Hey guys, I'm Aaron and this is Sketchup Square One, where we take a look at the fundamentals,
the basics of Sketchup. Today we're going to look at a command called 3D text, let's hop
right in. Okay, so you can find 3D text under the tools, toolbar, so if I come up to the tools menu
I can drop down, its right here, 3D text. It is also, it's not on the default toolbar,
so I don't have it up here, you add you can, of course, add it to the default toolbar. It is in
the big toolbar, if I go to view - tool palettes on mac - toolbars on windows - and click large
toolset, I’ll see it right here. The icon for it is just an extruded capital letter "A" because
you know good things start with A. So, what I’m going to do, I’m going to go ahead and start,
I’m going to click on, click on this and what it's going to do is going to start by asking you to
basically specify the text you want to put in here, so I’m going to type something here.
There we go and I have a couple things I can define here, I can define my, this is going to
be the alignment from the point I place, so is it going to go from here to the left, is it going to
be centered, is it going to fall to the right. If you're doing just a single word like this,
of course, it's not going to matter, but if I have multiple lines of text. So, if I go ahead and
hit return and I'll just type another thing here,
this is where it's going to make more of a difference. So, there's my alignment left,
here's my alignment right, here's my center alignment. Like I said, it doesn't make
too much of a difference if you put one light text and if you put in multiple lines, that's
going to affect that. I have some options here if I want to put in filled text or extruded text.
So, I'm going to go ahead and put both in. I'm just going to place this first and then we'll
come back in again and place it again and we'll dive a little deeper into this so we'll look at
what the fonts are, that kind of thing. But right now, it's going to put this text in a Tahoma font,
ten inches tall, it's going to be filled and it's going to be extruded one inch. Let's go ahead and
hit place, so when I hit place, it connects to my mouse, and as I mouse over different surfaces
that text is going to automatically align. The intention of 3D text is to place it on surfaces,
you can always throw it on the ground, or I could place it on Sumele but the intention is that it
automatically snaps to a face. So as I click on a face, it's going to go ahead and just place
it right there. Now I see, when it places, let's zoom in here this is what it places,
so it makes a group, if I double click into that group
it has created these surfaces and extruded them out that one inch that I asked for.
So all of this geometry at this point is just geometry, this is not text anymore,
this is just geometry I can't go in here and highlight the "E" and change it into a "B"
because it's not text. This no longer exists as text, I know I'm reiterating that,
but the number one question I have, and I'm sure it'll show up in the comments is "can I edit the
text once you place it" Once you place it, it's just geometry there are extensions out there that
will let you go back and edit I think TomTom has one, but for this portion, it is just placed in,
is just geometry at this point. So, I'm going to go in there again, I'm going to go ahead and
hit 3D text, we're going to dive in a little little bit deeper here, so we're going to type
some more in here, and I'm going to look at some of these options here. So you see that it tells
meTahoma ten-inch, but I can't actually change it here. I have to click on the fonts button,
the fonts button is going to bring up the system font, so this may look a little bit different if
you're on windows than what you're seeing on mac, but the idea here is pretty simple. So,
I can pick the font I want to use, so maybe I'll use a different font here and I'll go with bold,
these of course the typeface is going to change based on the font family that sort of thing,
and I can also change the size. So I can say well I want this to be,
let's just make it huge let's make it like 24 inches and I'm going to hit enter. You do have
to hit enter here for that to update over here. The other option I have is I can turn on or off
filled or extruded, I'm going to go ahead and do that just so you can see what that does
and I'm going to go ahead and place that. Look at that so now I have this big two-foot-tall "More"
but you'll notice it's just an outline, it's just line work, why would you want to do that?
It's called 3D text, well there's some cool stuff you can do with it, so if I drop it
right here on this, this big piece up here, this the top of this cube thing, and it is a group so
when it's in a group, of course, it's not going to interact with other pieces, so if I move it I can
move it around freely, but what I could do with this is I could always, right-click and explode it
and when it does that it'll actually break through this material below and let me you
know make changes in that geometry. So, just another thing you may want to use that for. I'm
going to go ahead go one more time, I'm going to go back into three text and we'll do one that is
um... so... I ran out of witty things to type, so I'm just going to type text.
I'm going to just fill and not extrude so you can see all the different options,
and when I place that here's what that looks like. So that gives me just,
literal like flat text with no extrusion and that's just like I said, that is just
all that is super simple, now that's just a bunch of lines I can do whatever I want. If
I wanted to I could actually come in here and I could manually extrude this, so if you ever like,
'I want three "text" but I don't want them to all be the same size' or something like that
you could always manually push-pull that if you needed to but that's that.
So 3D text is actually fairly easy to get the hang of and use, like I said, the biggest thing that
people stumble on is they want it to be like a text box that they put in. They type in some text,
they put it in, then double click on it later, change it again. Once you place it, it is just
geometry. It's boom it's in there, the nice thing is that once it's geometry, it's just geometry. So
you can change however you want, anything you want to go in there manipulate, push-pull it,
change it, you can always: you can grab text from one set of 3D text and drop it into another,
it's just a bunch of geometry at that point. If you like that video, click like down below,
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3D text tool? Did you learn something new from this video? We like making these videos a lot,
but we like them, even more when they're showing something you want to see, thank you!