Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual

Creating Components

Your house looks a little lonely here on its plot of earth with only a driveway and walkway. It could use a little dressing up. How about a fence to keep the kids and dog in the yard? If you followed the bench exercise in the first chapter, you saw that having SketchUp is like owning a lumber mill. You can whip up the materials you need for a fence in no time, starting with a basic fence board. Identical objects like fence boards or fence posts are perfect candidates for SketchUp components. Create one component, and you can use it over and over. Make a change to one fence board, and every fence board changes.

Note

This group of exercises continues a SketchUp project started earlier. If you need a file to work with, you can download fence_begin.skp from http://missingmanuals.com/cds.

1. Zoom into an area slightly in front of the rectangle that designates the yard.

   You may want to use Zoom (Z), Orbit (O), or the Pan (H) tools to find just the right spot.

2. With the Rectangle (R) tool, draw a rectangle on the red/green plane at ground level.

   It shouldn't be difficult to draw a rectangle at the same level as the yard. If you have trouble, try orbiting around to a more downward view. This time you don't want the new rectangle to be on top of the rectangle that represents the yard—position it just in front of the yard.

3. Type 6,1 and press Enter (Return on a Mac).

   Your rectangle takes on the dimensions of a 1 x 6-inch board. You don't need to include the inches symbol when you use ...