When you create a component, you turn SketchUp geometry into something special. A basic component becomes reusable and separate from other geometry. PRO If you’re a SketchUp Pro user, you can add attributes to create dynamic components. Users can then configure certain aspects of the component, or the component can add steps to staircases or pickets to fences as you scale the dynamic component.
What Happened to Layers? SketchUp’s Tags are an updated form of what was called Layers in older versions. Tags provide the same functionality that Layers provided and more.Tags help you organize the objects in your SketchUp model and control their visibility. SketchUp allows you to hide tagged objects in one click rather than select each object individually. Hiding large chunks of your model using tags helps to find things faster and even speed up SketchUp a bit too.
With the Outliner in SketchUp you can view a model's groups, components, and section planes in a hierarchical tree. The Outliner panel makes it easy to:
In SketchUp, there are two types of Objects; Groups and Components. Objects are there to help you organize your model because:
SketchUp provides all the tools needed to keep everything organized. An organized model makes it easier to manage entities and control visibility. To get started, take a look at the following organizational features and techniques available in SketchUp:
SketchUp components enable you to reuse objects. For example, pretty much every building has at least one door and window. Instead of modeling these common objects, you can insert a component that someone else has already made.Like all geometry in SketchUp, a component is still made of edges and faces. The edges and faces are simply part of a special component group. (You can also create components to reuse your own geometry, but that's covered in Developing Components and Dynamic Components.)
You're most likely to encounter SketchUp's color picker when you apply materials to a model. (However, you do find the color picker elsewhere, such as when selecting a color for text.) This article explains how to use the color picker for your current operating system. To select a color, you can choose from the following different methods:
SketchUp’s Match Photo feature has inspired many happy dances, because it enables you to
Have you ever stuck a decal on a window or a wall? In SketchUp, sticking an image on a face is even easier than those decals, because digital images don't wrinkle or trap air bubbles.Technically speaking, SketchUp enables you to import images that are already on your hard drive. When you import images from your hard drive (select File > Import to see the Open dialog box, shown in the figure), you can import the image as an image, a texture, or a matched photo.
To add detail and realism to your models, SketchUp enables you to paint materials on faces. Materials are essentially paints that have a color and optional texture (defined within an image file). For example, in the following figure, the roofing material has a blue color and a texture that simulates metal roofing. The siding and grass are also materials that have a color and texture.