Erase, hide, and smooth edges - SketchUp Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video we're going to clean up the unwanted edges that resulted from extruding the floor plan and adding headers. I'll zoom in over here into the bathroom area, and then select multiple edges. I will click on an edge, hold down the Shift key, and then keep clicking edges to build up a selection set. Then I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose Hide, or press H on the keyboard. The edges go away. Another way that you can get rid of edges is by deleting them, and this is considered a little bit more permanent. I'll click some edges, hold down the Shift key to build up a selection set just as I did before, but this time, I'll press the Delete key, and they go away. Now there's a subtle difference, and you can only see this if you go up to the View menu and choose Hidden Geometry. Those edges that I had previously hidden are still there. Now they're visible because I chose to view the hidden geometry. Incidentally you can toggle the display of hidden geometry on and off with the I key. I'll press I to hide that, or press I again to show it. A hidden edge is still selectable and snappable. I can unhide that edge by going up to Edit, Unhide, Selected. Now it's a regular edge again, and if I press I, it looks like it did before. Now if I press U, it's a shortcut for Unhide All. Now all of the edges that I had hidden are now back again, so you can use these modes to control the visibility of your edges. Another way that you can deal with edges is by using the eraser tool. I'll use the eraser tool and click on individual edges to erase them. This is analogous to selecting them and then pressing the Delete key. Another method that you can use with the eraser tool is by dragging with the tool. So on this surface I will drag across it instead of individually clicking the edges, and that's just a little bit faster. When I release the mouse button, those edges are deleted. You can also choose to hide edges with the eraser tool, and if you look down at the status bar, it says Shift equals Hide right here, so if I hold down the Shift key, and click or drag over these edges, they are hidden, and I can verify this by pressing I to toggle the display of hidden geometry. I'll press U to unhide the edges, and I'll just go ahead and erase them. Now, you can also use the Option key on the Mac to soften or smooth, and that would be the Alt key in Windows. So I'm going to hold down the Option key on the Mac, and soften or smooth this particular edge. What happens there is that it blends the surface normals of the top surface and the side of the wall together, and this makes it look almost like there's a seamless edge. Now this can be helpful on very curved geometry, but it's not what we want on walls. So I'm just going to go Edit, Undo. Now, I just need to go ahead and go around the plan and erase these edges. I think erasing is the best choice here. Now if you make a mistake and you erase an edge that you didn't intend to, don't worry, you can recreate that edge very easily. In this case I'll go to the line tool, and draw a line from the bottom endpoint to the top endpoint, and SketchUp automatically creates the surfaces wherever there are bounded areas. I'll just come over here and continue erasing the edges that don't belong. We're going to see a series of edges on every header, and in every case where we had collinear lines. See here on the floor plan evidently, there were two different line segments. So when I extruded the wall, that edge got extruded up as well. That's why it's a good idea to try to join your collinear lines in the floor plan stage, because if you don't, you'll have a little bit more work later in the 3D stage to get rid of the unwanted edges. Now I need to orbit around and see all the edges from different sides. Here I'm going to drag over these edges to erase them. I'll orbit around again and there are more edges that are just obscured by the wall surfaces. It's worth cleaning up your model like this. It makes it look so much better, and more presentable.