Hey everybody, Matt for mastersketchup.com and today I want to show you
how to use keyboard shortcuts in sketchup to speed up your navigation.
Now you can see here I have a laboratory table and what I want to do
is just show you real quickly how I have set up some custom shortcuts to help me
quickly
change the visibility of things as I model.
Right now I've got this table and I want to edit
a cross-member that's underneath here.
Now I could just go ahead and activate this cross-member and try to navigate
but why
make things hard? You want to make things as easy as possible for you
so
what I want to do is get rid of this countertop so I can actually see what
I'm working on
and I've set up
on my keyboard so that the letter 'n' will hide
whatever is selected.
You can do the same thing by going to edit
and hide or right-click
and hide
but like I said I have keyboard shortcuts, so I just hit 'n' on my keyboard
and it's as easy as that.
If I didn't have to explain all that it would have happened a lot
faster.
So now you can see how easy it is to look at stuff. So
I selected this cross-member
and you can see how it
is extending a little bit into another sidebar here
which i don't want so i want to use the push pull tool to bring it
back
to this point here
so I'm going to go ahead and open it
and
you can see
even though I've activated it
there's all this stuff in the way
so the next keyboard shortcut that I created
is the letter 'x'
and what that does
is
component edit hide the rest of the model
so i'll show you, I'm going to hit that
and it hides
everything else
and you can alternate back and forth really easily so
that's what's really cool about it so now if i activate the push pull
tool
I can start the push pull
and then hit 'x'
bring back the rest of the model
come around here
and reference
a point
that's outside of the group
to finish the push pull
and once i've done that
you can just come out of the group
and
if I'd go into my outliner
you can see
the epoxi
countertop
group that was originally hidden
and you can right click that
and unhide it.
so that's one thing to keep in mind when you're hiding stuff.
You want to make sure that you keep your model organized in groups and components.
You should be doing that
all the time. I'm a big advocate for groups and components. That's the best
way to stay organized. Now you can see I don't have this fully optimized,
you should try to label every group
and every component so you know what your
what you're looking at when you're in the outliner.
So if I were to click this epoxi and hide it,
you can see how easy it is to come into the outliner
and unhide it.
So whenever you hide something in the model it doesn't hide in the outliner, it
stays there and just becomes
um...
italisized.
So you can see it in italics
and you can just unhide it.
The other way to unhide something is if you go to view
and hidden geometry.
You can see that
any hidden geometry shows up so that's good if you have a lot of
different groups and its kind of hard for you to find
the uh... the group if you're looking for any outliner.
This allows you to select the group
right-click
and unhide.
Now here's another trick that I like to do with that keyboard shortcut
uh... tell me if this has ever happened to you, you're zooming in
to something over here
and then you back up, you zoom out
and all of a sudden you hit a wall
and you try to zoom back in
and you have to scroll for like miles before it
gets you out of that wall.
So check this out, if I go back to the wall, all I have to do
with the select tool- you click once, hit 'n'
and the wall disappears and that allows you to reference anything else. You zoom
back in
and then you hit control 'z'
to undo
and the wall pops back.
So that's a nice little trick I like to do.
It saves you a lot of time and keeps your finger from getting sore from zooming
in all the time.
So if you like to set up your own keyboard shortcuts you go to window
and preferences
and then
in that window you hit shortcuts
and you select whatever
function
this has a list of every function in sketchup
so to do the the functions that i
showed you today
you'd go to view
component, edit,
hide the rest of the model
and to add the shortcut you'de click here
type in the key
that you want to activate that shortcut and you click add
and you can see I already have it added here so it's not going to let me do it
and that's it and then you click ok
so you go through there and find the ones you want and that's how you get your own
custom
keyboard shortcuts for sketchup.
Now if you'd like to learn more cool tips about how to use sketchup
just visit my website at mastersketchup.com