I’ve watched over 20 tutorials now and i’m finding SketchUp really really useful.
I have 3 newbie questions which i hope someone can help me with. I thought it would best to post my 3 questions as one post, so thanks in advance if you can answer any of the following questions:
QUESTION 01
Is there a group / component window where by you can see all of your groups and components within your model, so you could choose to hide and unhide each group /component.
QUESTION 02
Is it possible to draw objects beside each other and then stack and snap them on top of each other.
For example, if i wanted to draw a building that had 3 floors, which were supported but steel columns, would it be possible to draw each floor independently as a group beside each other and then when i am finished drawing everything i’d like to be able to stack the groups on top of each other, where they would snap into place.
Is this possible? I’d much rather be able to build various parts of a model independently and then snap them all together in the end.
QUESTION 03
is there a setting to choose to make your models less jagedy / rough edges… so that your models look more smooth
Q1 yes, it’s called OUTLINER, you’ll find it under the ‘window’ drop down box. If you are going to use this, it’s important to name your groups and components, or it can become difficult to see what’s what.
When you click on the group, it highlight that group in the model, so you can write in a name directly in outliner by typing over ‘group’ or by going to entity info and typing the group name there.
Q2 yes, but make sure you make each floor a group before you stack them on top of each other. If you don’t want to see the lines on the steel columns where they join, either hide them or create a layer ‘always off’ and have this unchecked on all your scenes in the layers panel, and then assign all the lines you don’t want to see to this layer.
Q3 how your model looks depends on the style you have used. You can use different styles in different scenes. Different styles make your model run faster or slower, so you can use one style for quick modelling, and then use a more complex style for presentation scenes. There are tutorials about creating and editing different styles. You do this via the ‘styles’ option box found in the ‘window’ drop down box.
A small tip; having the outliner open (for me, at least) does seem to make SU crash a bit more frequently so make sure your autosave is on a good interval
Another thing to bear in mind is that items that are currently invisible (on a layer that is not visible) don’t appear in the outliner…