Create a curved cantilevered counter - SketchUp Tutorial

- Now that the masking model for the new kitchen design is complete, let's go ahead and start adding detail to it. First up is the kitchen island. Let's design a countertop for it. Right now it's just a box, and at this point I haven't grouped things so we have separate faces and edges in the island. Let's double click on the top surface to select the surface and it's boundary edges. In Entity Info it says we have five entities selected. Hold down the Shift key and click on the surface to deselect it, now it should say four edges. Go to the Move tool and click an endpoint of the top surface there, move it down in the blue direction and then press the Option key on the Mac or the Control key in Windows to go into Copy mode. While the cursor is on this edge, type "1.5 enter" to specify the counter depth of an inch and a half. This will give us additional geometry to use, so that we can cantilever the countertop out, leaving space for a bar, so that we can have bar stools along this long edge, press "p" to go to the Push/pull tool and pull this surface out a distance of one foot, type "one apostrophe enter." I think this counter would be more interesting if it had a triangular shape here. To draw that in will be kind of challenging right now, if I use the Line tool, and I try to draw a line in this direction, there's nothing to snap to, there's nothing to align to, because the coordinate axes are parallel to the kitchen island right now. I think that if we went back to the way that the axes were initially we would have better success, so I'll right-click on the red line here to get this Special Context menu which only appears when you right-click on one of the axes, choose Reset, and now the coordinate axes are back where they were initially. I can then go ahead and draw a line here, and I can draw it in the green direction very easily now. While the cursor is going in the green direction, hold down the Shift key and observe that that line gets thicker that means that you've locked in that inference direction. Now you can click right here to specify the length of the line. Next, click there again, to draw in another line and sketch up fills in that bounded area with a surface, press "p" and pull that down and snap it to the underside of the counter. Now, I think this would be more pleasing in general if we didn't have a sharp corner here but instead had a nice, curved transition. To do that I will use the Tape Measure tool, and I will click right here on the end point and then move the cursor along this edge and type in "two enter." There is now a guide point right here. It allows us to snap to that point. Click again on this corner end point, move the cursor along the opposite edge and type "two enter," so now we have two guidepoints. Use the Arc tool and click the start at the guide point and the end at the opposite guide point, and then you have to click a third point representing the bulge. If you zoom in closely here, you can see the values in the lower right-hand corner where it says bulge, I'd like it to say five-eighths of an inch, when it does, just click, and the arc is complete, then press "p" and push the surface down to the bottom. You can then choose Edit, Delete Guides, and those guides are removed. Just to refine this a little bit, I'll use the Eraser tool and hold down the Option key and click on these two edges to smooth and soften those. That would be the Control key in Windows. I can then click on this edge to erase it also. Now, let's perform something similar on the opposite side of the counter over here, but this time I'll do it a little bit faster. I'll draw a line from this corner over in the red direction and hold down the Shift key, click over here, and click again, press "p," pull it down, press "t" for tape, click a point on the corner, move it over in this direction and type "two enter." Do that again in the opposite direction, two enter, press "a" for arc, draw an arc from start to end and then position the bulge so that it's five-eighth of an inch, press "p" and push this down, and you can delete the guides globally like that, and press "e" for the eraser, press the Option key on the Mac or the Control key in Windows and hold that down while you click on those two edges so that they're smoothed and softened, and then finally click on that edge there to erase it. Now we have a cantilevered countertop that has a much more complex and interesting shape.