I found the click and drag component so central to Sketchup to be a highly intuitive tool that felt natural to me. Using it felt similar to building games I’ve used in the past, like the Sims builder. I also found the pull notion to be a good tool that was also fun to use in addition to being immediately coherent. I experienced quite a bit of frustration with the roof building tool. One of the issues was a particular misalignment with the way I was setting up the moment of the ‘pull’ up to create the roof. After watching several tutorials showing several ways to make the roof, I realized that there was something that I was doing wrong consistently. After a long time troubleshooting, I finally got the roof to work, but I still don’t know exactly what I was doing wrong the first time even when I was able to replicate it.
The undo button was essential. I wish that the “move” button weren’t so fickle. It caused confusion when I tried to make the roof, and it also created chaos when I tried to alter the size of a building. I also wish that there was a function that would automatically flush buildings to one another, which might help a more amateur designer put together preliminary structures without having to zoom in to see if the lines were aligned correctly. However, this might be annoying for a more precise and complex design where buildings are close, but not touching each other.
A humanistic use of the tool that I can envision would be a recreation of a series of houses, or building of historical value that has since been lost. For example, photos of buildings which perished in the Chicago Fire could be used to recreate the look and feel of the neighborhood before new developments.
A tip for a novice: make sure that you have found the actual midpoint for the line to make a basic roof. If it’s slightly off, your “move” function to pull it up will end up making the house look funky.
3 replies on “sketchup experience”
Great tip! I experienced this myself and it took me awhile to figure out what I was doing wrong that made my roof look so weird.
I also had a lot of trouble with the roof building process and one of the things I specifically ran into was trouble with the ways that the roof was oriented, it seemed like the tool only worked in pulling up certain lines. I thought your example of rebuilding buildings from the Chicago Fire was really cool – I wonder whether it would be possible to do a model of the entire city pre-Fire in Sketchup!
Good job powering through the difficulties Cecilia! Moving objects can be tricky. The key is to make sure you’ve selected everything you want to move (and only what you want to move) and pick it up from the right place. For instance, picking up a box from a corner will allow you to “snap” it to the corner of another box easily. See this site for more Move tools tips