SketchUp Free: Help, Manual or Tutorials

[camiloae]

I just started using SketchUp. Getting a grasp of the basics has been relatively easy with the help of a basic YouTube Tutorials.

However, it’s been rather time-consuming to find answers to specific and more advanced issues online since it’s difficult to filter out search results for the Pro version.

I’m having trouble finding a keyboard shortcut for the Pan tool and it’s also been difficult to learn how to work with layers, adjusting opacity for specific objects and hiding and unhiding objects.

Is there a “one-stop shop” website with multiple tutorials or “how to” intructions for specific operations?

Thanks!

[DaveR]

Have you looked through all that is available here?

As for the keyboard shortcut for Orbit, if you use a standard 3-button mouse, you won’t need it. Navigation is much easier and faster with a basic 3-button mouse anyway. O is the shortcut, though.

Keyboard shortcuts are mostly the same between the desktop and browser-based versions except in a few cases where the browser hijacks the shortcut. You could use this as a starting point for shortcuts.

Layer usage in the few version is exactly the same as with the desktop versions so you can follow the instructions given in the Help articles.

[Mark]

Thanks for calling this out: we have produced some content for help.sketchup.com that walks through functionality specific to SketchUp for Web. But we have more work to do. As we introduce new capabilities, we’ll have updated help center content for them, but there’s also a bigger effort underwa to help people learn the web version of SketchUp. Since the desktop version has been around 15+ years longer than the web version, we may be behind for a while, but we’ll do our best to catch-up!

One thing that may be more helpful in the short term: you can use the Instructor Panel in the right-hand utility to see what the core and modifier key functionality is for a given command. The Instructor also often links to how-to content specific to that tool. Hope that helps!

[whiterabbitdesigncompany]

Pan tool has keyboard shortcut “H” (hand?) “O” is for Orbit. But you can use the shift key in conjuction with the orbit tool to make it pan.

As for transparency, there isn’t a “layer transparency” or “object transparency” feature as far as I know. Transparency is either global using “x-ray” view or on a material by material basis. So an individual “object” could only be made transparent if it has transparent materials applied to it. If your model has other instances of that material that you don’t want transparent you can make a unique instance of it that is transparent and apply to that object. This can get complicated if you then want to not have it transparent in other scenes in which case you would have to make copies of that object with and without transparent materials and save them to their own layers wich can then be toggled ona nd off.

Hiding objects can be done on a scene by scene basis by hiding them and saving the scene, however, that can get troublesome. The more robust way to hide items is to assign them to a layer and then turn the visibility of the layer off for specific scenes, and remember to update the scene so that preference is saved.

[camiloae]

Thanks so much!