Hey, guys. I'm Aaron and this is SketchUp Square One, where we take a look at the fundamentals
of using SketchUp. Today we're going to look at one of my favorite tools, Follow Me. Now,
Follow Me is actually a big tool. There are a lot of ways to use it and there are some advanced
ways you can use Follow Me. I'm going to do everything I can to cover the basics of how to use
Follow Me. Then I'm going to do a part 2, which will be a "Tricks and Tips of Follow
Me." This here is going through the fundamentals for those who say "I've never seen or used Follow
Me before." "How do I use it?" That's what we're going to look at right now. Let's hop right in.
The first thing is getting to Follow Me. Unlike the tools we've looked at so far,
Follow Me does not have a place on the default toolbar. It's not up here.
It is up here under Tools> Follow Me. We can also turn on the large tool set going to
View>Tool Palettes on Mac (Tool Bars on Windows) and turning on Large Tool Set. If you hover over
right here, in the middle, you can see there is Follow Me. I can see the default shortcut key
is Shift + F. Let's talk about what Follow Me does. What Follow Me does is kind of like a 3D
Push/Pull that goes more than one path. I'm going to put a rectangle here. I'm going to put it on
the green axis, and come upwards like this. Let's make two of them. I'll take this and make a copy
of it right over here. Now, I want to take this and if I use Push/Pull, which we've used before,
I can make that long like that. That is what Push/Pull does. I'm going to grab a line now.
I'm going to bring the line back like this and I'm going to have it turn. What I can do with Follow
Me, is I can say Follow Me by clicking on the surface and dragging it along the surface like this.
As long as I have interconnected lines to follow, I can go in any shape. I'm going to hit Undo and
add another line. We'll take a line here and go straight down and come back. Now,
if I hit Follow Me, I can go out of plane, I can go any direction I need to in order to make that
follow. That's really cool. I'm going to hit Undo again. I chose the command first, which like a lot
of tools I have the option to choose the command and then hover over to highlight the actual
geometry I want to use the tool on. That is an option. The preferred method for using Follow Me,
though, is going to be to select and go in and select all of the pieces I want to follow first.
I'm going to drag my window like this, and select these four lines first, then click Follow Me,
and then click that surface. Boom! See how that just goes quickly? This is going to give you
cleaner results and a much more pleasant working experience than if I were to try to drag along.
It's really simple with this, I have 4 lines floating in space. If I'm doing this on a full
building, where I have hundreds of lines all over, Follow Me's auto-detect to the line you are trying
to hover along can be a little funky. Attempting to drag it along the line can be a little bit
painful. It is recommended that whenever you come in to do Follow Me, you preselect the geometry.
Then choose Follow Me, and then pick the surface you want to have followed. This is pretty simple
because this is a rectangle. Let's go over here and let's make a new shape. Something like that.
That's a fun shape. Let's have that and then we'll follow all of these lines. Notice this line is
not just straight. We've got some arcs here. If I grab all of that geometry, then I choose Follow Me
and pick that shape, look what it automatically does. It automatically rounds that.
Really cool shapes, really cool geometry that you could make
otherwise, but using Follow Me lets you create things like molding or
trim in just a couple of seconds. Things like pipes are super easy too because you make a circle
and have it follow everything. This is additive Follow Me. This was adding new geometry. You can
also take existing geometry. This is a box and I put a little arc on the back. Now, I can tell it
I want to pull that arc and cut out all the way around. Again, in the spirit of pre-selecting,
I want to pick my map first. Where do I want this arc to go? Well, I want it to go here, here, here,
and here. Right? I want it to go all the way around. If I have a closed shape like this,
I can just choose the face that it creates. Choosing this will automatically set the exterior
boundaries, the edges that make the outside of this face, into the path that will get followed
when I click Follow Me and then choose the shape. Look what it does there. It goes in and cuts down
all the way around. This is great because things like these corners aren't necessarily easy to
manually come in and cut that out. Follow Me just goes around the corner and chops it right
off. Another thing Follow Me is used for a lot is things like this, shapes like this. I'm going to
go ahead and take all of this and make a copy. I'm going to move it over with my modifier key
because I want to do it a couple of different ways. Here I can pre-select a shape, Follow Me,
and then pick this profile. Look what it does. It spins it around and it gives me that shape.
The important thing, I'm going to Undo, the important thing here is as it spins around,
if I want this to be symmetrical, I want to make sure that this point right here
is directly over the center of the circle. If I were to drop a line from here, straight down,
there is the middle of the circle. That was not on accident, I did that on purpose.
By having the shape that I am following not touching, you can see all of these other
options we started touching, I don't actually have to do that. What this is going to do is
take this path and take this shape and spin it around, then, from that, create what we would
call a radial following. I don't know. It doesn't have to be a circle either. I'm going to grab my
rectangle tool, pull the modifier key to drop in the center, drop it in the middle here and pull
it out like that. Then, I will use my eraser tool to get rid of that line. Now, I'll select this,
say Follow Me, and pick right here. Look, same thing, it took that shape and it pulled it, turned
90 degrees, pulled it, and turned 90 degrees. All the way around. This same profile gives me
two very different shapes in the end depending on the path that I am actually using for Follow Me.
So those are the fundamentals of Follow Me. I'll make another video for next week that goes into
some more advanced use cases. If you've already been using Follow Me and you already
knew all of this stuff, that's cool. Hopefully you've picked something up. Hopefully you're like,
"Oh! I didn't know about that," or, "I've never thought about it that way."
If not, come back next week and maybe we'll offer you something, or a new opportunity to
learn something, you didn't know about Follow Me. Like I said, it is one of my favorite tools,
you can create some really cool geometry using it. Hopefully that is enough to get you started and
try out using Follow Me in a model of your own. If you liked this video, please click like down
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