Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Drawing a Hipped Roof and Using Follow Me

The world is full of patterns and symmetry. Several SketchUp tools, including the Follow Me tool, take advantage of this happy fact. In earlier chapters, you saw the Push/Pull tool in action. Push/Pull takes a two-dimensional shape and expands it into a three-dimensional object. The process is called extrusion. Follow Me is another SketchUp tool that extrudes 2-D shapes. The difference is that Follow Me extrudes shapes along a path, rather than just in a straight line. In this chapter, you extrude the profile of a roof around the top edge of a building. Like other SketchUp tools, the Follow Me tool is a great timesaver. You provide the minimum amount of information needed to define the shape of the roof, and SketchUp takes that information and draws it with all the proper edges, faces, corners, and angles.

This chapter also explores the Protractor tool. You use the Protractor to measure angles and to create angled guides in your model. For those cases when you can't simply align an edge along one of the main axes, the Protractor tool comes in handy. The hipped roof created in this chapter is just one of those cases. So roll up your sleeves. Find the Follow Me and Protractor tools in your SketchUp toolbox. It's time to build a roof.

Making Construction Lines

Before you can build a roof, you need a building and a plan. The simplest shapes will do the trick, so this section starts off by making a couple of building-shaped boxes. Then ...