Book Image

Taking SketchUp Pro to the Next Level

By : Aaron Dietzen aka 'The SketchUp Guy'
Book Image

Taking SketchUp Pro to the Next Level

By: Aaron Dietzen aka 'The SketchUp Guy'

Overview of this book

Anyone who’s worked with it will know that SketchUp is the quickest and easiest way to create 3D models. While its approachable interface makes it super easy to learn, this book will show you how the extremely capable SketchUp software can take you far beyond what you may have initially thought possible. Get ready to level up from a basic user to becoming a SketchUp ninja! Each chapter will take you through the capabilities of SketchUp, challenging you to use tools in innovative ways. This includes organizing your model, modifying native commands, customizing your interface, utilizing inferencing, and much more. Additionally, you’ll learn about the extensions that can be added to SketchUp to supplement the tools you have been using, allowing you to make your 3D modeling process quicker, easier, and more powerful. By the end of this SketchUp book, you’ll have an enhanced understanding of how to use the impressive range of tools and be on your way to customizing SketchUp for your one-of-a-kind workflow.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting More Out of Native Tools
7
Part 2: Customizing SketchUp and Making It Your Own
13
Part 3: Extending SketchUp’s Capabilities for Modeling

Understanding what makes up templates

When you start a new model, you never really start with a new file. Any time you click New in the File menu or click on the Simple template in the Welcome to SketchUp window, you are opening a template. In fact, it would be fair to say that there is no such thing as an empty SketchUp model. If you have the SketchUp modeling screen up on your computer, even if there is no geometry, axis, or background colors, you are looking at the contents of a SketchUp file.

To dive right into this, that is all a template really is: a SketchUp file. When you start a new file, you are telling SketchUp to open up an existing SketchUp file. The difference between starting a new file via a template and using the Open command to open a file is that when you use a template, SketchUp knows that you do not want to save anything back to the template and prompts you to save it into a new file.

While clicking New from the File menu may seem to land you in a brand...