Push-pull & best practices

SketchUp
1

I am a newbie with SU Pro 2019. I am seeing two different behaviors by the push-pull tool, and I don’t understand why.

If I draw a random rectangle, and apply push-pull, it generates a 6-sided closed cube. But on my house model, when I apply push-pull to a wall face or floor face, it moves the face and stretches the bounding faces, but won’t generate a closed entity. My walls and floor plates will always have one face missing.

I suspect that the answer to the above may tie into my second question. Given a model of a two-story house, which of these would be best practice in SketchUp: to first draw the full height exterior wall enclosure, then draw the floor plates within the enclosure; or to draw in succession the cellar walls, first floor plate, first floor walls, second floor plate, etc. (with floor plates extended to the exterior face of the house)?

SketchUp seems not to like duplicate or overlapping faces, so drawing hierarchy would appear to matter.

2

The orientation of the PushPulled face affects the resultant 3d extrusion - i.e. either it’s a full ‘box’ or a box without the original face…
If you get a resultant extrusion that you don’t want, then ‘undo’ it [Ctrl+Z]… and repeat the PushPull on the face with the Ctrl key - this will add the missing box’s face [or omit it] as you might wish…

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3

The organization of your house parts (and how you separate the geometry with components) depends on your end use for the model. For a simple model for visualization of space, and starting to learn, I’d keep it simple and what is easiest for you. Separate the floor. walls. and roof for example. The ceiling might be another component or part of the roof. This way you can hide parts to the house in scenes to see inside. It’s OK for faces in separate components to touch/coincide if you are not seeing them (for example a wall shape sitting on the floor. if you are seeing them coincide in an exposed location, you will have z-flashing. bleed-through of edges, and possibly other undesirable graphic effects. Use real thicknesses of parts of the house (as opposed to single faces) where you can.

4

Check out the LEARNING CENTER. The Sketchup fundamentals will help explain many of your questions.

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5

Here’s a primer on house model organization.
Watch both video tutorials before diving in and you’ll be miles ahead of the learning curve.

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6

Thanks to all to replied so promptly to my very first post, and special thanks to Geo. I’ve been using Autocad since the prehistoric days of DOS, and it never occurred to me that in SketchUp, sticky behavior would still affect layers that have been turned off. Somehow, I missed that in all previous tutorials.

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