Gain insight into utilizing tools such as sections, dimensions, and text in SketchUp to help clients understand a model space better. Learn how to add sections, manipulate them with the move and rotate tools, as well as use the dimensions and text tools to provide detail about specific parts of the model.
Key Insights
- To help a client understand a model better, you can use sections, dimensions, and the text tool in SketchUp. Sections can be added and manipulated using the move and rotate tools, allowing for cuts to be made in specific places or angles.
- The dimensions tool in SketchUp allows for measurements to be added from one point to another on the model, with the text tool working similarly but also allowing for additional information to be added, such as the name of a specific component.
- Once you've added the necessary information, you can export the view as a JPEG file and share it with your client. You can also organize your tags by creating a new one, like "annotations," for easy accessibility and visibility control of your added information.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
We have completed our clubhouse as of now, but our client is having some trouble understanding the storage room. Let's go through a hypothetical situation where a client is requesting additional information that we can use with our model.
We can use sections, dimensions, and text to help our client understand the space. The first thing I will do is go to my tags dialog box and hide my roof. Now let's orbit around our model so we can see our storage room, which is right here.
Now, if we go to this section tool, which is this tool right here, and click this, we can see that we have this section inference gizmo that it'll snap to whatever face I'm showing. Yeah, if I click this face, it'll make a section through the model. So I'm gonna first ask you to name the section.
I can name this section overall section one, and then using your move tool, you can move this section back and forth depending on where you want to cut this section. Well, if I select my section, it'll turn blue, and if I deselect my section, it'll be orange. If I double click my section, it'll activate the section, turn on, or turn off.
If I deselect my section and then unclick, the section will be gray when it's non-active. Sections can also be modified through the move and rotate tools. I can move it up and down to cut it to where I want, and I can also rotate it for specific angles.
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This is useful if you wanna do an angled cut through the building. Now let's go to our toolbar. Go to my select key, and then right click, and let's turn on our section toolbar, and let's move this over here to the right.
So you can see here, we can actually add a new section directly from this button, and this right here will toggle our sections on and off, visible or hidden, and this one will actually activate our sections that we have in our model, and this one will either show the walls as solid or as open, or a poche cut through our walls. This is really helpful for some architectural graphics. So in SketchUp, you can only have one active section in your main model or group.
So I will go to my section, and I will add an additional section through here. I'll just name it section one for now, and as I move this, you can see that I cannot have this section and this section activated. However, if I was to delete this section, and if I was to go into this wall group, and then add a section, I can cut through the wall group, and then also activate this section as well.
I can have two sections activated, but this would only cut through the walls and not everything else in the model. You can play with certain visibility tricks and certain ways that you group things to get the desired effect that you want. I will undo that middle section, and I will leave the section right here.
Now let's zoom into our storage room. We would like to add some dimensions and some call-outs to describe what the storage room looks like. Let's pull out our section a little bit further so we can see a bit more of the space.
This also shows our footings. We can use the dimensions to apply dimensions on our model. We go from one point to one endpoint, and then we can move our mouse in the other to create a dimension.
You can see it can kind of get kind of tricky in certain views to get that right. Then if we were to double-click into the text, we can actually override the text with text. We can place our dimensions anywhere we would like in the model and along any axis, red, green, or blue axis.
The text tool works the same way as the dimensions tool, but it will drag out a leader. So I click this leader here. It'll call out of what this is.
I want to call this out as five-inch wall tile and not the VDCISync. Whatever component is in here, it'll actually call out that side component. I will say, change this name just to MopSync.
The text tool will allow you to change the options under Entity Info. If I was to click this text under Entity Info, I can see that I have options to change the font to whatever size I want and some various effects. And also, I can adjust the leader of how that gets affected.
By opening up Advanced Attributes, I will see that I have options on adjusting the text through here and also depending on what kind of style I want for these leaders. You can see that in these options right here, the angle stays the same with Pushpin. But if I was to change this to view-based, the angle will change based off of the view.
And depending on the view, it'll get cut off by the model. You can choose which option is best for you depending on your desired need. For right now, I would change it to Pushpin.
And remember that whatever angle it was previously at, it'll snap it to that point. So I wanna get back to this view where I can see it and then I'll use Pushpin. And if you don't like the view, you can always move it around again.
Now, if I was to do another leader on this material, you can see that it's not an actual component, but it's calling out this square footage of this wall material. And this is really useful if you're trying to understand the area for paint or if you wanted to do this on the floor to determine the square footage for specific flooring. I will delete this call-out.
And then I wanna select all of my text, make sure that it's all consistent with the right type of text. So I want this to be bold and 14. I want these to be bold and 14.
Now let's zoom out until we get a right kind of perspective that we wanna have. I will uncheck my sections to hide my sections. And now let's export this JPEG view so we can send it to our client what this looks like.
If we go to File, Export, 2D Graphic, and then we'll go to our C drive and our SKP-201 File Downloads folder. Let's save this file as clubhouse-storageroom. We'll save this JPEG and export it.
We have various export settings that we can change the view size to be a larger pixels. This is helpful if you want a high-res image that you're gonna be blowing up. But for now, we'll just keep the standard view size.
This is gonna take into account this view window that we have open. And I'll export. Now if I was to open up that folder, SKP-201 File Downloads, you can see that I have the clubhouse-storageroom export of what that looks like.
So this is really helpful to do some quick markups and then export and send it to a client. I will turn off my layers, my sections, and hide them. Then I will select all of this text, deselect the door and the mop sink, and I will add a new tag as annotations.
And I'll change this to annotations tag so I can turn off annotations. I can also put my sections under annotations as well. However, you won't be able to turn them on and off without that.
So I will disregard this and actually put that under unpacked. And now use the display sections as my tool to turn them on and off. All right, well, there we have our completed first half of our clubhouse.
All right, now I'll go ahead and save this file. This is gonna be our file that you will submit for your midterm. So let's save as this to be clubhouse-midterm-yourinitials.dm. Thank you so much, and I will see you in the next video.
