Hi there, my name is Josh, and I want to show you a few things about Section
Planes in Sketchup. If I open up the Large Tool Set you can see what that icon
looks like for Section Planes. Right there. I can also go to Tools>Section
Plane, and I'll be initially prompted to give it a name and perhaps a symbol if
I'd like. I know that my first section is going to be a floor plan view so I'm
going to type "Floor Plan" for the name and "1" for this symbol. And you'll
notice here with, when I start to kind of hover around, SketchUp will change the
orientation of that SketchUp plane based on where I'm placing the cursor. I'm
going to drop this one right on top of the roof here, and you'll notice when I
click on that Section Plane you can see in the Entity Info panel there's the
name and the symbol that I gave it. Let's also open up the Outliner. Window>
Outliner, and you can see there is that floor plan there as well. If I click on
this and go to the Move tool I can move it around just like any geometry in
SketchUp. I can also use perhaps the Rotate tool if I wanted to get a little
crazy and do a different kind of Section Cut here. There could be a time where
that might be a useful thing to do. For this, in this case though we're gonna get
go for a nice flat to Section Plane there, and let's take a look at some of
our options that we have via the Outliner panel here. If I right-click on
that Section Plane you can see some options there. Same thing if I
right-click on the Section Plane itself in the modeling window. The difference
here is that in the Outliner I've got two additional options to rename things.
So it depends on what you prefer to do: have the Outliner open, or a lot of the
abilities to affect the Section Plane can be obtained via a right-click on the
Section Plane in the model. Alright, let's cruise down and take a
look at some of these options. We've got Erase and Hide. If I were to Hide a
Section Plane, you can see there that in the model I can't really click on that
Section Plane anymore, but with the Outliner what's nice is I actually can
see it there. I can click on it, and SketchUp will show it to me in sort of a
Hidden Geometry fashion there. So the Outliner could be a good way to manage
your Section Planes. Let's Unhide that with the right-click, and let's Reverse
that Cut. So you can easily Reverse the Cut. Let's take a look at creating a
group from slice real quick. If I do that and now you can see a group was created
down there. I'll use the Move tool to kind of bring that up into view. So what
that did was give us a nice grouped line work at the slice point. I can double
click and take a look and see what's going on there. So that could be pretty,
pretty useful there to get a quick Section Cut there. Get that line work.
Let's delete that for now and let's reverse that section cut back to this
direction, and what else do we have here? Right-click>Align View. So I'm gonna do
this in the modeling window. So just like in SketchUp, if I right-click on a face
like this, I can align the view so I'm looking perpendicular at that face. I
can do the same with a Section Plane. If I right-click I can align the view and
this was how I started to compose a Scene here for a Floor Plan view. So I
click on this Scene here I've already got this set up. The only difference here
was with that I had perspective turned off because we're looking straight down
at that Floor Plan view, and let's go ahead and activate that cut again. So
there's a nice Floor Plan view.
Another option we have is to troubleshoot the section fill. So I'm
going to change my Scene here, and let's say that in our model we were actually
missing some geometry here. So let's first take a look again at this when
it's active. Active Cut. So there's a nice fill that we're getting with that
Section Cut. If we had some geometry missing perhaps this wall, we take that
away, and take a look at our Section Cut. Now we're missing some of that fill. So
we also have an option in SketchUp - go ahead and activate that again - to
right-click on a Section Plane, and Troubleshoot Section Fill. So we
already know that there's obviously a problem here, and SketchUp will give us a
little indicator of where we might want to look to help fill that Section Plane.
That Section, Section Fill. And I can right click and uncheck that option.
Let's go back out to this Scene, and next thing to look at is our Windows>
Styles. So Window>Styles, and here you'll see some attributes tied directly
directly to Sections. So I've got Section - Fill, Lines, Width. We've got color wells
for those too. So if I, let's activate this cut, and we'll go into we're gonna
be affecting a certain Style here so note that I'm making changes to a Style
here. I can go to the Edit tab and if I make a change to the fill color perhaps.
Let's make an obvious change there, and the Section Lines could also be a
different color. And the Section Line Width as well. You could have a really
thick line width or perhaps something thin like that. Let's take that back to
two, or actually three. And we'll go back and color these black again. You can
toggle off Section Planes for a particular Style as well, or that cut
itself, or the fill if you don't want to see the fill at all. Just be sure to, if
you do make a change, let's say, go back and make this fill maybe more of a grey.
Any change I make to that Style I should update the Style so it retains that
change. Let's also get that wall back. I'm gonna undo a few steps here and get this
wall to come back. There we go. There may be a time where you want to show two
Section Cuts at the same time so this Section Plane here is not inside a
Group or Component it's outside of everything in the model. It's cutting
through everything. If I jump inside the Group here I can
actually put a Section Plane inside a Group or a Component. So in this case
we'll just call this one "Section 2," and we'll just do "2" for the symbol. Then
we'll place that right here.
And we'll move that along until we get to the spot we want, and if I click
outside the Group you can see we can have multiple Section Planes active at
the same time. And that does it for Section Planes in SketchUp. Thanks for
watching. We'll see you next time!