Imagine a cube. How would you draw it with a pencil? Even if you have very little experience drawing, we bet that you can visualize a way to draw it. Now imagine a sphere: How might you draw that? Drawing the sphere is harder to imagine, right?
Representing a sphere in SketchUp will be much quicker than drawing it by hand, but you still need to know how to think with SketchUp — and how its tools work — to imagine the sphere coming into being. Can you imagine a circle spinning its way into a sphere, as shown in Figure 1-5? Do you feel yourself exercising those new brain muscles?
FIGURE 1-5: One of a few ways to imagine a sphere in SketchUp: a circle rotating in place.
In Chapters 2 and 3, you’re going to leap with wild abandon into this new mind space. Our last piece of setup advice is to take it easy on yourself. Remember, you’re not just using the Line tool, but also using your imagination in a new way. With this book, you are going to earn that superpower.
Chapter 2
Getting a Running Start
IN THIS CHAPTER
If you can’t wait to get your hands dirty (so to speak), you’ve come to the right chapter. Here, we help you make a simple model step by step, spin it around, paint it, and even apply styles and shadows. You don’t need to read another word of this book to be able to follow along, although we do refer you to chapters where you can find out more. Above all, following along with the basic project in this chapter can help you understand how SketchUp’s basic features work together and enable you to produce a knockout model in no time!
So what are you going to build? Perhaps a doghouse. The nice thing about doghouses is that they’re a lot like people houses in the ways that count: They have doors and roofs, and just about everybody has seen one.
Making a Quick Model from Scratch
It’s time to fire up SketchUp and create a new model. In desktop versions, click the thumbnail image for the Simple Template in the Welcome window that appears when you start SketchUp (see Figure 2-1). In the web version, click Create New, and choose the units of measurement you prefer.
FIGURE 2-1: The desktop Welcome screen (left) and the web Welcome screen (right)
So, you have SketchUp up and running, you have some idea of what it does and how it works, and you’re probably just itching to give it a try. Let’s start with an 80-storey high-rise office tower. Okay, maybe that’s a little ambitious for your first attempt. Instead, follow these steps to build a doghouse:
1 Delete the scale figure on your screen.The scale figure is there to give you an idea of your model size, but for many exercises in this book, you won’t need it. To delete the scale figure, first activate the Select tool (spacebar); then click the scale figure and tap the Delete key on your keyboard.
2 Draw a rectangle on the ground.Use the Rectangle tool (tap the R key) to draw a rectangle by doing the following:Click once to place one corner on the left side of your screen.Click again to place the opposite corner on the right side of your screen. Most of the time, you should not drag the cursor in SketchUp. Click the first point, release the mouse button, move to the next location, then click and release the mouse button. In Chapter 1 we referred to this as “Click-release, click-to-finish.”You’re in a 3D perspective, or view of the world, so your rectangle looks more like a diamond; 90-degree angles don’t look like 90-degree angles in perspective. Figure 2-5 shows what you should aim for in this step. Are you modeling a doghouse for a Chihuahua or a Great Dane? For a mouse or an elephant? As you move your mouse, the Dimensions box shows you the size of the rectangle. Don’t worry; we’ll cover how to model precisely before too long. It’s important to draw the right kind of rectangle for this example (or for any model you’re trying to create in perspective view), so try it a few times until it looks like the rectangle in Figure 2-2. To go back, use the Undo (Ctrl+Z) shortcut we cover in Chapter 1. You can go back as many steps as you like.FIGURE 2-2: Draw a 3D rectangle on the ground.
3 Start the Push/Pull tool, and extrude your rectangle into a box by clicking the rectangle and then clicking again somewhere above the rectangle.The Dimensions box in the lower-right corner (formerly labeled Distance) shows how far you have pulled the top of the box up. Are you making a house for a snake or a giraffe? At this point, your model should look like Figure 2-3; if it doesn’t, use Push/Pull again to make your box look about the right height. If you’re happily pushing/pulling away on your box and everything suddenly disappears, you pushed/pulled the top of your box all the way to the ground. Just press Ctrl+Z (Mac: ⌘ +Z) to undo and keep going.
4 Start the Line tool, and draw two diagonal lines for your roof, as shown in Figure 2-4.Below is a step-by-step explanation of how to draw the lines. Remember: click-release, click-to-finish. Don’t hold your mouse button down while drawing.Click the midpoint of the top of your box’s front face to start your line.You know you’re at the midpoint when you see a small, light blue dot and the word Midpoint appears. In SketchUp, these tips are called inferences. Move slowly to make sure that you see the Midpoint inference.FIGURE 2-3: Use the Push/Pull tool to extrude your rectangle into a box.Click again somewhere along the left side edge of your box's front face to end your line.Wait until you see a red On Edge inference before you click; if you don’t, your new line won’t end on the edge where it needs to be.Start a second line.Move your mouse toward the opposite edge. As you move your mouse to the right, also move it up and down a bit,