Design Software Articles

Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-25-2022

Like any 3-D modeling program, SketchUp offers different ways to do common tasks. In this Cheat Sheet, you'll find tips on the best way to use SketchUp tools and to boost your productivity. Keyboard shortcuts also enable you to work quickly and easily in SketchUp, so you'll uncover keyboard shortcuts for common tools.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-22-2022

It's not enough to draw nice-looking lines anymore. If you want to compete in the AutoCAD realm, you need to carefully organize the objects you draw, their properties, and the files in which they reside. This guide provides basic information and tools for the AutoCAD drawing setup, keyboard shortcuts in AutoCAD, and the AutoCAD drawing scale and limits—without putting a T-square through your computer screen in frustration.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-14-2021

Tinkercad is a superb cloud-based 3D design platform, which enables you to design 3D prototypes and those 3D “wow” projects that you want to show off to your friends and colleagues (and your mum and dad). Tinkercad For Dummies gives you a great grounding in how to use Tinkercad, but what about all those little shortcuts and tips and tricks that will take you from being a Tinkercad Jedi padawan to a Tinkercad Jedi master? Well, you will find them all in this Cheat Sheet; everything from keyboard shortcuts to how to find what you want in the online Tinkercad libraries. It’s all here!

Article / Updated 10-02-2020

In some cases, you may want your prints to reflect the scale of your SketchUp design. In SketchUp for Web, scaled printing is available with a paid subscription (or as part of SketchUp for Schools). Here’s how printing to scale works in SketchUp for Web: Before entering the print preview, create orthographic views of your model and save them as a SketchUp scene. Scale is a notion that cannot be applied to model views in SketchUp’s perspective camera mode. To create an orthographic view, use the Search tool and type Ortho to activate the Parallel Projection camera mode. Then use view commands (and search queries) like Front, Top, or Align View to orient your camera as desired. When you have the orthographic view you want, create a new scene. Using Search, type Print to activate the print preview canvas. Click the Print Mode drop-down menu to the right of the canvas, select Scenes, and then choose the orthographic scene you just made. Click the Print Mode drop-down menu again, and choose Print to Scale. Notice that the view of your SketchUp model changes slightly. When you switch into this scaled printing mode, SketchUp resizes your model slightly and derives an arbitrary scale just below your list of scenes (see below). Set your desired drawing scale, and choose whether to display that scale on your printed page. You can assign any scale you want, but you probably want to pick one that will aptly display your SketchUp model view on the page you’re printing. You can type any units you like in the In Drawing and In Model fields, but the scale displayed in the canvas respects the unit settings in your model. You can change these in the Model Info panel, near the bottom of the utility tray on the right. Last, you can click the Print Scale check box to display the scale of your drawing on the printed page. Want to learn more? Check out our SketchUp Cheat Sheet.

Article / Updated 09-30-2020

As you set off on your modeling adventure, you’re can be prepared with ten SketchUp quick wins — techniques or extended workflows that upgrade the 3D superpowers you’ve been reading about in this book. You’ll find that these SketchUp tips and tricks are pretty quick to pick up. Moreover, many of these techniques are designed to speed the core mechanics of your 3D modeling. In fact, quick wins like these are available in every project you’ll do in SketchUp — hidden gems you’ll discover when you think “There’s got to be a quicker way to do this.” When you’re struggling, step back and realize that there is indeed a smarter way. Set your click style in SketchUp to click-move-click It’s tough to say out loud, but it’s possible that you’ve gotten pretty far in your SketchUp career while click-dragging your mouse for many SketchUp operations. If for some reason you just haven’t picked up the technique that lets you move your mouse freely between the beginning and end of most operations, you can force yourself to learn On the Window menu, choose Preferences (Mac: the SketchUp menu; web: app settings). In the Drawing section of the resulting dialog box, change from Auto Detect to Click-Move-Click. Click-move-click is what SketchUp calls click-release, click. But you don’t even have to think about what it’s called, because after you change that preference, it’ll be the only way SketchUp works. Customize your SketchUp shortcuts When you know the default SketchUp shortcuts, you should customize and use another dozen helpful shortcuts. You can choose your own shortcuts, of course; our suggestions are based on personal preferences and thumb wars. In desktop versions of SketchUp, you create or edit shortcut customizations by choosing Window→Preferences (Mac: SketchUp→Preferences). To assign shortcuts, look up the name of the command you want to customize and then click the input field to type a custom shortcut key. In SketchUp for web, use Search to look up the commands. When you mouse over a command name, you see a little empty rectangle to the right of its description. Click that rectangle to assign or reassign a shortcut. Here are ten SketchUp shortcuts to customize right now: X-ray (X): The X-ray face style toggles the transparency of faces in a model. This shortcut is super-handy if you’re designing pieces that fit together and working with solid tools. X-ray is also great when you’re making complex selections; it helps you understand whether you’ve selected more than you want. If you use the shortcut, you can toggle X-ray on demand. Hide Rest of Model (Shift+M): As your model becomes complex, you’ll want to get a better view of the groups and components that you need to edit. This display command turns off everything outside the context of a group and component so that you can orbit around and see what you need to see. SketchUp also operates considerably faster when you hide the rest of the model while editing a piece of it. Color by Axis (Shift+X): It’s possible that you might slip an inference with the Line tool and create a mysterious missing face. This mistake happens often enough that it’s handy to have the Color by Axis style toggle at your fingertips to identify edges that have strayed off course. Like the X-ray shortcut, it a helps you spot important details. View Hidden Geometry (Shift+H): Whether you hide edges and faces yourself, SketchUp hides them all the time. Whenever you extrude arcs or circles, SketchUp creates hidden edges. As your modeling skills improve, you’ll often need to see this hidden geometry to grab better inferences, so this shortcut comes in handy. Perspective or Parallel Projection (Shift+P): For some reason, these two camera settings do the same thing: toggle between a perspective and orthographic view of your model. If you’re setting up a model to create plans or elevations, you’ll find yourself using this shortcut (which you need to assign to only one of the commands) to switch your world view back and forth. Create Scene (+):Scenes are really useful for saving a view or a design scenario. You can create them on the fly with this simple shortcut. Previous & Next Scene (< and >): If you’re considering presenting from SketchUp, it’s a good idea to set up this simple pair of shortcuts to reverse or advance a scene-by-scene narrative. The people you’re presenting to will think you’re a wizard. Shadows (Shift+S): Let’s face it: Shadows make your SketchUp model look cooler. But they can slow SketchUp as your project grows in size. Slip shadows on and off occasionally. Most users find that intermittent shadow feedback to be visceral and pleasing, like a free bottle of sparkling water. Make Group (G) and Make Component (Shift+G): Let’s go rogue here: you should overwrite the default shortcut for the important Make Component command and instead assign G to Make Group. You don’t always know what an object is when you start creating it, and making a component costs you a few extra clicks. So keep G on your trigger finger to create a group immediately, drawing objects in their own modeling context right away. Then, after you’ve made a group, press Shift+G if the group needs to be a component. Paste in Place (Shift+V): You’re going to be using Paste in Place all the time — more often than normal pasty Paste but not so much that you can break your Ctrl+V muscle memory. Bring Shift+V into your 3D lexicon to move geometry in and out of groups or components (or across modeling files) efficiently. Use SketchUp’s inference locking force Inferencing is like the way of the Jedi. You must trust the inferencing force and know that it is always with you in SketchUp — and can be invoked with arrow keys. Here are two inferencing techniques that will significantly speed your work: Use the arrow keys to lock orientation for the Move tool. When you want to raise or lower something in SketchUp, activate the Move tool, click your selection on its bottom corner, and press the up arrow key. Now your cursor is free to roam the screen, and you can to pick an exact finishing height for your move. Inference locking with the arrow keys is accurate as any other technique but requires less mental effort. Use the Get Down inference to operate off axis. This is the best inference name ever, right? Seriously, our new favorite inference technique is to hover over an over a face or an edge and then press the down-arrow key to lock a tool orientation (the magenta inference). The Get Down inference lets you treat the orientation of any edge or face as if it were a 4th axis, along with red, green, and blue. That’s why it’s so hip, man. To get off the down-arrow inference, first, click the down key again. The magenta inference will run perpendicular to your reference. Click the down key a third time and you’ll unlock the inference. Transport yourself across space and time Okay, the title is a slight exaggeration, but some camera tools help you warp through a SketchUp model with much less effort than orbiting and zooming across a model. Integrate them, and your perceived effort of modeling goes down. That’s a big deal! Try these camera techniques in SketchUp to see whether any of them sticks for you: Use the Orbit tool to center your screen on an object. If you’re modeling an interior, this tool is a handy way to skip your view across a room. With Orbit activated, double-click any geometry on the screen. SketchUp jumps to center your screen on the focus of the double-click. Use Zoom Window to jump to a nearby selection. With Zoom Window (choose Camera →Zoom Window), you can use a selection window to jump your view closer to a specific area. It’s recommended that you not use Zoom Window to jump to areas that are very far away. Use Zoom Selection to jump right to a selection. If you wanted to remember one more keyboard shortcut, this one might be it. With the Select tool activated, you can right-click an object and choose Zoom Selection from the shortcut menu to warp right to it. Round off edges with SketchUp’s Arc Tool The following technique for rounding corners around a series of edges is just too cool to leave out of this book. This fillet — or rounding — method works on flat faces only. Follow these steps and reference the images below to round edges: With a flat face, activate the two-point Arc tool. Near one of the junctures between two edges, click to start drawing an arc. Hover your cursor over the adjacent edge to find the magenta tangent inference. Double-click to finish your arc. The face and edges on the outside of your arc disappear. But wait, there’s more. Move your cursor close to another corner or intersection, and double-click the face (not the edges). The round-off repeats and will keep repeating if you continue to another intersection of edges. Without changing from the Arc tool, you can continue to apply the same rounding to as many edge intersections as you want as long they’re on a flat, nonextruded face. This method of rounding edges is also configurable. When you’re done rounding, use the Select tool to select an arc, then open the Entity Info panel to redefine the arc’s radius or segments. Pretty smooth — or at least as smooth as you want it. Use SketchUp’s Scale Tool to set length for simple objects Here’s a quick alternative for simple extrusion when you know exactly how long a simple, uniform object (such as a 2×4) needs to be: Select the object you want to scale. Make the object a group, if it’s not one already. Using the Scale tool, click one of the middle grips that define the length of the object. Scale the object in one direction. If you chose the right grips, the object extrudes as though you ‘re push/pulling it. If you grabbed the wrong grip, press the Esc key and try again. Click to finish your scaling. Click anywhere at all. Type how long you want that object to be and press Enter to set the length. Just like telling SketchUp, the length of an extrusion after using the Push/Pull tool, you can define the dimensions of a Scale operation by typing an input right after finishing the operation. Remember, this technique works only with simple, uniform objects — such as dimensional lumber — but it’s very useful when you need to redefine the length of a piece without a few extra clicks of the Tape Measure tool. 10 extensions for Dummies Truth be told, there is soooo much to be said about SketchUp extensions — the add-on apps that you can install to access more modeling tools. Think of extensions as being like gems you find in a dungeon, unlocking new powers in SketchUp. But SketchUp extensions can give you superpowers — and they’re incredibly fun — so they’re worth exploring. Extensions are available only in desktop versions of SketchUp. You have to have a Pro subscription to use them. The quickest way to find and install extensions is to use Extension Warehouse(choose Window→Extension Warehouse). Extension Warehouse works just like an app store on your smartphone: You search for extensions, browse them by category, and install them in SketchUp. You can install many extensions for free; others cost a little bit of money. After you’ve installed an extension, use Extension Manager to check its status or deactivate it. Choose Window→Extension Manager to find a few extensions that come installed in SketchUp Pro. Deactivating extensions that you don’t use is a good idea, especially as you start collecting them. Fewer enabled extensions usually means faster and more stable modeling. When will you need extensions? That’s the question! To help you start thinking more three-dimensionally about your modeling, in the table below you discover ten add-ons that are worth checking out — and teaching yourself — as you get into the wild world of SketchUp extensions. Ten SketchUp Extensions Extension What to Use It For Get It From Weld By Smustard Singe edges together. Ideal for welding tangent arcs for smooth extrusions. Weld is free, and it’s almost essential for a good Follow Me. Extension Warehouse Bézier Curve By SketchUp You can use this extension to get 3D curves. This extension is also very useful for tracing over hand sketches or imported images. Extension Warehouse Soap Skin Bubble By Josef L. Create complex mesh faces between noncoplanar edges (like a loop of whacky Bézier curves). Extension Warehouse Joint PushPull By Fredo6 Give almost anything thickness with this 3D extruder, including that wacky shape you made from Bézier curves. SketchUcation Plugin Store RoundCorner By Fredo6 Precise chamfering and filleting — basically, edge magic. SketchUcation Plugin Store Skimp By Mindsight Studios You’ll find lots of models on the Internet that are too big to load into your project. Skimp simplifies these behemoths to a noncrippling size for composition in SketchUp. Extension Warehouse Open Cut List By L’Air du Bois Designate objects as a certain kind of wood and then use this extension, which spits out a list of pieces and a cutting diagram that accounts for kerf, clearance, and the dimensional lumber you’re working with. Make some sawdust! Extension Warehouse Mirror By TIG If you use other CAD programs, you’ve probably spent some time looking for this extension, which quickly copies and inverts a selection across a defined plane. SketchUcation Plugin Store True Bend By ThomThom Lots of extensions that bend and distort models, but the best one to start with is True Bend, which bends an object around a 360-degree radius. Extension Warehouse Eneroth Random Selection By Eneroth3 Variety can do wonders for your model. Use this extension to randomly select objects in a uniform array. Then move, scale, or replace them to inject chaos into SketchUp. SketchUcation Plugin Store Get SketchUp on your smartphone Okay, it’s true: You can’t use SketchUp to draw 3D models on your smartphone. But you can get the free SketchUp app on a smartphone or tablet to view and reference your models. Think about walking around a hardware store with an exploded view of your model or a scene in which you’ve saved a parts list or cutting layout. Here’s how to get your models on a phone or tablet: Install SketchUp Viewer from an app store. This part is pretty simple. Go to the app store for your device, and search for SketchUp Viewer. Open the app, and access models stored in Trimble Connect, 3D Warehouse, Dropbox, or on your device. If you use SketchUp for web, the models you’ve saved are already stored in Trimble Connect. If you use SketchUp Pro, you can store your models in Trimble Connect (choose File→Trimble Connect→Publish Model) or upload models to 3D Warehouse. Models that you’ve stored in any of these places are available by clicking the cloud icon in the top-right corner of the screen. Additionally, you can load models from Dropbox or from device storage. Now that you have your models on your phone or tablet, what are you going to do with them? Well, you’re going to use them. Isn’t that the beauty of making models in the first place? Here are a few ways to use your models with the SketchUp Viewer. Use Styles and Scenes to deliver 3D presentations. Almost everything about styling and composing models for 3D presentation in Part 3 applies in the SketchUp Viewer, because all the scenes you create in SketchUp are available in the Viewer. Your saved model views — with hidden groups and components (or tags), dimensions and labels, section planes, shadows, or styles — are at your fingertips on your device. In addition to jumping between scenes you’ve saved, you can use the Position Camera tool to jump your camera to first-person view. (Find it by clicking the Orbit icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen.) Reference project plans while building something. Wouldn’t you know, the model views that you make to build a project — orthographic plan and elevations, section views that show construction details, dimensions, and label callouts — are pretty useful to reference while building a project. Why wouldn’t you want all this information on your workbench, caked in sawdust? Take measurements on the fly. Need to double-check the dimensions of your design? After you’ve made a note with your real-life tape measure, pull out the 3D Tape Measure tool (the second icon from the top) in SketchUp Viewer. Now place a finger on your screen. You’ll see a little magnified view of your model with an inference cursor. Move your finger to snap to the inference you want; then remove your finger from the screen. Repeat to set the end of your measurement. SketchUp spits out a model dimension. Do you think it will fit? Preview models in real space with augmented reality. Okay, here’s the fun part: You can use the SketchUp Viewer to preview your models in the context of real-world space, using the augmented reality tools available on many smartphones and tablets. The SketchUp Viewer activates the camera on your device and then projects a scaled 3D model onscreen. The result is a scaled preview of your model, set in the frame of the real space you may be designing it for. This feature comes in very handy for evaluating room layouts, previewing custom built-in projects, and catching Pokémon at will. Turn off your SketchUp profiles It’s the nature of computers: At some point, you’ll make a SketchUp model that slows down. When that happens, you can lessen the processing load of SketchUp in many ways. The simplest (and quickest) method to try to speed up SketchUp is to turn off edge profiles. This display setting removes the extra line thickness applied to edges that define the outline of your geometry. You can turn off profiles by changing or editing a style, but it’s much faster to set a customized keyboard shortcut. Now you can toggle in and out of edge profiles. Just like toggling shadows on and off, toggling profiles is a nice way to throttle the demand on your computer while keeping the sketchy look and feel a keystroke away. Connect with the SketchUp community The Internet is an infinite resource of highly specialized SketchUp knowledge. People across the world, in many languages, have uploaded detailed YouTube videos in which they explain how to do something very specific in SketchUp. Generate a cut list, draw with subdivisions to create organic shapes, model videogame levels, import GIS data — you can do it all in SketchUp, because a community of SketchUp people (we call them SketchUppers) are inspired to share and teach those who are willing to learn. You’ll find them in the SketchUp Forums, SketchUcation, and YouTube. Almost anywhere you can ask a question, a SketchUpper will answer it. One last tip: Ask a friendly question, and you’ll get a helpful answer. With that, you are now in the good hands of SketchUppers everywhere. Want to learn more? Check out SketchUp Cheat Sheet.

Article / Updated 09-30-2020

The bad news is that every new SketchUp user encounters certain problems, usually in the first couple hours of using the software. You can call these problems growing pains. The good news is that, because these SketchUp problems are common, you can anticipate a lot of the bad stuff you’ll go through. This article offers you SketchUp tips and tricks to help you work around those issues. SketchUp won’t create a face where you want it to You’ve dutifully traced all around where you want SketchUp to create a face, but nothing’s happening. If you follow along in the image below, which was inspired by a visit to the M.C. Escher museum in Amsterdam, you see the top-left image seems to show a cube beside a rectangle, but the rectangle didn’t produce a face. In the top-right image, a diagonal line was drawn between diagonally opposite corners of the rectangle, producing two triangular faces, but something still doesn’t look right. Changing the camera position to standard front (lower-left image) and right side (lower-right image) reveals the source of the problem. It turns out that the upper-right corner of the rectangle doesn’t lie on the red-blue plane but is actually to the right of the blue-green plane, and to the right of the blue-red plane. The upper-left image isn’t really an optical illusion; it just looks like one. Ninety percent of the time, when SketchUp doesn’t create a face where you think it should, an edge isn’t on the plane you think it’s on. To check whether your edges are coplanar, draw an edge that cuts diagonally across the area where you want a face to appear. If a face appears now, your edges aren’t all on the same plane. To fix the problem, you have to figure out which edge is the culprit, and the Color By Axis option may help you see this information at a glance. Here’s how Color By Axis works: In the Styles panel, change your edge color from All Same to By Axis. SketchUp draws the edges in your model using the color of the axis to which they’re parallel; edges parallel to the red axis are red, and so on. Look carefully at the edges that you wanted to define your desired face. Are all the edges the color they’re supposed to be? If they’re not all supposed to be parallel to the drawing axes, this technique doesn’t do much good. But if they are, and one (or more) of them is black (instead of red or green or blue), that edge (or those edges) is your problem child. Fix it and switch back to All Same when you’re done. If the plane isn’t the problem with your edges, then check whether one edge is part of a separate group or component. To check whether you have a component problem, try hiding groups or components and checking the edges to make sure that they’re all in the group or component you think they’re in. A common source of this problem is SketchUp’s inferences. As you slide the mouse over a face you may unwittingly be latching on to an unintended inference, such as the edge of a surface that is part of a cylinder. Watch those inference prompts, and use Undo when you complete a face but no face appears. Your SketchUp faces are two different colors In SketchUp, faces have two sides: a front and a back. By default, these two sides are different colors. When you use certain tools, such as Push/Pull or Follow Me, on a face, sometimes the faces on the resulting geometry are “inside out.” For some people, the issue is just bothersome. If you want to 3D-print your model, you need to fix the issue so that your model will print correctly. To fix this issue, right-click the faces you want to flip and choose Reverse Faces from the context menu. If you have lots of faces to flip, you can select them all and then choose Reverse Faces to flip them all at once. In 3D printing, this process is called checking your model’s normals. The plan for the structure you see below was for all the outside walls to be wood siding and the interior walls to be painted yellow. But the top two images show that somehow the left wall got reversed. The bottom two images show that the problem has been solved by selecting the yellow face and reversing it. Edges on a face won’t sink in Edges on a face tend not to sink in 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. When the edges you just drew don’t seem to cut through the face you drew them on, try these approaches: Retrace one of the edges. Sometimes that works — you’d be surprised how often. Select Hidden Geometry from the View menu. You’re checking to make sure that the face you just drew isn’t crossing any hidden or smoothed edges; if it is, the face you thought was flat may not be. Make sure that the face you drew on isn’t part of a group or component. If it is, undo a few steps and then redraw your shape while you edit the group or component. Select the face + edges, right-click, and choose Intersect Faces→With Selection. This approach is often needed when you are working with one or more curved surfaces. SketchUp crashed, and you lost your model Unfortunately, SketchUp crashes happen sometimes. The good news is that SketchUp automatically saves a copy of your file every five minutes. In the web version, these autosaves are captured in Trimble Connect as revisions. You can always view the revision history for a file by navigating to it in the Trimble Connect tab (by clicking Open in the menu at the top of the screen to access Trimble Connect). For any file, you can choose to view or restore an older version. In desktop versions, the file that SketchUp autosaves is actually a separate file, AutoSave_yourfilename.skp. If your file ever gets corrupted in a crash, an intact file is ready for you. The problem is that most people don’t even know that the autosaved file is there. Where do you find it? If you’ve ever saved your file, the autosaved file is in the same folder as the original; therefore, it’s very important that you save your file almost immediately after starting it. Simple, right? Not so fast. On a Mac, you may need to change your Library folder from hidden to visible. In the Finder app, hold down the Option key while you choose Go→Library. If you don’t hold down the Option key, Library may not appear on the menu. When you close your model, SketchUp typically assumes nothing untoward has happened and usually cleans up after itself by deleting the autosaved file. The really good news is that every time you save a file, SketchUp proactively saves two identical files, one with the normal file extension .SKP and the other with the file extension .SKB. You continue working on the .SKP file. If something goes really wrong with your model, you can always go back to how it was an instant before the last time you saved it. But you can’t find it in the Open File dialog box. Here’s the secret: In the Open File dialog box, go to the end of the File Name window, click the down arrow beside Sketchup Models (.SKP), and click All Files. Now the .SKB files show, and you can open them. (web: The same basic principles apply, but read more details on SketchUp's website.) To minimize the amount of work you lose when software (or hardware) goes south, always do two things: Save often — compulsively, even. Use the Save a Copy As command on the File menu. When you’re working on a big project, the following steps can help ensure you don’t lose any work: Save the original version of your file as yourfilename_Master.skp. That’s the file you’ll always be working on. Create a folder that lives in the same place as your Master file; call the folder something like Your file’s name Archive. Every half-hour or so, choose File→Save a Copy As, and save a sequentially numbered version of your file to the Archive folder. When you’re building a big model, it’s not uncommon for your Archive folder to contain 40 or 50 saved versions of the model dating back to when the project first started. Back up regularly. At least at the end of every work session, such as when you head to a coffee or lunch break, back up your files to a low-cost, high-capacity, high-speed portable USB drive, then remove it and keep it separate from your computer. At the end of your shift, take it to a different location. You don’t need to keep it in a bank vault, just in a separate building. Take it home at night, for example. You can always buy new hardware and software, but you can’t buy your personal files. SketchUp is sooooo slooooooooow The bigger your SketchUp model, the worse your computer’s performance. What makes a model big? In a nutshell, faces. Do everything in your power to keep your model as small as you can. Here are some tips for doing that: Reduce the number of sides on your extruded circles and arcs. Use 2D people and trees instead of 3D ones. 3D plants and people have hundreds of faces each. Consider using 2D ones instead, especially if your model won’t be seen much from overhead. Use search filters in 3D Warehouse. When you’re searching for models in 3D Warehouse, you can restrict your search result to show only models of a certain file size or polygon (face) complexity. Especially if your model is more than 10 MB, it makes sense to keep your 3D Warehouse downloads small! Some models are just big, and you can’t do much about it. Here are some tricks for working with very large SketchUp models: Make liberal use of the Outliner and tags. These SketchUp features were specifically designed to let you organize your model into manageable chunks. Hide everything you’re not working on at the moment; doing so gives your computer a fighting chance. Substitute simple forms for large numbers of complex components. For example, insert sticks as placeholders for big sets of 3D trees, cars, and other big components. Turn off shadows and switch to a simple style, such as Shaded in the Default Styles collection. It takes a lot of computer horsepower to display shadows, edge effects, and textures in real time on your monitor. When you’re working, turn off all that stuff. Use scenes to navigate between views. Scenes aren’t just for presenting your model; they’re also great for working with it. If you create scenes for the different views you commonly use and with different combinations of hidden geometry, then you don’t have to orbit, pan, and zoom around your gigantic model. To speed up things even more, deselect Enable Scene Transitions in the Animation panel of the Model Info dialog box. (web: Animation settings are in the Scenes panel.) You can’t get a good view of the inside of your SketchUp model It’s not always easy to work on the inside of something in SketchUp. You can do these things to make it easier, though: Cut into your model with section SketchUp’s Sections feature lets you cut away parts of your model — temporarily, of course — so that you can get a better view of what’s inside. Widen your field of view. Field of view is the part of your model you can see onscreen at one time. A wider FOV is like having better peripheral vision. You can change the field of view only when in Perspective view mode, but the setting will be remembered if you then switch to Parallel view mode. The image below shows the plan view of a room. If you zoom or walk in through the door — oops, tunnel vision. Increase peripheral vision by changing your field of view. Ah, that’s better! Now you can see that the picture hanging on the wall is the floor plan of this room. A face flashes when you orbit in SketchUp If you have two faces in the same spot — maybe one is in a separate group or component — you see a Z-fighting effect. SketchUp is deciding which face to display by switching back and forth between them; it’s not a good solution, but certainly a logical one — at least for a piece of software. The image below attempts to portray this effect in a single image. The only way to get rid of Z-fighting is to delete or hide one of the faces. You can’t move your SketchUp component the way you want When you insert some components into your model, the components by default glue to faces. A glued component instance isn’t actually glued in one place. Instead, it’s glued to the plane of the face you originally placed (or created) it on. For example, if you place a sofa component on the floor of your living room, you can move it around only on that plane — not up and down. This gluing behavior comes in handy when you deal with things like furniture; it allows you to rearrange things with the Move tool without accidentally picking them up. If you can’t move your component the way you want to, right-click it to see whether Unglue is an option; if it is, choose it. Now you can move your component around however you want. Bad stuff happens almost every time you use SketchUp’s Eraser When you use the Eraser tool, it’s pretty easy to delete stuff accidentally. Worse, you usually don’t notice what’s missing until it’s too late. Here are some tips for erasing more accurately: Orbit around. Try to make sure that nothing is behind whatever you’re erasing; use SketchUp’s navigation tools to get a view of your model that puts you out of danger. Switch on Back Edges. When you’re doing a lot of erasing, choose View→Edge Style→Back Edges. That way, you can see every edge in your model, and you’re less likely to erase the wrong ones. Use the Undo modifier of the eraser. Follow along starting in the upper-left image you see below. The intent is to erase the four edges in the center to create a single face. While erasing, you can select multiple objects by holding down the left mouse button while dragging the eraser over them. Oh, great googly moogly (or words to that effect) — you selected some things you didn’t want to erase. No problem: Don’t release the mouse button, but press and hold down the keyboard Alt key (Mac: ⌘). Now anything you drag the eraser over will be unselected. You can switch back and forth as desired, but nothing actually gets erased until you release the mouse button. Double-check. After you do a lot of erasing, give your model a quick once-over with the Orbit tool, just to make sure that you didn’t get rid of anything important. Put a sticky note on your computer monitor that says something like Check after Erase! just to remind you. All your edges and faces have different tags Using Tags in SketchUp can be a dangerous business. Here’s the short version of some good advice: Always build everything on Untagged, and assign whole groups or components to other tags only if you really need to. If you used tags in SketchUp and now things are messed up, here’s what you can do to recover: Make sure that everything is visible. Select Hidden Geometry on the View menu; then (in the Tags panel) make all your tags visible. Just make sure that you can see everything in your model. Choose Edit→Select All. In the Entity Info panel, move everything to Layer0. In the Tags panel, delete your other tags. When you’re prompted, tell SketchUp to move anything remaining on them to Untagged. Create new tags and follow best practices to avoid problems. If you’ve downloaded 3D Warehouse models, you’ll probably find that they have some tags that you don’t understand and might want to get rid of. They may have had significance to the original creator, but they can become clutter in your file, so they should be removed. Want to learn more? Check out our SketchUp Cheat Sheet.

Article / Updated 09-30-2020

SketchUp’s 3D Warehouseis a huge online collection of 3D models that is searchable and, most important, free for everyone to use. To access the 3D Warehouse, all you need is an Internet connection. If you have a SketchUp model that you want to share with the world, share with just a few people or store on SketchUp’s servers for safekeeping, the 3D Warehouse is where you put it. Why use SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse? Let’s dispel a popular misconception right away: When you upload a model to SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse, you aren’t automatically donating your hard work to the world — you can make uploaded models and collections private. With that understanding, here are some awesome reasons to use the 3D Warehouse: Sharing is good for your self-esteem. To be clear, you don’t need to subscribe to the nouveau-tech mindset that all information has to be free of charge. If you spent a lot of time on something and you don’t want to give it away, you shouldn’t have to. But if you’re proud of what you made, and sharing it with others would make you feel good, the 3D Warehouse offers a great way to contribute to the 3D modeling community. Create your own personal component library. Because SketchUp can download models directly from the 3D Warehouse into the model you’re working on, making your own online collections is incredibly handy. Everything you upload is accessible anywhere you happen to be working. For example, you can maintain a collection of the furniture in your house. Whenever you need a model of your sofa, you can just download it — no matter what computer you’re using. Explore uploaded models in 3D without having to download them. You can orbit, pan, and zoom around any model you can see on the 3D Warehouse — without having to download it into SketchUp first. If you want to show someone your model in 3D, you can just send them its 3D Warehouse link. Better yet, you can embed a 3D viewer window on your web page; anyone who visits your page can poke around. It’s never a bad idea to have a backup. If all you’re looking to do is save a copy of your work in the cloud (where you can’t spill your coffee all over it), services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive are great choices. None of these, however, give you direct access to your models inside of SketchUp. When you upload something to the 3D Warehouse, it’s both safe and readily available. It’s also a good idea to keep a backup of everything on a removable USB drive and store it away from your computer, preferably in a different building. Getting to SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse You can get to SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse in two ways: From SketchUp: Choose Window→3D Warehouse. A mini web browser opens right in front of your modeling window. In SketchUp for web, use Search to find and open 3D Warehouse. From the web: Check out SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse on the web. Accessing the 3D Warehouse from the web is a great way to hunt for and curate 3D models to quickly create component collections for use as you’re modeling. Go ahead and poke around the 3D Warehouse. It’s amazing what you find; thousands of people add new content every day. Much of it isn’t very useful, but you still find plenty of interesting things to download and look at. Taking apart strangers’ models is a great way to figure out how they’re built. Find, preview, and download models in SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse Before you get into sharing models, here’s a quick explanation of the most important thing you’ll do in 3D Warehouse: search, evaluate, and download 3D models: Finding models: Once you’ve searched in 3D Warehouse, there are various ways to refine and improve your model search results. In particular, it’s recommended that you filter your results by either Popularity or Likes and using Categories (in the upper left of your search results) to filter out models that aren’t related to what you’re looking for. Evaluating models for size and performance: Be careful about downloading models that are very big or complex. Unfortunately, a bad 3D Warehouse download can cripple your model. Keep the junk out by restricting the file size and polygon count of your searches. Downloading models: If you’re using 3D Warehouse while modeling, models you download will import directly into SketchUp, where they are placed on the cursor of the Move tool. Move the cursor to the desired location in your model and then click to place the new component at that location. If you downloaded a SKP file from 3D Warehouse in a web browser, you can drag and drop that file into SketchUp to place it in your model. Managing your SketchUp models online 3D Warehouse can sometimes feel like a free-for-all of individual models floating around in cyberspace. But if you use it intentionally, it’s actually a pretty organized place. If you are downloading models, the image below shows the doodads and gadgets you should pay attention to on a model’s details page: 3D model preview: This preview, which is available in a web browser only, enables you to hover over the image of a model and click 3D Model to preview the model using SketchUp’s camera tools. If you don’t have a mouse, press O for Orbit and H for Pan. Statistics panel: The numbers that appear on this section of the page are all interesting and useful, but the ones you should pay closest attention to are Polygons and Materials. These tell you the model’s size in the three metrics that count most: Polygons is 3D modeling shorthand for faces; the more you have, the harder SketchUp has to work to display your model. If you’re thinking about downloading a tree with 350,000 polygons, consider taking a vacation to Tahiti while SketchUp opens it. Materials are similarly taxing on your computer’s performance, but they only come into play for models that have been heavily photo-textured. Distance from Origin is how far away the geometry in a model is from the origin of that model. The bigger the number this is, the worse your model will perform when you initially load it into SketchUp. You can fix this, but beware: A model that is very far from the origin is likely to have other problems! Related Collections: If the model you’re searching for doesn’t quite do the trick, it can be useful to browse related Collections compiled by other people who are interested in the same thing you are looking for. In addition to information about a model you’re looking at, either yours or someone else’s, you’ll find some valuable tools for curation and organization, just below the title of the model. Like models: Liking a model by clicking its heart icon is a quick way to give it positive feedback. Likes make it easier for people to find useful 3D models. Whether or not you share models, you can help improve 3D Warehouse by liking things. Models you like are saved for you in My Content (on the Account menu). Adds to Folders or Collections: One of the most productive things you can do on the 3D Warehouse is collect models — your own and other people’s. Make yourself empty collections for things like chairs, scale figures, trees, and star destroyers. Then fill them with the amazing models you find as you’re exploring. Back in SketchUp, in the Components panel, choose My Collections from the Collections drop-down menu, and there they are, ready to use in your own work. Collections are public, so if you prefer to keep your libraries private, use Folders instead. In SketchUp, able to access folders by going to My Content in the 3D Warehouse mini-browser. Embed: Click here, and the 3D Warehouse serves up some HTML code that you can use to embed the model on a web page. The Embed feature is especially important for product manufacturers, designers, and anyone else who wants to let people explore a model in 3D without leaving their website. While we’re on the subject of SketchUp collections and folders, here’s how to create and manage them: Make sure you’re logged in to the 3D Warehouse. If you're logged in, you’ll see your username on the account drop-down menu at the top of every page in the Warehouse. If you’re not logged in, click Sign In (also at the top of every page) and enter your account credentials. Go to the model details page for a model you want to add to a Folder or Collection. To create a Folder or a Collection, click on the appropriate Folder or Collection icon. The Folder and Collections icons are located just below the lower-left corner of the image in the model details page. The Folder icon looks like a folder, and the Collection icon is right next to it. First things first: Decide how you want to organize things. Remember, folders are private to you; collections are visible to everybody. Then create a name for your new library. You can also create new folders or collections, using the icons on the My Content page. To add a model to an existing folder or collection, choose it from the list. As you create more folders and collections, you’ll see designations when you click the Folder or Collections icons. Add the model you are viewing to a folder or collection by choosing it from the list that appears. If you find yourself working on the same kind of project over and over, these techniques for searching for, evaluating, and organizing models comes in handy big time. A well-organized stash of attractive, high-performance SketchUp components is one of your best weapons for dramatically speeding your modeling. After all, why draw something from scratch if a perfectly good something already exists? Want to learn more? Check out our SketchUp Cheat Sheet.

Article / Updated 09-30-2020

Need to take a brief 10-minute SketchUp tour: a rundown of the layout, tools, and utilities you’ll interact with on a regular basis? Check out this brief walkthrough to see what you can expect from SketchUp and SketchUp for Web. Modeling window: See the big area in the middle of your computer screen? That’s your modeling window. You build your model here, and your modeling window always shows a 3D view of your model, even if you’re looking at it from the top or side. Key features of the modeling window are the model axes: three green, red, and blue lines that help define the directional space of your model. Menu bar (Desktop only): If you’ve used a computer in the past 30 years, the menu bar is nothing new. Each menu contains a long list of options, commands, tools, settings, and other goodies that pertain to just about everything you do in SketchUp. You should generally refrain from using the menu bar to find things, because that requires that you remember the name of a tool, the menu it lives on, and where on the menu it is. Menu (web only): In SketchUp for Web, you will be using the menu a lot less to find tools but just as much to open files, save copies using Save As, and change settings. Search (web only): A recent addition to the SketchUp interface is this quick way to find and activate tools and look up shortcuts. If you’re using the web version (it’s not available in SketchUp Pro yet), you’ll find this really handy when you start learning tools and utility settings that you don’t use that often or have a hard time remembering. Toolbar: Click a toolbar button to activate a tool or command. You’ll start to use tool icons naturally while using SketchUp. In desktop versions, you can customize your SketchUp toolbar setup to show tools you use most often, or to not show those tools whose shortcuts you’ve remembered. In the web version, similar tools are nested together in the toolbar. So when you click the Rectangle tool icon, you’ll switch to the Rectangle tool but also see the other shape-drawing tools available to you. Similarly, the Tape Measure tool contains other tools for measuring and labeling things. Large toolset (desktop only): Usually, it’s better to turn off the Large Toolset and attempt to use core commands by shortcuts. But if you prefer a visual reference for tool icons, you may prefer leaving the Large Toolset on to have all the tools handy all the time. You can can control its visibility by choosing View→Toolbars (Mac: View→Tool Palettes). Status bar: Consider this your SketchUp dashboard. The status bar provides helpful information about the SketchUp tool you are currently using. It’s important to check the status bar for reminders about modifier keys: keystrokes that you use in combination with certain tools to perform additional functions. Soon enough, you’ll know how to copy by using the Move tool with a modifier key. You’ll definitely forget this key, and when you do, the place to look is the status bar. The status bar also relays step-by-step instructions for the tool’s operation, but you may be better off using the Instructor. Utility panels desktop only): Before long you’ll start to interact with utilities — things like colors and display settings — that are generally organized on the right side of your SketchUp window. In desktop versions, you control which utility settings are visible via the Window menu. In more recent PC versions of SketchUp Pro, you can manage the default tray of utilities: Choose Window→Manage Trays, and use the Manage Trays dialog box to reconfigure what you do (or don’t) see here. On a Mac, utilities look like dialogs except that they’re neatly collapsible, and you can stack them aside in tidy trays when you are not using them. Utility panels (web only): In the web version, all utility panels — for stuff like saving model views or libraries of model textures — are organized on the right side of the screen, accessible by their icons. Opening a utility panel slides open a larger interface where you can access one or multiple panels. Use the X next to a panel name to close it, or use the arrow icon at the top right of the panel to hide the utilities you are currently using. Measurements box: You use this box all the time as you model in SketchUp, but you’ll never need to touch it. Depending on what you’re doing, this box displays information about what you’re modeling or enables you to specify a precise length, angle, or other measurement while modeling. Context (right-click) menus: Whenever you have something selected in SketchUp, you can right-click your selection to reveal a shortcut menu of commands and options. These are always relevant to whatever you right-clicked, so the contents of each menu are different. If you decided to proceed without a mouse, you can still right-click a trackpad, usually by using two separated fingers. Want to learn more? Check out our SketchUp Cheat Sheet.

Article / Updated 01-22-2020

AutoCAD can be your best friend. The latest version of AutoCAD is packed full of 3D tricks. Use the information below to make the most of AutoCAD. Would you believe that it took less than five minutes to produce the image below? Follow these steps to produce a 2D view from a 3D model: Click the Workspace Switching button on the status bar, and then choose 3D Modeling. Toolbars, palettes, and Ribbon panels flash on and off, and soon AutoCAD settles down to display the Ribbon, as configured for the 3D Modeling workspace with a few additional panels. Set up a 3D model. Create a new model or open an existing file that contains a 3D model.You can find the files used here at this link. Go to and download afd23.zip. The drawing named afd23a.dwg contains the model Use in the following steps. Switch to paper space. Click the Layout 1 tab near the lower-left corner of the screen. Delete the existing viewport by clicking the viewport object (the frame of the viewport) and then pressing Delete. By default, new drawings created from a standard template file contain a single viewport. If you’ll frequently create new drawings like this, set up a template file with the viewport already deleted. Click the Base button from the Create View panel on the Layout tab of the Ribbon, and then choose From Model Space from the drop-down list. The VIEWBASE command creates several new layers automatically. By default, they’re the opposite of the screen color (black or white), but they always print in black. You can change these layers to any color you want. Position the base view. AutoCAD automatically selects what it thinks is an appropriate scale, assuming that you’ll place the three standard orthographic views and one pictorial view. However, you can change it. Select a suitable place in the lower-left quadrant of the layout sheet.The Drawing View Creation contextual tab appears on the Ribbon, a drop-down list of view options appears at the cursor, and an option list appears on the command line. Define the base view. Using any one of the three selection methods — Ribbon, cursor, or command line — set up the base view as follows: Orientation: The view shows what appears to be the bottom view of the part because AutoCAD defines top, bottom, and so on relative to the world X,Y coordinates. Select Orientation and the Top to create the view you want. Hidden lines: The preview image in paper space always displays in shaded mode, regardless of the visual style of the model in model space. Change the Hidden Lines option to Visible and Hidden. The view won’t change yet, but don’t worry — it will after you complete the steps. Scale: This setting defaults to 1:4, which is suitable for your purposes if you started from the sample drawing. Visibility, or Edge Visibility: This setting specifies how to display edges that are formed where tangent surfaces meet. The normal practice is not to display them, but it sometimes causes features to disappear (or partially disappear). If you change this setting, hover the cursor over the Edge Visibility button in the Appearance panel of the Ribbon and pause for a few seconds; a much more extensive tooltip list then explains each option. Move: Specify a new location for the view before it is finally created. This isn’t such a big deal, though, because views can always be easily moved later. Exit: Or press Enter. You can edit any of these view specifications later, view by view. Place the other drawing views. When you finish placing and defining the base view, AutoCAD automatically runs the VIEWPROJ command. All you need is three quick clicks to place the top, isometric, and right-side views; then press Enter to have AutoCAD generate the views. Edit the isometric projection. Isometric projections don’t normally show hidden lines. Double-click anywhere in the isometric projection to bring up the Drawing View Editor tab on the Ribbon. Click Hidden Lines on the Appearance tab and choose Shaded with Visible Lines from the drop-down list. If a Ribbon button has a drop-down list, the Ribbon displays the last button that was used. Any one of four different buttons may be in this particular location. The image below shows three ortho views and a shaded isomeric view, which was created in 37.6 seconds. Add annotations. Add dimensions and text notes in the paper space layout. Dimensions are associative to their matching geometry if you use object snaps to the geometry when you place them. While you’re at it, perhaps you can use VIEWDETAIL to create a detail view at a different scale.When you submit a drawing to your boss, they’ll be impressed that you managed to create such a complex drawing, including the shaded isometric projection, in only three days. Place text and dimensions on their own layers. An isometric view and an isometric projection are different creatures. An isometric view is normally drawn so that lines that are parallel to the three principal axes appear in their true length, and an isometric projection foreshortens them due to the tilting and rotating of the viewing angle of the object. Traditional paper-and-pencil drawings use isometric views, whereas AutoCAD creates isometric projections. If you truly want an isometric view, the solution is simply to ignore the usual rule about drawing and inserting at full size. When creating an isometric projection, use this approximate scale factor to produce an isometric view: 1.2247441227836356744839797834917 You can also edit the insertion later, to make it match this scale factor. Editing views in AutoCAD You can apply two different types of editing to 2D views that were generated from 3D models. You can edit the view specifications themselves (start with the easy one): Select the base view, and then select the blue grip box that appears in the center of the view. Drag and drop the view into a new location. Interesting! If you move the base view, all the ortho views projected from it follow along, with some constraints. The ortho views don’t move in perfect unison as a single group, but they maintain their orthographic relationship to the base view.Similarly, you can move projected ortho views in only the direction that still maintains their ortho relationship to the base view. Better yet, all attached dimensions (you hope) also follow along. You can also double-click a view and then change the specifications that were used to create it. Refer to Step 9 above. To experience the magic of creating 2D views from a 3D model, return to model space and edit the model. For example, add a second hole (hint: subtract a cylinder), extend the length of the peg, and then return to the paper space layout. All your views and their dimensions are updated. AutoCAD creates the views as a series of anonymous blocks. They behave much like regular blocks, but because they don’t have normal names, you can’t access them directly to edit or explode them Additional 3D AutoCAD tricks To fully cover the 3D capabilities of AutoCAD would easily require a full book on its own, but meanwhile, here are a few high points: Don’t want four views? If you don’t want four standard views, you can create only the base view and then change its scale factor to better suit the sheet size. Need additional base views? If necessary, you can have more than one base view in a single layout. For example, one large drawing might show an assembly and its component parts. Didn’t create enough views? Use the VIEWPROJ command to add more projected views later. They don’t have to project from the original base view, but can project from an existing projected view. No longer need a view? You can delete a view, even a base view, without affecting the other views — except that doing so breaks the horizontal and vertical links between the views that were projected from it. No 3D model in your drawing? You can use the VIEWBASE command to generate views from a 3D model that lived in the model space of the current drawing. AutoCAD’s top model You may have generated 2D drawing views from a 3D model in model above. But if the VIEWBASE command cannot find a 3D model in the current drawing file, it opens a standard file dialog box so that you can browse for an Autodesk Inventor Inventor is the 3D parametric modeling software from Autodesk, primarily intended for the mechanical design field. Inventor is fully parametric, in that dimensional constraints drive the profiles that define the solid features that consist of the parts that comprise the assembly model that drives the 2D drawing views that Jack built. If you change a dimension on a 2D drawing of a part, everything updates, all the way down the line. The Inventor file isn’t inserted into the AutoCAD file. Instead, it’s attached like an xref. VIEWBASE creates a 2D drawing view based on it, and additional views can be projected from the base view. Here’s the magic part: The AutoCAD drawing views are still linked back to the Inventor file so that any changes made to the Inventor file reflect down to the AutoCAD file, updating it. Better yet, you can send the AutoCAD DWG file to a client or vendor without having to send the source Inventor file. The AutoCAD file contains only anonymous blocks for the 2D views and has nothing in model space. On the other hand, whenever the AutoCAD DWG file has access to the Inventor file, the AutoCAD drawing views update and remain in step with any changes made to the Inventor model. Here are more tips for working with AutoCAD and Inventor files: Mix and match 2D drawing views. If VIEWBASE finds an AutoCAD solid in your part, you can tell it to ignore it and let you attach it to an Inventor file instead. You can have more than one base view in an AutoCAD drawing, so you can mix and match 2D drawing views. One or more base views can come from an internal AutoCAD 3D model, and others can be linked to external Inventor files. Select additional solids. If model space contains more than one solid, VIEWBASE allows you to switch back to model space, where you can select and deselect solids to appear in the base view. For example, a model of a gearbox assembly might consist of many components. Separate views can be created, perhaps on several different layouts: one showing an outside view of the entire gearbox (which doesn’t need to include the internals such as gears and bearings); another showing only the input shaft, gear, bearings, and seals; and another showing the output shaft and its related components. Choose a different scale. The VIEWDETAIL command generates detail views at scales different from the parent view. Use different section views. The VIEWSECTION command has five options for creating section views: Full, Half, Offset, Aligned, and From Object. This command creates section views based on existing views in the layout. The cutting plane line that it generates can be manipulated like any regular polyline, and the section view then updates accordingly.

Article / Updated 10-11-2019

Many modification techniques and AutoCAD commands that you use in 2D drafting can be applied to 3D modeling. In addition, a specialized set of 3D editing commands is available in AutoCAD. All these AutoCAD commands are in the Modify panel on the Home tab when the 3D Modeling workspace is current. Selecting subobjects in AutoCAD Three-dimensional objects themselves are complex objects that can be made up of several hundred, or perhaps even thousands, of objects. Although these objects never stray from their parents, you can access them individually or in groups via subobject selection: selecting a vertex, an edge, or a face of a 3D object. After you select a subobject, you can use grip editing and the 3D gizmos to manipulate it. To more easily select subobjects, you can enable subobject filtering from the Ribbon. Vertex, edge, and face filters are located on the Subobject Selection Filter split button in the Selection panel on the Home and Solid tabs. The CULLINGOBJ and CULLINGOBJSELECTION system variables help limit object selection to the faces that are visible in the current view by ignoring faces around the back of the objects being viewed. By default, both these variables are turned off, so you can select objects in front and behind. If you have a complex model, turn on culling by clicking Culling in the Selection panel on the Home tab. To turn off culling, click the Culling button again. The button is shaded blue when the feature is enabled. If you need to select only a face on a 3D object, press and hold the Ctrl key and select the face you want to select. This method can be faster than turning subobject filters on and off. Working with gizmos in AutoCAD Although you can use the Move, ROtate, and SCale commands to modify 3D objects, they can sometimes give unexpected results in 3D. Enter the 3DMOVE, 3DROTATE, and 3DSCALE commands, which all use a gizmo or grip tool when a non-orthographic view is current. A gizmo restricts or constrains movement along the X,Y plane and the Z-axis. To use a gizmo, click an axis on the tool to restrict movement to that axis. You can access the three gizmos by using these methods: 3DMOVE: Click 3D Move in the Modify panel on the Home tab, or type 3DMOVE at the command line. 3DROTATE: Click 3D Rotate in the Modify panel on the Home tab, or type 3DROTATE at the command line. 3DSCALE: Click 3D Scale in the Modify panel, or type 3DSCALE at the command line. You can also access the Move, Rotate, and Scale gizmos in 3D by selecting objects when no command is active. You can set the default gizmo that is displayed when you use grips in 3D by opening the Gizmo drop-down menu in the Selection panel on the Home tab and selecting the gizmo that you want to be active. Right-clicking a gizmo lets you switch between different gizmos and constraints. More 3D variants of 2D AutoCAD commands Moving, rotating, and scaling objects are certainly the Big Three operations of 3D editing, but a number of other 3D variations on 2D editing commands are hiding in the wings, awaiting their turns in the spotlight. Getting your 3D AutoCAD ducks in a row Making objects align with each other in 3D can be a challenge at times, especially if you need to not only move an object in 3D but also rotate and scale it based on the specified alignment. AutoCAD has two commands you can use to align objects: ALign: Used to align 2D and 3D objects based on one, two, or three pairs of points. Based on the number of pairs of points that are specified and how they’re selected, the ALign command might move and rotate the selected objects into place. It can also be used to scale objects. On the Home tab, choose Align from the Modify panel slideout. 3DALign: An improved version of the ALign command that includes additional options as well as the ability to move and rotate a copy of the selected objects and use Dynamic UCS with the command. Click 3D Align in the Modify panel on the Home tab. Holding up a mirror The MIrror command is limited to working on the X,Y plane. If you want to mirror objects in 3D, you use the MIRROR3D command. Click 3D Mirror in the Modify panel on the Home tab. The MIRROR3D command is similar to the MIrror command, but you can control the plane on which the mirroring is performed. The generic 2D MIrror command works also in 3D, but you must employ a trick. As indicated in the preceding paragraph, MIrror works only in the X,Y plane — but it doesn’t have to be the World X,Y plane. The command works equally well in the X,Y plane of the current User Coordinate System (UCS). Associative arrays work in 3D as well as in 2D. AutoCAD has long had the 3DARRAY command; it’s similar to the old-style ARray command in that it doesn’t create an associative array object. For information on creating rectangular, polar, and path array objects, refer to the online Help system. Editing solids in AutoCAD You can edit 3D solids in a variety of different ways that you can’t edit other objects. You can use grip editing to change the shape of 3D solids, or use Boolean operations on a 3D solid to create complex models. You can fillet and chamfer the edges of a 3D solid by using the FILLETEDGE and CHAMFEREDGE commands. Using grips to edit solids Grip-editing is one of the most direct ways to modify an object. To edit a 3D solid by using grips, select the 3D solid when no command is running, and then select the grip that you want to use to edit the solid. Pay close attention to the grip you select; some grips give you control over changing the overall size of a solid; others might change only part of a solid, such as the face or top radius of a cone. Boolean operations You can join 3D solids by using the UNIon command to create a new 3D solid. You can also subtract volume from a 3D solid by using another, intersecting 3D solid to determine what should be removed with the SUbtract command. The INtersect command can be used to calculate a new 3D solid based on the volume that is common to two or more intersecting 3D solids. See the image below for examples. You can find these three commands in the Boolean panel on the Solid tab. Boolean operations are probably the most-used of the 3D commands. Yes, primitive solids such as a box or a wedge are easy to use, but most real-world 3D objects are more complex than the simple primitives. Something as apparently simple as a connecting rod on a car engine might require a dozen or so Boolean operations to add and subtract simpler solids until you arrive at the final design. You will often need to change to a different user coordinate system (UCS) before placing the next subobject to be combined with the base object. The easiest way to do this is to turn on UCSDETECT (F6) on the status bar. Then, as you move the cursor around while a create command is active, AutoCAD will automatically snap the UCS to any planar surface that it passes over. Filleting and chamfering Because fillets and chamfers are common real-world features, it’s logical that tools for creating them are available. You can fillet or bevel the edges of a 3D solid by clicking the Fillet Edge (or Chamfer Edge) split button in the Solid Editing panel on the Solid tab. Both commands allow you to select multiple edges to fillet or bevel. When you select an edge, AutoCAD gives you feedback on how the selected edge will be affected. The following image shows an L-shaped 3D solid that has been filleted and chamfered. To remove a fillet or chamfer, start the Erase command. Then, at the Select Objects prompt, hold down the Ctrl key and select the fillet or chamfer to be removed. For fillets, you may need to also remove nearby filleted corners that might have been created during the application of the fillet. The FILLETEDGE and CHAMFEREDGE commands were new in AutoCAD 2011. You can still use the Fillet and CHAmfer commands on 3D solids, but the new commands are much more efficient. Slice The SLice command lets you cut a 3D solid along a plane. You can slice a 3D solid by using a planar curve, such as a circle, 2D polyline, or surface, among many others. When you slice a 3D solid, you can choose which part of the 3D solid is retained, or you can keep both. This image shows a solid model that has been sliced in half. To start the SLice command, choose Slice from the Solid Editing panel on the Solid tab. After the command is started, specify a 3D solid to slice, an axis or object to define the cutting plane, and then, finally, which new 3D solids to keep. Use this guide to uncover more AutoCAD secrets.