Warming Up Your SketchUp Muscles
About eight SketchUp skills are useful every time you use SketchUp. Formal-education types would probably call them core competencies. Whatever you care to call these activities, we introduce them all in the following sections. Anytime you need a quick refresher, come back to this section.
Getting the best view of what you’re doing
Using SketchUp without learning how to orbit, zoom, and pan is like trying to build a ship in a bottle. In the dark. With your hands tied behind your back. Using chopsticks. Having just consumed the contents of the wine bottle. Get the picture?
Fully half of modeling in SketchUp uses the Orbit, Zoom, and Pan (H) tools, which let you change your view so that you can see what you’re doing. Most people who try to figure out SketchUp on their own take too long to understand the importance of these navigation tools and spend hours squinting, grunting, and having an all-around miserable time trying to get at what they’re working on. The following sections help you avoid the headache (literally).
Going into orbit
Hold a glass of water in your hand. Now twist and turn your wrist around in every direction so that the water’s all over you and the rest of the room. Stop when the glass is empty. We think that’s a pretty memorable way to find out about the Orbit tool, don’t you?
Just as your wrist helps you twist and turn a glass to see it from every angle, think of using Orbit as the way to fly around your work. Figure 3-15 shows Orbit in all its glory.
FIGURE 3-15: The Orbit tool lets you see your model from any angle.
Press and hold down your mouse’s scroll wheel, and move your mouse around. See your model swiveling? Release the scroll wheel when you’re done. Using your mouse to orbit means that you don’t have to switch tools every time you want a better view, which saves you
truckloads of time. You can even do this while you’re using most other tools.
There’s a secret trick to effective orbiting: Your model twists, turns, and rotates about the center of your screen.
Zooming in and out
Hold your empty glass at arm’s length. Bring the glass rushing toward you, stopping just short of smashing you in the nose. Now throw the glass across the room, noticing how it shrinks as it gets farther away. That, in a nutshell, describes the Zoom tool. We couldn’t figure out why the glass was getting bigger, but then it struck us …
You use Zoom to get closer to (and farther from) your model. If you’re working on something small, you zoom in until it fills your modeling window. To see everything at once, zoom out. Figure 3-16 is a demonstration.
FIGURE 3-16: Use the Zoom tool to get closer to the action.
As you’re drawing in SketchUp, you zoom in and out of your model all the time. The following tips make zooming quick and easy:
To zoom in and out, roll your mouse’s scroll wheel. When you stop scrolling, you stop zooming and revert to your active tool.
As you scroll, SketchUp zooms in on your cursor. Position the cursor over whatever part of your model you want to see closer (or farther away).
Use Zoom Extents to see everything. Click the Zoom Extents button on the toolbar to have your model fill the screen.
Just panning around
Using the Pan (H) tool is a lot like washing windows: You move the paper towel back and forth, but it stays flat and never gets any closer to or farther away from you. The Pan (H) tool is basically for sliding your model view around in your modeling window. To see something that’s to the right, you use the Pan (H) tool to slide your model to the left. It’s as simple as that.
Here’s the best way to pan: Hold down your mouse’s scroll wheel button and then press and hold the left mouse button. When you do these things at the same time, your cursor temporarily turns into the Pan (H) tool, and you can move your mouse to pan. If it’s hard for you to hold down both the scroll wheel and the left mouse button, you can also hold down the scroll wheel and the Shift key.
Drawing and erasing edges with ease
Here’s the secret to modeling anything you want in SketchUp: Learn to use the Line tool without having to think too much about it. You use the Line tool to draw individual edges, and because SketchUp models are really just fancy collections of edges (carefully arranged, of course), anything you can make in SketchUp, you can make with the Line tool.
SketchUp models are made up of edges and faces. Any time you have three or more edges that form a closed shape and are
on the same plane, SketchUp creates a face. If you erase an edge that
defines, or borders, a face, the face disappears too. Take a look at the section “
All about Edges and Faces” earlier in this chapter for more information on the relationship between edges and faces.
Drawing edges is simple. Just follow these steps:
1 Start the Line tool.Pressing the L key activates the Line tool.
2 Click where you want your line to begin.
3 Move your cursor to the desired endpoint for your line, and click again to end.As you move the cursor, notice how SketchUp stretches a rubber band back to the starting point. When you select the endpoint, the Line tool draws the line and then autorepeats, automatically starting a new line at the end of the previous one you drew.
4 When you want the Line tool to stop drawing lines, tap the Esc key to snip the line at the last spot you clicked.
SketchUp lets you draw lines in two ways: You can use the click-drag-release method or the click-move-click one. We highly recommend training yourself to click-move-click. You’ll have more control, and your hand won’t get as tired. When you draw edges by clicking and
dragging your mouse (click-drag-release), you’re a lot more likely to “drop” your line accidentally. Because the Line tool draws only straight lines, think about using it less like a pencil (even though it looks like one) and more
