Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Saving Views and Animating with Scenes

If you’ve worked in SketchUp for a while, you’re probably comfortable with the idea that you view your three-dimensional model and its world through a camera. It’s as if you’re running around the city shooting pictures. Move to a different position, and the view in your lens changes. This chapter pushes the whole camera view metaphor to the limit. You learn how to save the views of your model in scenes. That way, you can jump back to that camera view with the click of a button.

It’s hard to appreciate the beauty of three-dimensional objects and environments that you create with a static camera view. To really see and understand the environment, you need to move the camera and to view objects from different angles. Naturally SketchUp gives you some impressive ways to move the camera and animate your views. With SketchUp it’s pretty easy to create a walkthrough or a flythrough of your model. Friends and colleagues will not only be wowed by your 3-D modeling skills, but they’ll also be impressed with your computer animation savvy, too. It all starts with creating a scene—but in a good way.

Creating a Scene

When you work in SketchUp, you’re constantly jumping from one view to another. You need to see your model from different angles to understand the relationship of the entities as you create them. More importantly, you need to make sure that construction is proceeding as planned. If you try to do all your building from a single view, ...