15 Hidden SketchUp Tricks You Should Know

hey i'm matt from mastersketchup.com and in this video i'm going to share 15 little hidden sketchup features that you probably don't know about [Music] all right so the first one is going to be uh a move trick that you can use to um move something really quickly so you might know that sketchup added this feature uh where you can snap to various corners of groups and components even if it's hidden behind the group and it'll allow you to quickly snap to other places that are kind of obstructed from view however there's a lot of times where you might have a situation like this where you are trying to move something that's kind of closer to the camera to a point that's further away from the camera and so what i mean is is this so if i'm trying to move this sometimes sketchup has a hard time snapping see how it took a little bit of time for for it to snap to that corner and a lot of times it doesn't immediately connect um so one trick that i use a lot is and and by the way of course you can always like move the camera and kind of get a better perspective and snap like that but uh one trick that i use a lot in this situation is you start the move and then you tap like the up arrow key to lock the blue axis and that's going to allow you to move your mouse to whatever point the exact point that you're trying to move to and once you've locked on to that point just tap the up arrow key once again and sketchup will immediately pop that object to that specific point all right moving on to tip number two is when you're using the rotation tool a lot of times when i first learned how to use this tool i would always try to find a plane that was uh you know the the plane that i want to lock the rotation axis to and then i would hold down shift to lock that axis in order to start the rotation but one trick that i didn't realize right away was you can actually click and drag the rotation tool to any axis that you want so you can even drag it to a an axis that's not exactly a long and you know like the red green or blue axis all right tip number three is the push pull tool so sometimes when you're using the push pull tool you might already have a face uh selected and maybe you're trying to push pull this face but that one since this one's already selected it won't let you uh push pull this face so a quick tip is to literally just press uh p again on your keyboard and that will release any pre-selected face that way you can then just hover over a face to push pull it all right so tip number four is uh has to do with scenes so if you ever have multiple scenes that need to be synchronized to have their camera synchronized to the exact same camera location like very often this happens when you're creating a floor plan so i have several plan views of this kitchen that need to all have the same camera location and that way you can stack viewports in layout and have the the perspective match up perfectly so right now they all match perfectly but let's say i have this one zoomed in and uh so now these two scenes have different camera views but let's say i want them both to have the same camera view all you need to do is select all of the scenes that you want to synchronize so you can hold down shift or control to multiple select and then you just literally toggle the camera location off so that forgets the camera location property for all these scenes and then you turn it back on and that will save the current camera location to all of these scenes so now if i go back to all those scenes the camera location is completely synchronized all right tip number five is when you're using certain tools like the rectangle tool you know how you can type in dimensions right so we could do 5 foot comma 10 foot but one thing that you might not know is you don't have to provide both of the inputs so if i snap to five feet comma whatever i can just type comma and then a dimension press enter and then only the second dimension will resize and the first dimension will be ignored you can do the same thing with uh the first dimension so if you only want to correct the first dimension you can just type in the first dimension if you want only want to send the second dimension you type comma type it in and enter tip number six is with navigation we all know the middle mouse button is orbit and you probably know that you can hold down shift along with the middle mouse button to pan but another easier way kind of to pan is to hold down the middle mouse button with the left mouse button and that will also invoke the pan pan feature so that's kind of handy if you don't want to if you have your your fingers on on something else on your keyboard and you don't want to move over to the shift key all right tip number seven is the tape measure tool so the tape measure tool of course can create guides that are parallel to edges and axes in your model but one thing that i actually just discovered recently i don't know how i didn't know this you can actually drag the tape measure tool between two points to project project guidelines between them this also works by simply clicking two points you don't have to click and drag and so you can see i can quickly find the center of this rectangle by doing that it's just a good thing to know tip number eight is resizing circles once they're drawn so if you draw a circle and you activate the move tool you can if you see the circle highlighted blue the move tool will move the circle but if you see the circle is not highlighted and you're snapped to an endpoint like this using the move tool would actually resize it so that actually works if the circle is extruded as well and of course you can always uh select the circle and edit the radius precisely in the entity info window and by the way i actually picked up this tip along with some of the other tips in this video from this free guide from sketchycation called the doughbook and it has just a ton of tips on you know little things just like in this video uh that you can learn about sketchup and this is a free guide i'll have a link in the description below if you want to check it out and another great resource where i got some of these tips is this uh free guide from mindsight studios which is the developer of profile builder artisan along with many other great extensions for sketchup and so this guide is actually a cultivation of tips from several sketchup experts there's myself right there along with all these other really great uh sketchup experts um who have contributed their own tips um so it's a really well formatted book that has just a ton of tips on how to save time and become more efficient in sketchup so i will also leave a link to this one in the description below as well all right moving on to tip number nine and that's a fairly new feature that sketchup added which is to be able to create a group or component before actually drawing something so you just right click an empty space click make group start drawing and the container will be created around the group when you do the create component it will prompt you to locate the axes and then it will show you the create component prompt where you can configure it and then from there you can start drawing now this also works with keyboard shortcuts so if you just tap g on your keyboard that will create the do a create component and if you have like myself the custom keyboard shortcut shift g for create group that will initiate a new group so tip number 10 is the shift key modifier for the smooth tool within the sandbox tool collection so with the smoove tool you can type in a radius and you can modify geometry like this but it limits the movement along the z axis but if you hold down the shift key you can actually move or smooth um entities along the selections kind of perpendicular or i guess it's called the normal axis and tip number 11 is also with the smoove tool where you can actually create a pre-selection of entities and then use this move tool on those entities so the selection will will simply move uh to wherever you put it but then there will be a fall off based off of the radius that you have set up with the tool tip number 12 is a modifier key for the push pull tool so if you have the push pull tool on a shape like this it's going to basically extrude a new face vertically from that top face but if you hold down the alt key it will essentially keep all the entities connected to it instead of extruding a new face up from it tip number 13 is with the scale tool so i think most people use the scale tool among an entire selection of entities where you're scaling the entire object to a certain size but you don't have to do that so for instance if we wanted this you know let's say this is a chair or some sort of seat let's say we wanted this to be exactly 18 inches from the floor we could select just this face and then one of the edges down here which is basically on the floor we can grab the scale tool and then just scale this height and then type in 18 inches and so the scale tool can be used to set certain distances between a face and some other point in your model so it's kind of a handy thing to keep in mind if you're ever trying to resize certain things tip 14 is the unique component feature now everyone knows that components are direct copies of the other one so you make changes to one and all the others change as well and i'm sure you also know that you can right click to make one unique so that those changes are only affecting that one copy but if i undo that all right so let me just make make some copies of this again so what if i wanted three of these to be the same and then these three to be different you can actually create a selection of uh several of the same component right click make unique and now these three components will all share the same definition so now if i make a change to one of these these three will change and then these three are still working off of the um the original definition tip number 15 is when you're working inside of a group or component you might be used to having the select tool and tapping escape or maybe just clicking outside of the boundary box in order to close the component or group but if you have another tool active that doesn't work because that's just going to start drawing or it'll cancel the current action so no matter what tool you have you can always press the tilde key which is that little symbol next to the number one on your keyboard to close any group or component alright so that's going to do it for this list of 15 tips of sketchup features that you may not know about let me know in the comments below if there's a favorite tip that you have that i didn't mention in this video um and other than that that's all i have for you in this video thanks for watching don't forget to like and subscribe and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: MasterSketchUp

Views: 33,317

Rating: 4.9699659 out of 5

Keywords: Sketchup Tutorials, Sketchup, Google Sketchup, Trimble Sketchup, Sketchup Tips

Id: EkwvKvIcmZI

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020