From the course: SketchUp Pro 2024 Essential Training

Drawing with the Line tool in SketchUp - Sketchup Pro Tutorial

From the course: SketchUp Pro 2024 Essential Training

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Drawing with the Line tool in SketchUp

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- [Narrator] The line tool is a great way to create geometry in SketchUp. To activate the line tool, click the pencil icon here, or your keyboard shortcut letter L. Let's practice creating rectangles with the line tool. I'm going to orbit so that I can see the ground plane a bit better, and we're going to draw in the upper right quadrant of the axes. Click release on the ground plane, and move along the red axis. Click release to set the distance of your first line. As I move my cursor away, the lines continue to be created and I can snap it to the different axes. In this case, we'd like to move along the green, click release to set that, and as I move to the left, you'll see a string appear crossing over the starting point. This is what is called an inference, and SketchUp is trying to help us create the shape by letting us know we've crossed that starting point. Click release on that string, and then click release on our starting point to finish the shape. Once we have a coplanar set of edges, a face will be created. If I create another rectangle in the same way, but I don't finish the shape, a face will not be created until I create a finished coplanar loop of edges, and you can see that it looks like it's finished, but if I orbit a bit, they're not actually coplanar. So this is why it's important to pay attention to those different axes colors, because I accidentally drew a line up the blue axes when I thought I was drawing on the ground plane, so I'm going to undo this. Let's practice using our undo functions. It's command Z on a Mac or control Z on a Windows machine. Let's just practice some freehand drawing. Click all over the place and then orbit, and you may see that it's not quite along the ground plane like it appeared in the beginning. Again, we can back up, command or control Z, to get back to our starting point. Now, we often need to create edges to be specific lengths. Again, choose your starting point by clicking and releasing. Now, when you're using most of the drawing tools, it's very important to develop a habit of clicking and releasing and not clicking and dragging. When we click and drag, we choose the start and the stopping point, and it doesn't allow us to continue drawing edges leading from that endpoint. Instead, we click release and then click release to choose the endpoint and we can continue drawing or we can click release, move to the right, and then type in the distance that we'd like it to be. In this case, you can see it's a little over three feet, so I'm going to type five feet, enter, for a five foot long line, and then I can continue drawing. Remember, it's important to never click in this box. It is always waiting for our input, so we never need to click in there to input the distance. If you'd like to not continue drawing edges, you can hit the escape key to let go of that starting point and move somewhere else to choose a new starting point. If you'd like to deactivate the line tool altogether, you can hit your space bar to go back to the select tool as you decide what to do next.

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