Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual

Speeding Up Construction with Arrays

Once you create a component, it's easy to add a copy of it to your model. Open the Components window (Window → Components), and then click the In Model button (it looks like a house). In Model shows the components that are in your document.

Figure 5-9. In the Outliner window, two things distinguish components from groups. The name of a component appears in brackets, and the icon for a component consists of four small squares.

Click your fence board component in the Components window, and then click in the drawing area. If you built the bench covered in Chapter 1, you've already placed copies of components. In SketchUp-speak, the copies are called instances of the component. Placing components from the Components window is incredibly handy when you're adding a few windows to a house or adding benches to a public park. When you're building something like a fence, where you need dozens of fence boards perfectly spaced and aligned, there's a better method. You can create an array of fence boards. What's more, arrays aren't limited to components. In SketchUp if you can select it, you can create an array consisting of any number of identical objects. That means you can make an array of a single edge, a simple shape, a group, or a ridiculously complex component.

First here's a quick and easy way to make a single copy, and then in the following steps you ...