Shading faces and edges

In addition to changing the angle of view in SketchUp, we can also change the character of the view by changing the way the surfaces look. We can do that under the View menu and we have a couple of boxes here. We have Edge Style and Face Style. Let's start with Face Style. We've got a bunch of them here. Let's start with Wire Frame. And what this does is it gives you a wire view of the scene. You can actually see all the edges of the scene. If we select Hidden Line, it will hide all of the back facing edges and so it gives you a much different look.

A little bit more of a graphic look, it can be very nice to work in this mode. And you can also go into Shaded mode, which shows you the colors but not the Textures. And then we can go to our familiar Shaded with Textures, which pretty much shows you everything. And there's another mode called Monochrome mode, which will look like this. Now if we want we can also turn on a toggle, and that's called X-ray. And what that does is it retains shading, but it shows you the back facing edges. So, it's kind of a cross between Shaded View, and Wire Frame.

So, it gives you some shading, but also gives you a full view of everything that's in the model. And the nice thing about X-ray is that it is a toggle, so you can use it with different types of views. So if you wanted to see it with Textures, you could turn X-ray on or off. In fact, I'm going to turn X-ray off and let's take a look at Edge Style. We have a couple of them here, we can see Edges, we can also show Back Edges as dotted lines. And so, you can see here we've got these dotted lines on the edges on the far side. So that's almost like a Wire Frame mode. And that can be turned on or off.

And then, we can also use what are called Profiles. Now, Profiles are basically the outside edges of the surface. So, if you turn on Profiles, you can see these outside edges. You can also turn on what's called Depth Cue. So anything that's close to the camera will have darker shading than things that are far away. So things that are further away will have thinner shading. And then we can also turn on what are called Extensions. Now, we can zoom in here, and we can kind of see that. Now, what Extensions are, in fact, I'm going to toggle off Depth Cue here, so we can see Extensions a little bit more.

So, if you look up here you can actually see these Extensions. Which is basically just kind of a drawing trick. And it allows the lines to be overdrawn. So, basically it's like drawing past the point of intersection of the line. So, all of these can give your drawing character and life. And these can also be used in presentations. So, if you want to show off your project or your model in a certain way, you can turn on or off Textures or Shading or whatever. So, those are some of the basics of how to change the way your model looks in SketchUp.