Aidan Chopra

SketchUp offers keyboard shortcuts for the tools you use most often as you create models. To select the tool you want, simply press the letter that's indicated in the following table. Tool Shortcut Key Line L Eraser E Select Spacebar Move M Circle C Arc A Rectangle R Push/Pull P Offset O Rotate Q Scale S Zoom

Combining section views with scenes to create an animation is both a useful and impressive way to show off your SketchUp model. 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 may 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.

A really great way to use scenes is to pretend you’re walking or flying through your SketchUp model. By setting up your scenes sequentially, you can give a seamless tour without messing around with the navigation tools. This setup is especially handy when you need to walk and talk at the same time.Here are some tips that can help you to simulate a person walking or flying through your model with scenes: Adjust your field of view.

Two tools from the SketchUp Extension Warehouse are essential for 3D printing: CleanUp3 and Solid Inspector2, both created by Thomas Thomassen. CleanUp3 checks and simplifies the geometry of your SketchUp model. It combines multiple faces, eliminates extraneous data, and erases any lines that don’t make a face.

If you’re wondering how to get rid of all the ugly lines that appear when you use SketchUp’s Follow Me, the answer is pretty simple: You can smooth edges, just like you can hide them. The difference between hiding and smoothing is illustrated by the images of the cylinders in the image below: When you hide an edge between two faces, SketchUp treats those faces as though your edge is still there — it just doesn’t show the edge.

To make it easier to visualize your spaces, you can decide to offset (using the Offset tool) an exterior wall thickness on your SketchUp model. Here’s how you do it: Using the Offset tool, offset your closed shape by 8 inches to the outside. An offset of 8 inches is a pretty standard thickness for an exterior wall, especially for houses in my neck of the woods.

In a 2D program like Photoshop or Illustrator, the concept of layers makes a lot of sense: You can have content on any number of layers, sort of like a stack of transparencies. You find a distinct order to your layers, so anything on the top layer is visually in front of everything on all the other layers. But hold on a second — SketchUp isn’t a 2D program; it’s a 3D program.

You can use SketchUp’s modeling tools (with a little help from the Match Photo dialog box) to build a model based on a photograph you have matched. Here are two basic concepts: The process is iterative, not linear. Building a model using a matched photo entails going between drawing edges, orbiting around, drawing more edges, going back to your matched photo scene, and drawing yet more edges.

When mapping photos onto flat faces, you can choose the easy way or the hard way. Unfortunately, the hard way is the method you end up using the vast majority of the time. Importing images by using the File menu lets you take any image and map it to any flat face in your model. Before you follow these steps, make sure you have at least one face in your model; you map your texture to a face.