Google SketchUp® 7 For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Working with Styles and Shadows

In This Chapter

• Discovering how to style responsibly

• Giving your model some styles

• Whipping up some styles of your own

• Finding out about the Shadows dialog box

• Using shadows to make models look better

• Displaying and studying accurate shadows

It's all fine and well to build elegant and efficient models, but that's only part of what this software's all about. SketchUp is also a very capable tool for presenting the stuff you build. Deciding how it should look — loose and sketchy, quasi-photorealistic, or anything in between — can be lots of fun, and making the right decisions can go a long way toward helping your models communicate what they're supposed to.

The first half of this chapter is about Styles. If you're the sort of person who likes to draw, you're in for a treat. If you can't draw a straight line with a ruler, you're in for an even bigger treat. SketchUp Styles are all about deciding how your geometry — all your faces and edges — will actually look. Take a peek at Color Plate 21 for an idea of what styles can do.

I've dedicated the second half of this chapter to SketchUp's Shadows feature. Displaying shadows is an easy operation; it's a matter of clicking a single button. Adding shadows to your model views offers lots of ways to make them look more realistic, more accurate, and more readable. And, well, more delicious. You'll see what I mean.

Changing Your Model's Appearance with Styles

This section provides a complete rundown of how to use ...