Follow Me Tool Examples in SketchUp - The SketchUp Essentials #39

what's up guys Justin here with the sketch of essentials calm back with another Sketchup essentials tutorial so today we're going to talk a little bit more about the follow me tool it's been a long time since I created a video about the follow me tool and it's one of my favorite tools in Sketchup so I just wanted to kind of kind of run you through some of the possible usages of the tool in order to give you some ideas for stuff you can create and stuff like that so let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so the way the follow me tool works is it basically takes a piece of geometry and it extrudes it along a path so like for example if I have something like this circle here and I've got this long kind of curving path right here what I can do is I can come in here with the follow me tool which is this icon right here and you can come in here you can click on that and what it'll do is it'll extrude an object along that path for you just like this so you can see how as I drag my mouse along this path it's basically taking that circle and it's moving it along this line right here and it's creating a face with it basically or creating a solid object so basically you're going to use that to extrude objects along a path just like this now the first thing I want to talk about is the right way to use the follow me tool because it's very important that like for example the way that I demonstrated that is not the way the you that you use the follow me tool I just wanted to give you kind of an example of the way that it works actually let me back up even further so to find the follow me tool what you're going to want to do because it's not your basic tool set where you're going to want to do is you're going to want to go to view toolbars and you're going to want to make sure the large tool set is turned on you can also right-click in here and select large tool set in order for that to show up but it'll show up in this tool set over here and it's this object right here or this this icon right here with kind of this brown object and then the red arrow inside of it so that's going to be the follow me tool and so what you're going to do is the way that you use the follow me tool is you select a path so you see how I drag my mouse along this right here to select it but then all you're going to do is you're going to click on this follow me tool icon and you're going to click on the shape you want to extrude along that path and you can see how what that did is that extruded this shape all the way along the entire path that I had selected so that's probably the most basic kind of shape you can create with that you can also come in here and your shapes don't necessarily need to be touching the pads that you're using so like for example if I come in here and I select this object right here as my path you can see how this kind of tube shape that I have is not touching this path but I can still come in here with the follow me tool and extrude along it just like this and what that did is that came in here and that created a hollow extrusion so you can see how when I come in here both sides of this are hollow it's never actually touching the path but it extruded this shape all the way along that path just like this so another great example of that is if I have the circular path right here and then I've got the circle right next to it you can see how these aren't touching at all but if I come in here and I select this circle and then I activate the follow me tool and click on this space you can see how it did my circle along this path even though nothing was ever touching so you can come in here and you can create a circle and create an object just like this and extrude without them having to touch which can be a big time-saver instead of having to come in here and try to like line a circle up with the inside of this line and all of that so one of the nice things about the way Sketchup works with extruding objects is if you extrude something along corners just like that it this it automatically takes those spaces and kind of fixes them so like for example if I if I select this object and the other nice thing about this is I don't have to select the perimeter of this object I can just click on the face and as soon as I click on the face Sketchup knows that I want to use the perimeter of this object as my path for extrusion so I click on this face and then I click the follow me tool and I extrude just like this well you can see what that does is when it goes around the corner Sketchup automatically kind of welds this corner together so you get this nice smooth transition around all the different corner just like this so you can see how as I come in here and I look at all these different corners I've got a complete object that it kind of fixes in here just like this so and that allows you a lot of different options like for example if I've got a shape like this one and I've got a couple different notches in it just like this so if I draw one more notch in here just like this and then I erase this out all I have to do is click on this face click on the follow me tool and then click on that object just like this so you can see what that did is that took that object and extruded it around the square but it kept the little cutouts in here and it took them around these corners really nicely so what that did is that created this continuous extrusion shape so you get this kind of curved corner in here but basically sketchup cuts out any extra geometry that it would create so this is smooth so this allows you to do things like cabinet doors and other stuff like that really easily so the way that this goes around corners is really helpful so another thing you can do with the follow me tool is you can extrude things in a circle so before what we're doing is we're taking an object and extruding it along some sort of path well in this case what we're doing is we're extruding an object in a circle kind of around its center point which allows us to create a lot of cool different geometry like for example if I was to come in here and I was to draw an outline of a fountain just like this with all these ins and outs then what I could do is I could just click on this face it activate the follow me tool and click on it and what it's going to do is it's going to extrude this in a circle along that path which will create this kind of circular fountain shape so you can use this to create these round extrusions almost like if you had something on a lathe like one of those woodworking tools spins pieces of wood so you can you can use that to create these round objects and all you have to do is kind of think about how an object would look and generally this works with symmetrical round objects so objects that are the same when mirrored across an axis but generally speaking if you're just to imagine that you were to come in here and you were just to cut an object straight across the face just like this so if you were to come in here cut a fountain across the face if you think about what the profile would be you can then take that and extrude that in a circle in order to create the object that you want and you can't you can do that not only with rounded shapes just like this but you could also come in here with a square shape like this one and activate the follow me tool you can see how it kind of created this hollow shape in here that still has a base almost like a cup so once you start getting creative with the follow me tool you can do a lot of different stuff with it so once you kind of wrap your mind around the way that it works then really kind of sky's the limit on that kind of thing so another example is if I was to come in here and I was to select this space I'm basically telling it that I want this space to be my path the perimeter of this object so if I click on this space I activate the follow me tool then I click on this other one you can come in here and you can extrude a sphere and all it did is it just rotated the circular face all the way around this object just like this so you can come in mate come in here and make a sphere really easily so and then another thing to note is you can also come in here and by extruding along different paths you can get different results like for example I've got kind of this curved shape just like this well if I select this space and I extrude this along this circle it creates a cap that kind of looks like this so it's completely circular it comes to a point and all of that but if I have a square path just like this you can see how it comes in here and you get a little bit of overlap in here sometimes you have to clean up with this tool you can see how in this case what this does is it extrudes this in more of a square so it gives you a different look and feel to your extrusion so by coming in here and experimenting with different extrusions and stuff like that you can really uh you can really get a lot of different results so you know the more you work with this tool the more you start thinking about the different kind of things that you can create and stuff like that so this is a really useful tool it's probably my favorite one in Sketchup so that's where I'm at in today's video leave a comment below and let me know which is this something you've been using did it take you a while to figure out the way to follow me Tool Works I know for me I didn't really understand how this tool work for probably the first couple years that I was using Sketchup and then once I figured it out it really kind of opened my eyes to some of the possibilities so I just love to hear what you think about that if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week I feel like what I'm doing this channel please consider visiting my support me page on my website that's got links to everything from some extensions you can purchase and I'll receive a commission if you purchase any of those or also links to my patreon page and all of that just helps me offset the cost of running this channel but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 170,161

Rating: 4.9539747 out of 5

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2016, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup follow me tool, follow me tool, sketchup follow me, sketchup, sketchup tutorial, sketchup essentials, sketchup follow me tutorial, sketchup follow me curve, sketchup follow me arc, sketchup follow me command, sketchup follow me roof

Id: QFkjJC231Qo

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2017