SketchUp: Tips & Tricks

- [George] Hi, I'm George Maestri, and today, we're going to look at the advanced camera tools for SketchUp Pro. Now as of SketchUp 2018, the only desktop version is the Pro version. And one of the things you get with that is Advanced Camera Tools. And I find these tools to be very useful when I'm trying to create images from my models. Now we can find Advanced Camera Tools under Tools, Advanced Camera Tools. Now, before we do that, I want to make sure that we have a scenes window, a layers window, and the Outliner open because we're going to be using all of these.

Now in this case, my scenes window is blank. My layers window only has my default layer zero. And then I just have a couple of objects in my Outliner. So first thing I want to do is just use my standard SketchUp cameras and just frame that view up just a little bit. Now we can go into our Advanced Camera Tools, and the first thing we can do is create a camera. Now watch what happens when I do that. When I Create Camera, it's first going to ask me for a camera name, and I'm going to go ahead and just use the default, Camera 1.

When that happens, notice how the viewport changes a little bit. We get a new scene for that camera. So it's called Camera 1. And ACT means Advanced Camera Tools. If you scroll down to layers, we get a couple of different layers, we get one for the camera, we also get one for the field of view lines, and the field of view volume. And I'll show you that, just a second. And then if we go all the way down, you'll see that we actually have a real camera in the scene. And if I highlight that, you'll see some little bars around the outside window.

Now if we actually want to see this camera, the easiest way to do that is just to create another non-camera scene. So I'm just going to go ahead up to my scenes window and hit plus. And now I have Scene 2. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on that, make sure I'm in there and then if I zoom out, you can kind of see what we just created. So, here is that camera. If I were to deselect it and select something else, in the Outliner, you can see how that goes away.

But when I select it, you can see that this is the camera and it's volume. Now if we want to, we can turn on what are called the field of view lines. And these are these little dotted lines that show what the camera is seeing. We can also get a better view of that if we turn on field of view volume. Some of this functionality is available through the menu system. So if I go into Tools, Advanced Camera Tools, you'll see that I have Show/Hide Frustum Volume and again that's this button here.

So it's basically just toggling off that layer. And we also have Frustum Line, so again these options here in the menus are really just turning on and off those layers. And sometimes I find it's easier just to go to the layers themselves because I don't have to dig through menus. Now we can also show or hide all the cameras, we can unlock or lock the current camera, and then we can also set the camera type. So if I want this to say, be a 16:9 sensor or 4:3 or really any type of camera I want, all I have to do is select that menu.

So I'm going to make this a 16:9 camera. Let's go ahead and look through that. Now we can look through that simply by clicking on the scene and this is what my camera sees. Now if I go into my Advanced Camera Tools, and let's go ahead and turn on that 16:9, you'll see that I'm getting a little bit more clipping and I'm getting some upper and lower bars here that show me the outline of that scene. Now if I want to actually move the camera itself, I don't want to be using the actual camera tools here.

So if I use orbit, pan, and zoom here, watch what happens. I'm actually orbiting away from that camera and that's not really what I want. Let's go ahead and double click on that. And what I really want is, I want to use these tools down here. So if I want to pan left and right, all I have to do is hold down Shift and left, right. Or I can go up or down to move my camera. If I hold down the Shift key, I'm basically going to truck and dolly my camera, so I'm going to move my camera towards or away from my target.

If I hold down Control, I'm rolling the camera, and if I hold down Shift and Control, I can pedestal the camera. Now another way to move the camera is to simply grab the object in the scene and move it. Now if I double click on, let's say my Scene 2, you'll see that I'm actually going away from this camera. But I can actually select that in the scene or go down to the Outliner and select it and I can just use my move tool. So if I want to, I can literally just move this camera wherever I want in the scene.

If I want to I can turn on my frustum lines. Or my field of view. And I can get a sense of what this camera is actually seeing. Now I can have multiple cameras in the scene and I can switch between them. Now once I have that camera and I look through it, I can then do an export 2D graphic and that will go ahead and export that as normal. So hopefully this gives you some insight into how to use the Advance Camera Tools in SketchUp Pro.