Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual

Making Spheres with Follow Me

Follow Me might not be the first SketchUp tool that jumps to mind when you need to create a sphere, but it works great. All you need are two circles on perpendicular planes. It's best if the "path" circle is slightly larger than the circle being used as the profile. The circles need to have exactly the same center point, as shown in Figure 8-12. With those ingredients, you can create a circle with a single click of Follow Me.

Figure 8-11. The Follow Me tool works great when you need to create molding, whether it's on the outside or inside of a building.

Figure 8-12. You can use the path of one circle to extrude the profile of another circle. The trickiest part is creating two circles that are perpendicular to each other and aligning them both on the same center point.

The cursor for the Circle tool looks like a pencil. At the point of the pencil is a circle that changes color depending on its orientation. If you experiment a little with the Circle (C) tool in an empty document, you notice that the circle likes to snap to one of the three axes. If you move the circle down below SketchUp's horizon and have a slightly downward view, the Circle cursor usually snaps to the blue axis. That means the circle will be drawn on the ground, perpendicular to the blue axis. ...