Standard camera views

- [Narrator] When you work in SketchUp, there are many times when you'll need to align your camera to a very specific axis. And we can do that using what are called standard views. Now I can find these under the camera menu, standard views. Now we have top, bottom, front, back, left, right, and iso. Now each one of these gives us a standard view on our scene. So if I go into standard view's top, this gives me a top view of my scene.

If I go into, say, the front view, you can see it gives me a front view of my scene. Now once we have these views, we can certainly pan or we can zoom in or out. We can also orbit our way out of these. Now all this is doing is just moving the camera so that it is aligned to a specific axis. Now if we were to go into, say, a front view, you'll see that we still have perspective in our scene.

Now if you want to have an actual kind of a drafting view, an orthographic view of the scene, we can do that by going into camera, parallel projection. By default, we're on perspective. So let's choose parallel projection. And notice how the scene kind of flattens out. And what this does is it gives us a parallel view of the scene. So there's no perspective in the scene at all. And so again, I can go up to my tool bar here and use my tools to zoom in and out or pan.

But if I were to orbit, you could see how I'm getting a view that's really not perspective-based. It's more of an isometric view. And that's because we're using what's called parallel projection. If I change this from parallel projection to perspective, it looks a little bit more natural. So if you want to draw things that are exactly aligned, you will often want to go into one of our standard views.

And turn on parallel projection. Now we also have one other type of perspective. We have what's called two point perspective. Now this is a standard drawing style where the vertical lines are parallel but the rest of the lines are drawn according to the horizon lines. So this is kind of just that standard drawing trick you learn early on. Where all of the verticals are, again, straight lines. And the perspective is really only aligned to the horizon.

So as you can see, there are three different types of perspective: we have parallel projection, perspective, as well as two point perspective. And we can use any of these in conjunction with standard views to get standard drafting views into our scene.