SketchUp For Dummies

Chapter 7

Keeping Your Model Organized

IN THIS CHAPTER

Taking stock of your model with the Outliner

Avoiding problems by using layers the right way

Looking at how everything works together

Living life can be a messy ordeal, and modeling in SketchUp is no exception. As you crank away at whatever it is you’re modeling, you’ll reach a time when you stop, orbit around, and wonder how your model got to be such a pigsty. It’s inevitable.

Big, unwieldy, disorganized models are a pain. They can slow your computer, or even cause SketchUp to crash. Luckily, SketchUp includes a bunch of different ways to keep your geometry — edges and faces — from getting out of control. This chapter presents SketchUp’s two main tools for organizing your model: the Outliner and layers. After we introduce each tool, we explain how to use it and how not to use it (are you listening, layers?). This chapter ends with a detailed example of how you can use both tools together to make modeling easier.

Taking Stock of Your Tools

When sorting out the thousands of edges and faces in your model, it’s all about lumping things together into useful sets. After you organize geometry into sets, you can name them, hide ...