Utilizing SketchUp's View and Position Tools for Precise Model Navigation

And then if I go over to my large tool set, at the very bottom, down here, these are our view and position tools. This is our Position Camera tool. This allows us to put our man anywhere on our screen to start a specific view.

This is looking around. Once we're at a view, we can look around like we are with our head and eyes looking at the various buildings. This allows us to walk from that specific view, and this allows us to create section plans.

These tools are extremely helpful for getting us into the exact position when we need views, either for a client or for ourselves to better understand the project. Let's first hit the Position Camera button right here. You will see a little mouse with an X underneath it and a dot.

You can snap anywhere on face and points. If I come down to my parking lot and put my person face right here on this line, you will see that my Look Around eyeball becomes my default tool. As soon as I click and hold my mouse, I can start painting and looking around my park like I am with my head on a swivel.

This time, let's look right directly at our clubhouse like this, and then let's explore using the Walk tool. The Walk is similar to the eye where you have this icon of feet. You click once, and if you hold your mouse button, you can see that there's an X appears.

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If you drag slowly up, you will get closer to your building. You walk forward, and if you drag going down slowly, you will go backwards. The further you get away from the crosshairs, the faster you'll go.

If you notice in our tooltips on the bottom that ALT equals disable collision detection, SketchUp automatically won't go through a building unless you're holding ALT, and then it will go through. You can do shift to go up and down, and then control will go fast. If you go at an angle, you'll be walking forward and backwards.

This is another way to move around in your model. Let's position roughly around here so we can see the front of our clubhouse. As you can see in the angle, some of these lines may not be completely vertical.

Let's change our view settings to be camera, two-point perspective. This will line up our model to be with these completely verticals. This is really ideal for good perspectives.

Next, let's go to our scenes tab on our dialog box in our default tray, and let's add a new scene. I will call this scene down here Animation-1. Enter.

This time, I will check the include animation button, and I will check the camera location, and I will deselect everything else. The only thing that I want that this tab or scene will change is the camera location. If you can see here, this animation was placed right in the middle because I was currently on True North axis, and whenever you add a scene, it automatically places one to the right of it.

What I can do to move this over to the right is I want to right-click, move right, or in here, I can use these little arrows to move it up or down. Let's go back to these True North animations, and you can see here that I previously saved style and fog into this setting. In this one, I didn't save my style and fog, so that style that I created didn't get updated.

What I want to do is I want to go back to here, and holding down shift to select both, I want to deselect everything so it doesn't change my styles or my shadows or any of those features. These don't show that, and then here, this one shows axis location, so I only want this one to show camera location. I will update my scene.

Now, let's change our style back again to landscape architectural style, and then let's turn on shadows. This time, in our scenes, let's make sure that we save style and fog in shadow settings so it doesn't accidentally get turned off. I will update scene button, update all these.

Now, let's create some additional scenes. Let's go into our look around, and let's rotate this way, and let's go towards our sidewalk. We'll use our Walk tool, and we'll walk in and get to a good point right on the sidewalk.

I'm going to hold shift to drop my eyeball down a little bit so we're parallel to these faces. Then, if you click and hold on your center wheel of your mouse, you will operate your eyeball, and you can actually move this around. Let's set a scene right here.

Let's go and right-click Animation-1 and do add. As you can see, this came in, and none of these icons were selected, so I'll go back to include animation, select camera location, select shadow settings, and select style and fog. Let's rename this Animation-2.

Again, let's continue to move into our site by using the Walk tool and using the scroll wheel to move our eyeball. Let's walk a little bit towards our bicycles, just like this. Let's right-click, add.

You can go back to here and right-click rename, and we can type in Animation-3. Let's keep going into our park and start creating some scenes. Let's go next to our fountain and move over into this direction.

We'll do another animation, add. Rename Animation-4. Now, let's go all the way into our fountain.

Let's hold down ALT so we can go through some of the geometry. Holding down our scroll wheel, let's look back towards our carousel. Let's back up a bit, holding down ALT to go through our geometry.

We can see something just like this. Now, I will add this animation clip and rename Animation-5. Now, if I go to my scenes at the top and click Animation-1, you can see that it will move me automatically back to my first view that I had saved.

If I right-click, I can play an animation on all the clips that are included in the animation. The clips that are included in the animation do not include the parentheses around it. So, I can right-click, play animation, and you can see this box that opens up and it shows that this animation is playing.

This will scroll through all the scenes that we have saved and it will create transitions between each one of these. Then, it will start back at the front. I'm going to stop this.

You'll notice that there are pauses in between. If we go to my Window, Model Info, and then go into animation at the top, you can see that we can create scene transitions. This is going to fill in the gap between one scene to the other scene.

If we don't have this checked, you're just going to be jumping from scene to scene and not have a smooth transition. The scene delay is what happens how long each clip stops at that animation. So, if we change the animation to zero, meaning it's not going to pause at all, and then I go back to Animation-1 and then right-click, play animation, it only pauses for a second or not even a second.

I do see that this animation is going rather quickly, so I want to change one more thing. That will be the scene transitions. I'm going to change this to four seconds, which is going to make a much more smoother movement throughout our animation.

I'll exit this and go back to Animation-1. I will right-click, play animation. Now you'll see this move a lot slower and it will pause for a brief second on each one.

This creates a much more aesthetically pleasing animation moving around our community park.