Aidan Chopra

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.

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.

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

Sometimes you need to draw temporary lines while you model in SketchUp. These temporary lines, or guides, are useful for lining up things, making things the right size, and generally adding precision and accuracy to what you’re building. In previous versions of SketchUp, guides were called construction geometry because that’s basically what they are: a special kind of entity that you create when and where you need them.

SketchUp has a relatively little-known feature that often helps when it comes to making roofs with lots of pitches: Intersect Faces. Here’s what you need to know about this terrific little tool: Intersect Faces makes new geometry from existing geometry. It takes faces you’ve selected and creates edges wherever they intersect.

If you’re going to use SketchUp to draw a 2D plan, the first thing you need to do is orient your point of view. It’s easiest to draw in 2D when you’re directly above your work, looking down at the ground plane. You also want to make sure that you’re not seeing things in perspective, which distorts your view of what you have.