How to Create a Sleek and Stylish Sleigh Seat in SketchUp

So in this video, we are going to finish our carousel sleigh. First, let's delete all of the guides that we previously drew.

We go to Edit, Delete Guides. Now, we need to make a seat. So let's orbit around this model so we can see this inside face, and we need to create a seat profile.

And we'll do that by adding some additional guides. We can create a guide off an existing edge by double-clicking on that edge. So I can double-click, and it will automatically make an infinite guide based on that edge.

So next, I want to create a guide in the vertical blue direction starting from this point here. However, if I click that and then start it, you can see that this guide is kind of a short guide. It's not infinite in length like the others that we previously did.

And that is because if we start from a point and then stop at a face or some sort of element that's non-connected, it will create as a static kind of short line. If I undo that, if we started from here and then went to here, it will make that infinite, right? So for us to do that, the best way to do would be to infer along this axis, and then infer here. We can see that that dash blue, meaning that it's reading that we want to go vertical along this face.

We'll start here and then click here, and that will create an infinite line in that direction. However, if you would like to create a guideline with a finite specific length, click anywhere in your model and drag out, and you can type in a specific distance like 12. Or you can click and then click.

Like I said before, if we start in space and then click our point, it'll make an infinite line. I will undo all of that. Let's create some additional guidelines for our seat.

I will click this point here and drag over one foot three, and I'll go down in this bottom portion and go up one foot six. Next, I will go to my protractor tool, and I'll click this point right here, and then along this vertical blue line, click, and then I want to create a line that's parallel to this. We could, you know, use our tape measure tool and drag parallel, or we can also use the protractor tool and wait to see it snap and then highlight magenta, meaning that this is parallel to edge, and then I can click.

Now let's go to our line tool and we'll connect and create our seat. We'll start from this point right here. We'll go across to this intersection, and then up, and then to this intersection, and then we'll go along this guideline, and we'll type in two feet, enter. Zooming in, we want to snap this right to this point.

Pay careful attention to the thickness of this line. Right now, it's bold, meaning it's not connected, but as soon as I connect this point, it'll change to a thin line, meaning that this is a connected face, and it split this face in two. If I go to my select tool, I can see that this is now a face, and this is a face, and it's been divided by this line in between.

I will now delete my guidelines, Delete Guides, zoom extents, and I'll save my model. Next, I would like all of these sharp corners to be rounded, and we can do that by using the Fillet Tool. So again, let's go to our two-point arc tool, and we don't need to worry about distance, just somewhere in a nice area where we can feel like we could create this fillet.

So again, like we just did on the outline profile, we go one click, and then we find where that tangent to edge magenta arc, and we double-click. We can do that for all of these. Panning up, we can do this last one right here to get a nice curve shape.

And then next, we can actually Push/Pull this face out to create our seat, and let's Push/Pull this out 28 inches. So 28, enter. Now you can see that we have many lines across the space.

It's not this very smooth surface, like it doesn't look like it's been molded out of plastic or some sort. So to adjust that, we can actually use this Soften Edges dialog box right here. If you triple click your geometry, you can see now this slider is now activated, and I could physically drag this slider across to see what happens.

As you can see, the further I slide, it really just kind of makes this into one kind of blobby type of shape. But if I kind of find this sweet spot, kind of right around, you know, around this 50 to 55 degrees, where I see all of these edges become softened, you can now see kind of these dashed lines. However, there is this line that's still here, and that's because this is in this kind of coplanar face.

If I was to check this softened coplanar, it would actually go away.

So Softened Coplanar is a nice check to get rid of these kind of lines that are on these flat faces, and then, you know, find this kind of between 50 and 55 degrees, and that looks much better, like it's been really molded out of plastic. There is another way to do this that we did when we were working on our fountain.

If I was to undo this, and if I was to go to the Eraser tool, and if you can remember, if we click Shift, we can toggle hide, and if we hit Control, we can toggle soften. And we don't need to hold this button down; we can just click to activate that. So this will do the same thing, if this edge is unsoftened, I can actually go to each of these edges and soften around.

This definitely takes slightly longer than using the slider tool; however, this gives you much more control to actually soften and hide the edges that you don't want to see. So yeah, now spin around, that looks really nice. Now you can even decide if you want to kind of get rid of this little edge here, have a nice smooth surface.

Now we have half of our sleigh made, so I'm going to go to the Select tool. I'm going to triple-click this and right-click, Make Group. And now we want to make a duplicate of this sleigh and then kind of inverse it to create that.

So instead of redrawing this whole thing and then exerting it the other direction, we can go to our Move tool, go to this kind of edge right here, click Control, so we have our plus, and then we can drag along the green axis. Now there are a couple ways to essentially mirror this object. So I'm going to show you a couple ways, and you can decide which way you think works the best.

If we go to our Scale tool and if we click this green Scale about Opposite Point, you know, we can extend it, but we can also create a negative of this. If we do like negative one, that will basically inverse it. And then we could go back to our Move tool, click here and drag across to snap right there.

So that is one option. The other option is if you actually right-click and then Flip Along, you can choose which axis you want to flip along. So this is going to Flip Along the Axes that it's perpendicular to.

If I Flip Along the Red Axis, it's going to flip along this line here. And if I Flip Along Green, it's going to flip along this, which is the direction that we want to flip. Take note that this Flip Along will flip along the axes that's inside of this group.

So every group you can change and modify the axes. Because we did not modify the axes in this group, it is still the same. If I click and then right-click, Flip Along Green, you can see that it very simply flipped that along and we created that inverse shape.

Now I'm going to save my file. We now have our completed sleigh seat. However, let's get rid of this center line because these are two separate groups.

We need to explode each one; right-click, Explode. And then, you know, we could go to our Eraser tool and erase, you know, each one. But the easiest way would be to kind of orbit around this center, and then click and then drag to the right to select only these lines.

And then we can hit the Delete key on our keyboard. And that will only delete the edges and not the faces. And that completes our sleigh seat.

So let's save our file, and I will see you in the next video!