SketchUp Skill Builder: Follow Me Tips

[Music] hey guys this is Aaron we had a request to show some tips on using the follow me tool to make some three-dimensional shape so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this 2d shape right here I just drew this in a single plane kind of a shape of half of a chess piece and I'm gonna use follow me to create a extruded solid shape so I'm going to do is I'm going to start by drawing a circle and I'm just gonna draw the circle right on the ground and it doesn't matter how big I draw it or anything all that matters is it's at the center of the shape so if I extrude around this middle point it's gonna wrap this shape around so if I if I started my circle you know over here or something it would extrude around that point which would give me some weird geometry so what I want is to make sure that I start at the middle of my shape all right now I'm gonna I'm gonna show you a couple different things about how follow-me works the first thing and this is seems to be the natural progression the way people try to use follow me is by clicking follow me clicking on to a shape and dragging it around this can work okay sometimes but it can also cause issues so you can see as I'm dragging this round oh there we go so what happened was I drug around the circle and then I kept dragging so I'm actually following some other shapes around right now and it can make kind of a mess so this is not the ideal way to do it you can keep dragging and hopefully just pick up the right shapes that you want and maybe get a a perfect circle but odds are good that sooner or later something's going to go wonky that's a technical term and you're going to get a not perfect looking piece like this alright so how do you combat that well let's try it again I grabbed another circle and you notice it doesn't matter how big I make this circle I could make it huge I can make it teeny tiny all that really matters is the edges here that's what I'm gonna follow that's all that's important when I use to follow me like this what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the edges first they then hit follow me then click on the surface and what that's going to do is just follow that circle and nothing else and you see I got a good-looking piece right there that looks great except if I flip upside down its Hollow it did not extrude along that bottom section easy enough to fix of course all I have to do is draw a line anywhere along the circle it'll close for me so the question is how do I draw this without having to go back and fill it in the simple solution is to draw the circle not actually connected to the geometry but maybe slightly removed you can see all I did there was I start on this point use inferencing and drop down the blue axis and drew a circle now if I select this circle follow me click the shape I get nice extrusion oh look at that if I delete the circle that's all closed up looking good I'm looking better but still some improvements can be made here one thing I got is I got these bands for some reason I got something here too inside here I got some extra lines I don't should need these extra lines this should be a smooth piece issue for that is if I look at my profile here that I drew I have multiple separate pieces making up that profile in some cases it's fine this corner right here that's fine will give me a ridge on the bottom that's not a big deal but some of them like this I don't want this all to be smooth not broken apart now of course I can do the follow me and then do a triple select right click and soft and smooth but I want to look at how to get the best out of follow me from the start so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select all these lines I'm gonna go to extensions and I'm going to click on weld weld is a free extension that I installed it from extension warehouse and what that's going to do is going to take all those lines and make them into one so if I do that same thing my circle drop down draw my circle select my circle follow me look at this much better that's some good-looking geometry right there all smooth all one piece because it was joined together beforehand so how can I get even better than that alright so here is the ultimate follow me workflow I have those same lines so first time do again select all extension weld gives me one piece and now just take a little bit further I'm gonna triple click the geometry right click and make a group and I did that before I did follow me am I crazy no I'm going somewhere with this watch this circle again just like before I'm gonna drop it straight down at this point this group is actually geometry is isolated so I could have put it up here high but you know I'm developing a habit here I want to do is select this select my circle I'm gonna selects follow me and now you see I can't actually come pick here it actually tells me no not allowed can't happen but what I can do is I can right click edit group then pick that geometry and even though I'm in a separate context from the circle it'll still let me carry out that follow me command so when I'm done what I end up with is here's my new chess piece already in a group kind of the ideal method for doing that so if I want to just so basically what's a one-click real quick no cleanup follow me I'm gonna do is take my geometry weld lines group them select pre-select my path and then follow me so as an added bonus just for fun you notice that we did do everything here with a circle to get this round piece this would have worked actually with any polygon so I could come in here to polygons and let's do something crazy like a three-sided polygon often referred to as a triangle and I will come in here and drop this straight down drag it out select the polygon follow me and whether that's cool-looking chess piece so a lot of times when we do these sorts of extrusions where we take shapes make lamps chess pieces that kind of thing we end up using circles but just to point out it doesn't have to be that way you can actually use any geometry as long as the center of the geometry like I said is lined up with the edge of this shape being extruded so that is a couple of solid tips on how to get the most out of follow me thank you

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 69,413

Rating: 4.974823 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling, Follow Me, skill builder

Id: tclgKdZV_eM

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2017