Google SketchUp® 7 For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Going Beyond Buildings

In This Chapter

• Extruding around circles and along paths with Follow Me

• Rounding off corners

• Mastering the Scale tool

• Modeling tapered forms

• Discovering the Sandbox tools

• Creating terrain surfaces the easy way

Here's something you already know: There's more to life than modeling buildings. Even though SketchUp is really good at letting you make models of built structures, you can use it to build just about anything you can think of — all it takes is time, ingenuity, and the ability to take a step back and break things down into their basic parts. SketchUp provides some fantastic tools for creating forms that aren't the least bit boxy, but they're not as obvious as Push/Pull and Rectangle, so most people never find them. This chapter is devoted to helping you discover SketchUp's "rounder" side.

In this chapter, I present tools, techniques, and other tips for creating forms that are distinctly unbuilding-like — my hope is that you'll use them to push the limits of what you think SketchUp can do.

Extruding with Purpose: Follow Me

Follow Me is probably the best example of a powerful SketchUp tool with kind of an underwhelming name. The problem that faced the software designers when they were trying to figure out what to call their new baby was this: It does what other 3D modeling programs dedicate two or three other tools to doing. They chose an unconventional name because it's a wholly unconventional tool.

In the following sections, I talk about how to use Follow ...