OH yeah- one more.
Years ago, someone told me about “Save a copy as”.
If you Save-As…you are constantly changing the name of the nmodel…it can get very very confusing.
So here’s what I do.
I make my own periodic backups. Usually at the beginning or end of the day…and at major moment where I’m about to take a radical turn…Save the file normally. Then….“Save a Copy AS…”
If your model is named “Jones Residence”…then Save a Copy As…
“Jones Residence_2018-08-03_1043”
Make a separate folder in your “Models” folder called “Backups”
Dump all these backups in there. Let them live there for the job duration.
The filename stays the original name…but you’re adding a date stamp manually. if you use the year-month-day format, they will all stack up in order by date…and time (so you can do multiple per day and still identify them discretely)
I can’t tell you how many times this has saved my butt. All of a sudden, I’m working and realize the entire landscape…or the entire third floor is gone. Heck…if you are focused on a particular area of first floor for two days, it’s pretty easy to forget that the third floor and landscape exist. When I though I was selecting some small item to delete two days ago…I was actually also selecting the landscape…and I deleted it!!!. i couldn’t’ “see” it…so I never knew! Now…a day or three later…that is not a good place to be. But…you go back thru your list of backups…find yesterday’s…nope…the day before…nope…the day before…AHAH! there it is. Copy the landscape group (you did make it all one group, right? Whew!) …go to your current Jones Residence model, and Paste-in -Place (if you’re not using THAT gold nugget, you NEED to know about it!)
Agreed. That looks like some hidden geometry somewhere. I created something like that:
The bounding box for the group looks bigger than what’s visible. Turn on View>Hidden Geometry and it looks like this:
Hello, I am just a beginner with SU and I am trying to use a .png file of a floor plan to create a model of the house. I found a tutorial on youtube but when I follow the steps it is not behaving the same as in the tutorial and I have been googling and googling and cannot figure out why. In order to create the exterior walls I used the rectangle tool and then offset and then a bunch more rectangles because the house is a funny U-shape. I remove all of the lines connecting the rectangles so that I am left with one continuous exterior wall that is U-shaped. I triple click on the face of any part of the exterior wall and a nice solid blue line outlines every side of the exterior walls plus the face has dots. I then select “create group”. At this point the screen suddenly changes and there is now a solid blue line which is the original rectangle that I used. In the tutorial once the group is made the display stays the same showing all of the sides and faces of the exterior walls. Does anybody know what I am doing wrong?
This describes what you should see immediately after making the group. The solid blue lines around the outside is the bounding box of the group. It’s what you should see if the group is selected. If you click in space with the Select tool somewhere away from it, the group should be deselected and the blue goes away.
To make any changes to the geometry in the group you need to open the group container for editing.
As Dave says, you should be starting with the tutorial at the link he provided.
Thank you very much. I will start going through those tutorials. I had previously watched different tutorials on using the various tools and grouping and stuff so I thought I could just kinda follow along with youtube videos but I guess I better take some more tutorials to get a better understanding of the basics. Thank you.
One thing you’ll find is that anyone can upload videos to YouTube and call them tutorials. It doesn’t require them to know anything about the subject they are talking about nor does it require them to be able to teach. When you are starting out, it’s a good idea to use sources like the Learning Center and the videos on YouTube produced by SketchUp. At least do that until you get to the point where you can discern if other tutorials you are watching are good or not. Otherwise it’s just the blind leading the blind.
