Intro and quick question

Hi All, I’m new to sketchup and still learning the basics. This is probably a very silly questions but when I create circles or rectangles and select the blue axis sometimes the object is on the floor and other times it’s elevated above the floor. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.

Can anyone advise me?

Thanks

SketchUp has to guess where in the 3D space the object hould be created. You can help it with a clear view direction, if you want to create a circle or a rectangle in the red-green plane, you can view the model more from the blue (up) direction. Or you can force one direction with the inferences (here e.g. the arrow keys).

Good places to start The Learning Center and The SketchUp You Tube Channel. Both are sponsored by the SketchUp Crew and well worth the time spent there.

Thank you. I have been doing this and repeating the same step, sometimes it’s elevated or below the floor and other times its on the floor. I’ve used the arrow key to select the blue axis, the box is drawn in blue but still hovers above the ground if I rotate my view to horizontal ground level.

It’s often helpful in a new drawing to start a rectangle, circle, pie, polygon or other new object with either a corner or the centre at the origin. That locates it not only on the blue (z) axis but also at a defined position in the red/green plane.

Once you have some objects in your model you can use inferencing and the arrow keys to position and orient other new objects precisely.

And don’t forget to make each newly drawn object into a component (or less usefully, group), before going on to draw the next one. Usually, the simplest way to select all of a newly drawn object is to triple click on any part of its geometry, to select all the connected edges and faces. (Took me AGES to figure that one out when I started with SU many years ago!)

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