From the course: SketchUp: Tips & Tricks

Create exploded views - SketchUp Tutorial

From the course: SketchUp: Tips & Tricks

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Create exploded views

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- Hi, I'm George Maestri and, today, we're going to look at exploded views and a clever little way to move things very precisely. So, many times, when you want to show how something is built you may want to create what's called an exploded view, and that's really just all the parts of the object kind of separated by a specific amount, so, that way, you can kind of see how everything fits together. So let's do that with this simple bench. Now, one way to do this is to simply just open up the group, select all of these subgroups, and move them apart. So, if I wanted to, I could move this, say, 12 inches. And I could select this and I could move that 12 inches and I can just keep typing and moving. But that could get a little bit tedious, because, really, we're kind of moving our hand to the keyboard to type, and, actually, can get pretty slow. And if you have an exploded view with a lot of parts, it can get lengthy. So let me show you a little trick to move things precisely and quickly. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a little cube of a known size. So, in this case, I'm going to make this cube 12 inches by 12 inches. So I'm going to type in 12 by 12, hit Enter, use my push/pull tool, and, again, type in 12. So I have a 12 inch cube here. Now I can select this and group it. And I'm going to actually use this as a measurement tool. So if I move something, I can actually snap to parts of this to get things to move precisely. So let's do this again. I'm going to go ahead and double click on this and then select this and go back to my move tool. Now, one of the things I can do is I can actually snap to this box. So I'm going to go ahead and left click here and drag and notice how this snaps to that midpoint, which is at six inches, or at the end point, which is at 12 inches. Now, I can select my other object here, and, again, move. And, again, all I have to do is snap. Now let's say I wanted to move this diagonally. Well, all I have to do is snap corner to corner and I can move that diagonally. Select these, move them, and so on. Now let's say these I wanted to move only halfway. Well, I can always snap to midpoints here. So let's go ahead and select this one here and move that by only snapping to midpoint. So, as you can see, this is a really simple and easy way to move things precisely. Now, I'm using this for an exploded view, but I'm sure you can think of all sorts of great uses for this technique.

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