Driving features / sketches with dimensions?

Hello all!

I am a proficient/experienced SolidWorks user (used professionally as an engineer for 12+ years), and I am really new to sketchup. I have watched a few youtube videos, and did some basic simple layout work as well for my house. I am in the process of designing some storage cabinets for my garage, as well as planning to do some more carpentry / woodworking and general room layout tasks.

One major hurdle I am having a hard time wrapping my head around is how to control dimensions on features or sketches. In SolidWorks - each unique feature has a dimension that is controlled until that sketch or feature is fully defined. I can click on any edge, and change that dimension and the solid model changes. In sketchup, this doesnt seems possible.

Here is an example. I make a rectangle in SU that is 2" x 5", then I realize I want to make it 1" less wide. Normally in SW I would just click the 5" dimension, and then type 4". In SU it seems I have to click on the entire edge, then move it back 1" to the right to yield a 4" width.

This seems like a really backwards way to model to me; instead of controlling the dimension you WANT, you have to continuously offset some known feature.

Is there a way around this that I am not aware of? Any tool that I can apply dimensions to the SU model and use that to drive the feature?

SU just works differently from SolidWorks.

There are other ways of changing/editing dimensions.

For your example you could use the Scale tool. Select the Rectangle, select the middle button on the 5" dimension, move it in the direction you want, then type the dimension you want: 4".

image

You should get this (I’ve added the dimension using the Dimension tool).

image

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Thanks John. Perhaps I will get more used to SU; just hard to rethink modelling approach after 12+ years.