the move is complete.  But then I come back and type "10" and hit enter again to get the exact distance corrected.

As long as you don't interact with any other part of the model, or move the camera, you can keep typing numbers all day to keep revising your entries.

Hope this makes sense, and that it helps.

[Bombarde16]

Jackpot.  Thanks.