I’m just starting with SketchUp and I have what I imagine is a very basic question. To give context, I’m trying to create a basic drawing of a house, and so far have only been trying to draw the walls and have been looking at various tutorials. My issue is that I find myself making walls, that touch other walls, and then I realize I want to modify some dimension of the wall and if I triple click to select the whole wall and erase it, it erases other faces that touch it. e.g. a basic working example would be if I used the rectangle tool to create two rectangles that share a side, and then used the push/pull tool to pull each rectangle up into a wall.
My understanding is that if I made each specific wall a group, then it wouldn’t delete other adjacent faces. But a common suggestion in tutorials has been to make the exterior walls into a group, and the interior walls into a group, but not to make each wall into its own groups. I’m assuming there must be a way to easily go back and delete a certain aspect of a drawing without it having to be it’s own group to begin with.
When it is raw geometry, ungrouped or within the group for editing, don’t triple click, that selects everything connected. Be selective with either the eraser or the selection tool, only select what you want to delete.
Also important to understand the different selection options, left to right will select hings only within the selection fence but right to left will select whatever the fence touches. Note one way is a solid fence the other is a dashed fence.
To help achieve your goals, some time spent at the SketchUp Campus and at the SketchUp - YouTube channel will be very worthwhile. Both sites are from the SketchUp team. On the YouTube channel, pay attention to the Square One Series and Level UP series. They cover the basics for each tool.
Learn very early to make Components (or less generally useful, Groups) of every ‘thing’ you make in SketchUp, as you go along.
So draw a ‘thing’ (for example, a wall, a window frame, a doorway, or a piece of furniture), triple click to select all the ‘loose’ geometry, tap the g key to make a component, give it a meaningful name, then move on to the next ‘thing’.
Geometry within a component or group is isolated from geometry in other groups or components and loose geometry in the model space.
If you need to modify what you have drawn, open the component or group for editing (double click it, or R-click/Edit component (or Edit group). DON’T explode the object.
And leave the Tag setting at Untagged, and tag only groups, components, or non-geometric entities like dimensions and text objects.
