Stopping to look around
Look Around is the third tool in SketchUp that's dedicated to exploring your model from the inside. If using Position Camera is like swooping in to stand in a particular spot, and Walk is like moving around while maintaining a constant eye-height, Look Around is like turning your head while standing in one spot. It's pretty well named, I think it does exactly what it says. Using Look Around is so simple it hardly merits these steps 2. Click and drag around in the modeling window to turn your...
Stretching a photo over a face
The basic metaphor here is one of a photograph printed on a piece of really stretchy fabric. You stretch the fabric until the photo looks the way you want and then you hold it in place with pins. Follow these steps to stretch your texture using the Texture Tweaker's Stretch Texture mode 1. With the Select tool, click the face with the texture you want to edit. 2. Choose EditOFaceOTextureOPosition. A quicker way to get to Edit mode is to right-click the textured face and choose TextureOPosition...
Acknowledgments
For helping in all the ways that it is possible to help with a book offering technical advice, lending a critical ear, providing moral support and encouragement I'd like to thank Sandra Winstead. It's rare to find everything you need in a single person, and I can't imagine having written this book without her. I'd like to thank Chris Dizon for agreeing to be the Technical Editor for this volume I can't think of anyone who brings more enthusiasm and curiosity to everything he does. As a...
Slapping on Some Paint
I have an ulterior motive for getting you to paint your doghouse To color it, you have to understand how to spin it around first. Moving around your model is the most important skill to develop when you're first learning SketchUp. Run through these steps to apply colors and textures to the faces in your model, and to find out about moving around while you're doing it 1. Choose WindowOMaterials to open the Materials dialog box see Figure 3-11 . Click a color or texture you like. When you do, you...
Pass those attributes up the chain
For an attribute SketchUp sometimes calls them options to show up in the Component Options dialog box, it has to be associated with the parent main component of a Dynamic Component. In other words, if you want to be able to set an attribute from the Component Options dialog box, make sure it's in the top level of your DC. If your DC has multiple layers of nested components, and you want to show an option associated with one that's buried a few layers deep, you need to create attributes in each...
Getting the hang of Scale
The basic principle of this technique is pretty simple You select the geometry edges and faces in your model that you want to resize, activate the Scale tool, and go to town. Here's a list of steps, just so it's crystal clear Figure 6-12 tells the story in pictures 1. Select the part of your model that you want to scale. Use the Select tool to do this check out the latter part of Chapter 2 if you need a refresher. 2. Activate the Scale tool by choosing ToolsOScale from the menu bar. You can...
From Contours
You know the squiggly lines on topographical maps that show you where the hills and valleys are They're called contour lines or contours because they represent the contours of the terrain every point on a single line is the same height above sea level as every other point on that line. Where the lines are close together, the ground between them is steep. Where the lines are far apart, the slope is less steep. Cartographers, surveyors, engineers, and architects use contour lines to represent 3D...
Applying styles to your models
The easiest way to get started with styles is to apply the premade styles that come with SketchUp. You find scads of them, which is great, because seeing what's been done is the best way to see what's possible. As you go through this section, you'll no doubt get ideas for your own styles, and that's where the fun begins. Applying a SketchUp style to your model is a four-step process, and it goes like this 1. Choose WindowOStyles to open the Styles dialog box. 2. Click the Select tab to make...
Edges on a Face Wont Sink In
This tends to happen when you're trying to draw a rectangle or another geometric figure on a face with one of SketchUp's shape-drawing tools. Ordinarily, the Rectangle tool creates a new face on top of any face you use it on after that, you can use Push Pull to create a hole, if you want. If your shape's edges look thick instead of thin, they're not cutting through the face they're drawn on. When that happens, try these approaches Retrace one of the edges. Sometimes that works you'd be...
Building your own Dynamic Components
Keeping in mind that this topic could easily occupy the remainder of this book if I let it, making your own Dynamic Components really is easier than it sounds. If you've been reading the rest of this section, you've probably noticed that I use the word programmed a lot in conjunction with DCs I shouldn't. DC creation has nothing to do with programming at all, and you certainly don't need to be a programmer to do it goodness knows I'm not. You need SketchUp Pro 7 to create new Dynamic...
Getting to know Intersect with Model
Luckily, SketchUp has a relatively little-known feature that often helps when it comes to making roofs with lots of pitches Intersect with Model. Here's what you need to know about this terrific little tool Intersect with Model makes new geometry from existing geometry. That's how it works It takes faces you've selected and creates edges wherever they intersect. You use Intersect with Model in cases where you need to create forms that are the union both put together , difference one minus the...
Cutting plans and sections
The most common use for sections is to create straight-on, cut-through views of your model. Some of the views often include dimensions and are typical of the kinds of drawings that architects make to design and explain space. You can take measurements from them if they're printed to scale . They provide information that no other drawing type can. The following terms which are illustrated in Figure 10-10 can help you create different views of your model more easily Plan A planimetric view, or...
The Print dialog box
The Print dialog box on the Mac is something of a many-headed beast several more panels are hidden underneath the Copies amp Pages drop-down list. Luckily, you only need to use two. Both are pictured in Figure 12-7 and described in the following list Copies amp Pages panel The controls in this part of the Print dialog box are pretty straightforward use them to tell SketchUp how many copies and pages you want to print Copies If you're printing more than one copy of a print that includes multiple...
Making a Quick Model
Figure 3-3 shows what your computer screen should look like at this point. You should see a row of tools across the top of your modeling window, a little man, and three colored modeling axes red, green, and blue lines . This is what your screen should look like in Windows left and on a Mac right . This is what your screen should look like in Windows left and on a Mac right . Follow these steps to build a doghouse and check this book's companion Web site at www.dummies.com go SketchUp7FD for...
Icons Used in This Book
This icon indicates a piece of information I think will probably save you time. When you're working in SketchUp, you need to know a lot of things. I use the Remember icon to remind you of something I cover earlier in the book, just in case you might have forgotten or skipped it. Everyone's a little bit of a nerd sometimes, and paragraphs that bear this icon indulge that nerdiness. You can skip them without fear of missing anything important, but reading them can give you something to annoy your...
Editing and saving your styles
If you're handy in the kitchen, you've probably heard the saying that cooking is an art and baking is a science. Cooking allows you to experiment adding a little of this and a dash of that while you're making a sauce won't wreck anything. When it comes to baking, taking liberties with a recipe can be a train wreck. What was supposed to be a cake can easily turn into a doorstop. I found this out when I made a lovely chocolate doorstop for my girlfriend's birthday not so long ago. . . . Luckily,...
The coolest things since radially sliced bread
You can model objects that exhibit radial symmetry just as easily as those with bilateral symmetry you just start out slightly differently. The only thing you have to decide before you start is how many wedges how many identical parts your object is made of. To set yourself up to model something with radial symmetry, you start by modeling one wedge, then you make it into a component, and then you rotate copies around the center. Follow these steps to get the hang of it yourself 1. Draw a...
Drawing your profile in place
Consider that I have a model of a house. I want to use Follow Me to add a gutter that goes all the way around the perimeter of the roof. I decide to draw the profile in place right on the roof itself because the edges of the roof are drawn parallel to the colored drawing axes. This means that I'll have an easier time using the Line tool to draw in midair. The trick to drawing an extrusion profile that isn't on the ground is to start by drawing a rectangular face. You then draw the profile on...
Damn the torpedoes Smart Scaling
I think the best way to get started with Dynamic Components is to dive right in and look at an example. Writing about stuff like this in the abstract makes my brain sore. I assume you feel the same way. Here's a fairly but not entirely simple one The first image in Figure 5-25 is a table that I've made dynamic I can use the Scale tool to make it longer or wider but not taller. When I scale it, the legs don't get distorted they stay the same size. I can use the Component Options dialog box to...
Discovering SketchUps Shadow Settings
The basic thing to understand about shadows in SketchUp is that, just like in real life, they're controlled by changing the position of the sun. Because the sun moves exactly the same way every year, you just pick a date and time, and SketchUp automatically displays the correct shadows by figuring out where the sun should be. Hooray for math You do all these simple maneuvers in the Shadow Settings dialog box, shown in Figure 9-14. The sections that follow introduce how the controls work so you...
Getting Your Bearings
Even though LayOut comes with SketchUp Pro, it's not just a SketchUp feature LayOut is a full-fledged, gets-its-own-icon program. As such, LayOut has its own menus, tools, dialog boxes, and Drawing Window. A couple of versions from now, LayOut will probably have its own For Dummies book. Maybe I'll even get to write it Even though LayOut's user interface is pretty standard, I want to give you a quick overview of the different elements. Knowing that it's a lot like other software you've used...
Scaling your model until the photo looks right
When you're happy with the way your texture is stretched to fit the face, one of two things will be true The proportions are correct. By this, I mean that the photo doesn't look stretched or squashed. This will only be the case if the face to which you applied the photo texture was already exactly the right size. The proportions aren't correct. If the photo texture you just tweaked looks stretched or squashed, the face it's on is the wrong size. No worries you just need to stretch the whole...
Modeling by photomatching
Setting up a new matched photo was just the first step. Now it's time to use SketchUp's modeling tools with a little help from the Match Photo dialog box to build a model based on the photograph you matched. Here are a couple of the basic concepts It's not a linear process. Building a model using a matched photo entails going between drawing edges, orbiting around, drawing some more edges, going back to your matched photo scene, and drawing yet more edges. Every photo is different, so the ones...
Creating accurate shadow studies
One of the most useful features in SketchUp is the ability to display accurate shadows. To do this, three pieces of information are necessary The latitude of the building site The sun's position and thus the position of shadows depends on geographic location that is to say, latitude. The shadow cast by a building at 3 00 on March 5 in Minsk is very different from that cast by a similar building, at the same time of day, on the same date in Nairobi. If you're displaying shadows on a model of a...
Facing the facts about faces
Faces are surfaces. If you think of SketchUp models as being made of toothpicks and paper which they kind of are , faces are basically the paper. Here's what you need to know about them You can't have faces without edges. To have a face, you need to have at least three coplanar on the same plane edges that form a loop. In other words, a face is defined by the edges that surround it, and those edges all have to be on the same, flat plane. Because you need at least three straight lines to make a...
Taking the Scenic Route
Wouldn't it be great if you could save a particular view of your model And wouldn't it be even greater if that view could also save things like styles and shadow settings What if you could come back to any of these saved views by clicking a button on your screen What if this whole paragraph were just a series of questions SketchUp scenes are you guessed it saved views of your model. It's probably easiest to think of scenes as cameras, except that scenes can save much more than just camera...
Stamp
Eventually, you might need to plunk a building or some other structure down on the terrain you've lovingly crafted. The Stamp tool provides an easy way to you guessed it stamp a building footprint into a terrain surface, creating a flat pad for something to sit on. It also provides a way to create a gently sloping offset around the perimeter of your stamped form. This creates a smoother transition between the new, flat pad and the existing terrain. Follow these steps to use the Stamp tool check...
Creating section animations with scenes
This is probably one of the most useful and impressive things you can do with this software, but some people who have been using SketchUp for years don't know about it. The basic idea is that you can use scenes to create animations where your section planes move inside your model. Here are a few reasons you might want to use this technique If you have a building with several levels, you can create an animated presentation that shows a cutaway plan view of each level. Using an animated section...
Getting set up for photomatching
Modeling with SketchUp's photo-matching feature is generally a step-by-step procedure. Whether you're building a new model or lining up an existing model with a photograph, you start by getting your modeling window ready. How you do this depends on which one you're trying to do Use a photograph to build a model If this is what you want to do, open a fresh, new SketchUp file and you're good to go. Line up a model you've built already with a photograph This case requires you to re-orient your...
Using shadows to add depth and realism
The neat thing about shadows in SketchUp is how easily you can apply them and how easy they are to adjust. In the previous sections, I give a dry rundown of the basic controls in the Shadow Settings dialog box. In the following sections, I show you how to use those controls to add depth, realism, and delicious nuance to your models. If only Caravaggio had had it so good. . . . There are lots of times when you'll need to use shadows to make your drawings read better most of them fit into one of...
Modeling on top of photo textures
After you place a photo texture on the right face and in the right place on that face I'm turning into Dr. Seuss , I wouldn't blame you a bit for wanting to use the information in your photograph to help you add geometry to your model. It's a great way to be more or less accurate without having to measure much, and the combination of photo textures and a few simple push pull operations can be very convincing. Modeling with photo-textured faces isn't hard, but you have to know one critical step...
Looking at SketchUps raster formats
So you know you need to export a raster image from SketchUp, but which one do you choose You have four choices in Windows three of them are available on the Mac. The following sections give you the details. When you export a raster image, you're saving your current view in SketchUp to a separate file somewhere on your computer. As a raster image, that file consists of tiny, colored dots called pixels more pixels than you can shake a stick at. When you look at all the pixels together, they form...
Drawing Floors and Walls
Most floors and walls are flat surfaces, so it's easy to model them with straight edges and flat faces in SketchUp. In fact, chances are good that the first thing you ever modeled in SketchUp looked a lot like the floor and walls of a building. I can think of two different kinds of architectural models that most people want to create in SketchUp how you approach modeling floors and walls depends entirely on the type of model you're making Exterior An exterior model of a building is basically...
Setting your field of view
Field of view is how much of your model you can see in your modeling window at one time. Imagine your eyesight kind of like a cone, with the pointy end pointing at your eyes and the cone getting bigger as it gets farther away from you. Everything that falls inside the cone is visible to you, and everything outside the cone isn't. If you increase the angle of the cone at the pointy end, the cone gets wider, and you see more of what's in front of you. If you decrease the angle, the cone gets...
Introduction
couple years ago, I was teaching a workshop on advanced SketchUp techniques to a group of extremely bright middle and high school or so I thought students in Hot Springs, Arkansas. As subject matter went, I wasn't pulling any punches we were breezing through material I wouldn't think of introducing to most groups of adults. At one point, a boy raised his hand to ask a question, and I noticed he looked younger than most of the others. Squinting, I read a logo on his T-shirt that told me he was...
Just for good measure Rotation and Animation
It might not be the most useful thing you can design Dynamic Components to do, but it sure is satisfying. Making your models come to life is actually easier than making them scale intelligently, which is good news all around. Look at Figure 5-30 It's a simple two-door cabinet that I made into a DC. When I click one of the doors with the Interact tool, it swings open. When I click it again, it swings shut. Couldn't be simpler. Pay special attention to the third image in Figure 5-30 it shows...
Injecting accuracy into your model
It's all well and fine to make a model, but most of the time, you need to make sure that it's accurate. Without a certain level of accuracy, it's not as useful for figuring things out. The key to accuracy in SketchUp is the little text box that lives in the lower-right corner of your SketchUp window the one I point out in Figure 2-13. It's called the Measurements box, and here are some of the things you can do with it Make a line a certain length Draw a rectangle a certain size Push pull a face...
Drawing in D on a D Screen
For computer programmers, letting you draw three-dimensional objects on your screen is a difficult problem. You wouldn't think it would be such a big deal after all, people have been drawing in perspective for a very long time. If some old guy could figure it out 500 years ago, why should it give your computer any problems The thing is, human perception of depth on paper is a trick of the eye. And of course, your computer doesn't have eyes that enable it to interpret depth without thinking...
SketchUp Crashed and I Lost My Model
Unfortunately, SketchUp crashes happen sometimes. The good news is that SketchUp automatically saves a copy of your file every five minutes. The file that SketchUp auto saves is actually a separate file, which it calls AutoSave_your filename .skp. If your file ever gets corrupted in a crash, an intact file is ready for you to find and continue working on. The problem is that most people don't even know it's there. Where is it If you've ever saved your file, it's in the same folder as the...
Making lathed forms like spheres and bottles
And nuclear power plant chimneys. A surprising number of things can be modeled by using Follow Me to perform a lathe operation. A lathe is a tool that carpenters and machinists use to spin a block of raw material while they carve into it that's how baseball bats are made the good ones, anyway . A simple example of a lathed object is a sphere. Here's how you might make one with Follow Me 1. Draw a circle on the ground. 2. Rotate a copy of your circle up by 90 degrees, as shown in Figure 6-3....
Other settings
You can control the following odds-and-ends settings in the Print Preview dialog box, too 2-D Section Slice Only If you have a visible section cut in your model view, selecting this check box tells SketchUp to only print the section cut edges. Figure 12-4 shows what the same model view would look like without on the left and with right this option selected. I use this to produce simple plan and section views that I can sketch on by hand. Use High Accuracy HLR The bad news is that I have no idea...
The Document Setup dialog box
You use the settings in the Document Setup dialog box see Figure 12-6 to control how big your model prints. Here's what everything does Print Size This one's pretty self-explanatory, but here are some details just in case Fit View to Page Select this check box tells SketchUp to make your printed page look just like your Modeling Window on-screen. It's really that simple. Width and Height If the Fit View to Page check box is deselected, you can type in either a width or a height for your final...
Warming Up Your SketchUp Muscles
I can think of seven activities you'll need to do every time you use SketchUp. Formal-education types would probably call them core competencies, but I find language like that tends to put people to sleep. Whatever you care to call these activities, I'll introduce them all at the same time, in the following sections, so you can come back and get a quick refresher whenever you want. Getting the best view of what you're doing Using SketchUp without learning how to orbit, zoom, and pan is like...
Making some placemarks
You can stick pins into Google Earth to mark locations you'd like to come back to later they're called placemarks. Follow these steps to create one yourself 1. Fly to where you want to create a placemark. 2. Click the Create Placemark button at the top of the screen. 3. Move your placemark it looks like a thumbtack to exactly where you want it on top of your house, for instance . 4. Give your placemark a name in the Edit Placemark dialog box. Your new placemark should show up in the Places...
Editing exploding and locking component instances
Right-clicking a component instance in your modeling window opens a context menu that offers lots of useful choices here's what some of them let you do Edit Component To edit all instances of a component at once, right-click any instance and choose Edit Component from the context menu. The rest of your model will fade back, and you'll see a dashed bounding box around your component. When you're done, click somewhere outside the bounding box to finish editing your changes have been made in every...
Working smarter by only building half
Bilaterally symmetrical forms are everywhere. Most animals you can name, the majority of the furniture in your house, your personal helicopter they can all be modeled by building half, creating a component, and flipping over a copy. Follow these steps to get the general idea of how to start building a bilaterally symmetrical model in SketchUp see Figure 5-12 You can do this however you want, but I think the easiest way is to draw a rectangle and push pull it into 3D. 2. Draw a diagonal edge on...
Using Follow Me
At its core, Follow Me lets you create forms that are extrusions. It's a little bit like Push Pull, except that it doesn't just work in one direction. You tell Follow Me to follow a path, and it extrudes a face all along that path. This means that you need three things to use Follow Me A path In SketchUp, you can use any edge, or series of edges, as a path. All you have to do is make sure that they're drawn before you use Follow Me. A face Just like with Push Pull, Follow Me needs a face to...
Understanding the relationship between edges and faces
Now that you know that models are made from edges and faces, you're most of the way to understanding how SketchUp works. Here's some information that should fill in the gaps and also check out additional resources on this book's companion Web site see the Introduction for details about the site Every time SketchUp can make a face, it will. There's no such thing as a Face tool in this software SketchUp just automatically makes a face every time you finish drawing a closed shape out of three or...
Printing to scale Windows and Mac
The steps in this section allow you to produce a scaled print from SketchUp I give Windows instructions first, and then Mac. When the user-interface elements are different for the two platforms, the ones for Mac are shown in parentheses. Figure 12-8 shows the relevant dialog boxes for printing to scale in Windows and on a Mac. Before you begin, make sure that you've switched to Parallel Projection and that your view is lined up the right way. See the previous section of this chapter for the...
Building on top of a snapshot
Here are the basic steps for building a model on top of your Google Earth snapshot 1. Make sure that you have a flat view of your terrain. Choose ToolsOGoogle EarthOToggle Terrain a couple of times to figure out which is the flat view, and then start from there. 2. Trace the footprint of the building you want to model on the imported black-and-white image. See image A in Figure 11-5. Of course, you're more than welcome to model something that doesn't exist yet if that's the case, feel free to...