SketchUp For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7

Keeping Your Model Organized

IN THIS CHAPTER

Taking stock of your model with the Outliner

Avoiding problems by using tags 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 Tags. After we introduce each tool, we explain how to use it and how not to use it (are you listening, Tags?). This chapter ends with a detailed example of how you can use the tools together to make modeling easier.

For a long time, SketchUp tags were called layers. So if you are using this book with an earlier version of SketchUp, everything ...