From the course: SketchUp Pro: Dynamic Components

Create parts of a fence post as components - SketchUp Tutorial

From the course: SketchUp Pro: Dynamic Components

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Create parts of a fence post as components

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- [Narrator] In this chapter we're going to model a picket fence as a dynamic component, and this dynamic component is going to have multiple sub-components, namely: a post with a cap on top of it, a top rail, a lower rail, and a picket element that will ultimately be copied to create the fence. We have to begin the project by modeling these sub-components. Let's start with the post and its cap. Draw a rectangle from the origin point over in the positive red and green directions. I'd like to have a four by four post, which is actually three and a half inches by three and a half inches. So I'll type three point five comma three point five enter. I'll zoom in there and use the push-pull tool and pull that up a height of four feet. I'll type four apostrophe enter. I'll zoom out, get an overview of that element. Go to the select tool, triple click on a surface to select everything that's connected to that, right click, and choose make component. I'll give this the name post and make sure this is checked because we want to replace the selection with the new component that we're making and click create. Let's verify that we have a component here in the outliner. So on the Mac go window outliner, in Windows choose window default tray outliner, and you'll see that we have a component here called post inside this currently untitled model. Now I'm going to navigate into the top of this post area and draw a rectangle on top of that. Then, I will use the offset tool and offset that inside a distance of one inch. So I'll type one enter. Then I'll use the select tool, double click on this surface, and then move that up in the blue direction an inch. I need to enter auto-fold mode, which on the Mac you can trigger with the command key, so I'm going to press that. In Windows you have to press the Alt key. Now I'd like to bring that up one inch, so I'll type one enter. So now because we offset the lines one inch inside and brought it up an inch, we effectively now have a 45 degree angle around the entire post which makes for a nice detail. I'll go to the select tool, triple click on any one of these surfaces on the cap to select all parts of the cap. Notice that it did not select the post below. The geometry here in the post is actually inside this container, the post, and so we don't select it when we triple click. I'll right click now on this selection and say make component. I'll call this one cap. Then click create. It's helpful when you're making components to visualize where their origin points are. So, I'm going to navigate so we can see the whole thing. Then I'm going to choose window, model info, and go to the components page here, and show component axes. I'll toggle that on and off and you can see what's being displayed here. We have a axis tripod right here, so that's the origin point for the cap. There's another one down here, and that is the origin point for the post. There's one other detail that I'd like to take care of here. If you look closely you'll see that there's a profile line here that's very bold, that's separating the cap from the post. I think that's too much emphasis in this situation. I really want this just to be a subtle detail. So what I can do is double click on the cap to open that component. Then I'll chose view, component edit, hide rest of model. This mode is helpful when you're working on a component so that you can focus in on just the geometry inside of that container. I'll orbit underneath and you can see there's no surface there. But what I can do to de-emphasize those profiles is I can select them with a window that goes around them and then choose edit hide. That will just hide those edges. Then I'll click outside the component to close it. Now the division here is less emphasized, now we just have these thin lines separating the cap from the post. Now I'm going to go ahead and save my file as Fence1.

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