Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual

Making Doors and Windows

When you're building a house in the real world, you spend a lot of time measuring and aligning the different elements. You may want to align several windows so they're at the same height. Perhaps you'd like to position a garage door so it's perfectly centered underneath the eaves. In the real world, that takes a lot of quality time with your tape measure. In SketchUp you can take advantage of computer-assisted shortcuts, most importantly, that old friend the inference.

For this exercise, start with a house-shaped box that looks like the one in Figure 4-17. You create and position openings for doors and windows. Later you'll create framing and trim for these features.

1. With the Rectangle (R) tool, draw a front door on the house.

   Position the door to the left of the midpoint, as shown in Figure 4-18. For this exercise, it's fine to eyeball the dimensions. Just drag out a rectangle that appears to be a reasonable size.

   

   Figure 4-17. If you don't have a house model from the previous exercises, you can download house_begin.skp from the Missing CD page at http://missingmanuals.com/cds.

2. Hover over the door's upper-right corner, and then move horizontally to the right.

   When you see a tooltip that says "Endpoint", move the cursor to the right. As you move the cursor horizontally, you should see a dotted inference line—if not, try moving up or down just a smidgen.

3. Press and ...