Wood’n Bits Workshop

I’ve had a couple people suggest that SketchUp isn’t very miniatures-friendly.  It’s true that as you shake it out of the box it is set up to draw buildings and such but SketchUp has tremendous hidden power and capacity so the fix is easy.  Let’s first look at the problem, however.

When you load up SketchUp it looks something like:

If we delete the little guy and then draw, say an 1.5″ x 3″ rectangle to represent a 18×36 table top in 1/12 scale, we get:

That little dot near the axis is our table top.  We can ZoomExtents and see it: The problem, though, is that now we can’t see the axes and so we start jockeying around so we can see everything.

There is a simple solution, however.  Starting again, delete the little guy and then

1) Select the Rectangle tool

2) hover the tool over the origin of the axes (where they come together).

3) Create a box that’s 6×6.  You do this by pulling out a square using your mouse and then, from your keyboard, simply type 6,6 (the comma is important here).

You should see, as you’re making the square something like:

but your rectangle will shrink to a dot (again), near the axes.

4) Click on ZoomExtents (magnifier icon with the little triangles around it) and you’ll get this:

5) Now that you’ve got a rectangle, double-click on it.  This will select the face AND the edges of this rectangle.  Now, delete it using your delete key. Makes sense, right…make something then immediately delete it.

6) Without doing anything else, go to the main menu and select File and then Save_As_Template:

In the dialog box you see, enter a name for your new template.  I called mine “Miniatures” and wrote a simple description.  What’s important, here is to leave the click box titled Make Default Template checked.

Now, whenever you load SketchUp you’ll be using this template and when you draw your 1.5″ x 3″ table top, it will look like:

Better, yes? As always, if you have comments or questions, you can reach me at larry@woodnbits.com.

Cheers — Larry

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Tags: SketchUp

This entry was posted by Larry on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 11:06 am and is filed under Miniatures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.