Hiding terrain can improve SketchUp’s performance. Terrain can gobble up a noticeable chunk of your computer’s processing power, but SketchUp doesn’t ask your processor to render hidden geometry. Having a way to hide the terrain is also handy when terrain obscures the bottom parts of a model. Hide the terrain, and it’s out of your way.

In SketchUp, importing preexisting terrain is your easiest route to creating terrain. However, the tools for creating terrain from scratch are useful in the following scenarios:

Does the terrain that you want to model exist somewhere outside your imagination and in digital form? Hurrah! You can just import it! Well, sort of. Also, after you import terrain, you usually need to edit it. At minimum, you likely need to clean up the imported data by reducing the number of faces to improve your model's performance, tracing contour lines, or a few other tasks covered in Editing and Fine-Tuning Terrain. But for now, enough of the sour details.

Terrain is important to many SketchUp modelers: Your building needs ground to stand on, or maybe you're modeling the ground itself to create a landscape. But wait. SketchUp's Sandbox tools - the tools you use to model terrain - can also create forms completely unrelated to terrain. How can terrain include all these other possibilities?

You can add additional camera types to the list of camera types included with ACT (found in Tools > Advanced Camera Tools > categories > camera) by editing a CSV file on your computer. This file is found here on Microsoft Windows:

Following are the contents required for each camera definition in the cameras.csv file: id A unique numerical identifier for your camera. name A descriptive name for your camera (this will appear within the Advance Camera Tools submenus in SketchUp). description An additional description for your camera.

When you add an ACT camera to your SketchUp model, SketchUp inserts a camera model with built in frustrums, safe zones, and aspect ratio masking bars. In the following sections, you find out to show or hide each element of the camera geometry.

Wherever you create an ACT camera, SketchUp creates a small camera model. To reposition this physical ACT camera model, use SketchUp's Move and Rotate tools. Tip: Physically repositioning the camera model is different than aiming the camera (with the pan, tilt, truck, or dolly movements, for example). To move an ACT camera model, follow these steps:

In camera view mode, you can move and aim SketchUp's virtual cameras much like you'd move an actual movie camera. The following figure shows off all the SketchUp ACT camera moves: dolly (1), pedistal (2), truck (3), pan (4), tilt (5), roll (6), and changing focal length.

In camera view mode, you can look through an ACT camera in a few different ways. Here's how to peer into your camera with the ACT toolbar: Click Look through a camera (). The Select Camera dialog box appears. Select a camera from the Camera drop-down menu. Click OK to look through the camera. Click one of the ACT tabs, and you see through the tab's corresponding camera.