From the course: SketchUp: Tips & Tricks

New section plane features in 2018 - SketchUp Tutorial

From the course: SketchUp: Tips & Tricks

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New section plane features in 2018

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- Hi. I'm George Maestri and today we're going to take a look at some new features for section planes in SketchUp 2018. So let's go ahead and just start off by creating a basic section plane. I can do this under Tools, Section Plane and this is basically the same as its always been, but now with 2018 you'll notice a couple of things. First off, this comes in as numbered. So notice how this has numbered corners. Then that's the number of the section plane. Now we can certainly move this up and down like we've done before. But one of the nice things about section planes in SketchUp 2018 is that they now show up in the outliner. So if I go into my Outliner window and scroll down to the bottom you can see my section plane is right here. And if I want I can rename that section plane. We can call it, maybe, top section and now I've got a more descriptive name. Another thing we can do with sections is we can actually start to do things like section fills. Now typically when we do a section, if you notice, these walls are pretty much hollow so we don't get that traditional fill that we would normally get on something like a floor plan or something like that, but we can go into our Styles window and I've got it pinned here on Windows, but you could certainly do Window styles on the Mac. And if we go into the Edit of our Styles, you'll see we have a number of different tabs. The last one on the right is Modeling Settings. And down here you'll see we have Section Fill, and we have a Color as well as a Toggle. Now when I toggle that notice how it actually fills these sections so now when I scroll in, I don't get that hollow wall that I was getting and I get a much nicer fill that I can use for things such as floor plans. Now another thing we can do with Sections is we can obviously do more than one section. So let's go ahead and create another one. So going to do Section Plane and this time I'm going to lock this to the green axis so we're going to do kind of a front section here and I'm going to select this and lets go ahead and move it so we can get a nice section here. Something like that. And if we go into our Outliner, you'll see that I have this second section. And we could certainly rename this. Let's call this, say, Front Section or something like that. Now if we want to switch between sections it's very easily with a right-click menu. So all I have to do is select the section I want. So let's go ahead and select our top section. If we right-click above it you can see we have an option here called Active Cut. When I do that, that becomes the active cut. If I select the other one, right-click do active cut and if we want, we can also align our view to that section. So all I would have to do now is turn on Parallel Projection and I have a proper section for that. If I were to select my top section, right-click, make that the active cut, and then do Align View, now I have a floor plan. So these are a few of the new options that you have with sections in SketchUp 2018 and I hope you find these useful in your work.

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