Hello. I am an architecture student who uses Sketchup regularly. I am still learning, and wanted to ask for any tips or techniques to create exploded axonometric / perspective views like the examples below.
To get an isometric view, first set the camera parallel projection and then set it to isometric. The other way around just sets an arbitrary camera angle that gives wrong measurements, but is close enough to isometric for the cause of this issue to be very hard to find. I’ve spent hours on this in the past.
To get an isometric drawing to scale you can export that view to scale like any other view (either print to PDF or by using LayOut). Then scale up the exported image by a factor of 1.1498299142610595 to compensate for the axes being viewed at an angle and not orthogonal to the camera. After doing this you can measure exact dimensions from the isometric drawing (as long as you measure along the axes and not diagonally). Even if you don’t plan to measure the exported drawing it can be a good idea to have it to a defined scale to easier understand the size o the design.
The quite odd value 1.1498299142610595 can be found through a little modeling and measuring in SketchUp as shown in this quick video. No manual trigonometry is needed (unless you are into that stuff).
The diagonal of the cube is the direction the camera will have in an isometric view. The 1m long edge parallel to it would point straight upwards within such view and is parallel to the image plane meaning it has no foreshortening due to the projection. The ratio between this 1m edge and its vertical projection is how much the whole image needs to be resized for the the scale originally applied to the image plane to apply along the axes instead.