Hi there, this is Josh. Please note that this SketchUp Skill Builder is in LayOut.
I'd like to show a few different ways you can use clipping masks. You may be
familiar with a clipping mask in other software and here's how easy they are to
use in LayOut. I can select a SketchUp viewport hold down shift and select some
LayOut line work that I've drawn and then right-click on those entities and
look for create clipping mask. Notice the SketchUp viewport is trimmed away and if
I want to jump back in there and make some edits I certainly can just
double-click and entering this special clipping mask group and I can easily
reposition or resize and click away when that's looking good and you'll see the
new positioning reflected there. Grab the line tool. If I'm looking for a more
irregular shape just draw whatever shape you need. Any shape will do. Select that
shape, select that viewport, right-click create clipping mask. Boom! That easy. you
could also go to let's say the freehand tool if you're looking for perhaps a
more complex or a more irregular shape for that clipping mask and do something
like this and then select those two things make that clipping mask and let's
bring these together and take a look at styling. If you would like to add a
little bit of styling to these clipping mask groups all you have to do is cruise
over to that Shape Style panel here engage that stroke button and let's
throw a dashed line on this one. And perhaps you don't want to have any
actually need to make sure that this button here is turned on so that the
stroke is engaged, and for this one the actual boundary for this clipping mask
is probably better left invisible so in some cases you may not want to show any
styling or you'll want to see that boundary at all and a common example of
this is an architectural detail. So in this case I've got SketchUp viewport
here and the same viewport here behind this clipping mask where it's just
scaled up and this might be a faster way to call out something that you're trying
to show rather than maybe going back into SketchUp
and creating a new scene or recomposing the view think about using LayOut for
something like this sometimes and then you can just jump back in to your LayOut
tools and add whatever styling or annotations that you need. And then again
go back over to the Shape Style panel here and you can add all kinds of
different styling to those annotations. Another example of this is with an
elevation. Go back to that line tool and let's say I was tracing a grade line or
in this case I just kind of want to cut away part of this SketchUp view here
that I don't want to see so in this case I'm going to zoom in and you'll notice that
I can use all these snapping points that I have in my SketchUp model. Cruise along
the line here and just trace what I need for this boundary and zoom out a little
bit and I'll draw this over to the side and come back over the top of this
viewport. And one way I could have done this, let's make this clipping mask real
quick, I could have just drawn a shape that I then put on top of the SketchUp
viewport. Maybe color it white so it blends in with the page. That's certainly one
way to go. The advantage of this method is I'm now able to click around down
here and not you know click on any LayOut geometry that I've drawn. I just
have that simple clipping mask and this leaves this kind of free for easy
annotations, dimensions, and notes and stuff like that. And finally a really
simple way to use a clipping mask is perhaps to just crop an image. So you
could certainly crop an image in whatever image editing software you have
but hey, why not just do that in LayOut? Grab those two entities, make that
clipping mask, and this little fella looks pretty excited about how easy it
is to use clipping masks in LayOut. Thanks for watching and we'll see you
next time.