From the course: SketchUp 2021 Essential Training

Line tool - SketchUp Tutorial

From the course: SketchUp 2021 Essential Training

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Line tool

- [Instructor] The line tool is a great way to create geometry in SketchUp. To activate the line tool, click on the pencil icon here or your keyboard shortcut letter L. To create a line, you can simply click and release to choose a starting point and send your cursor in the direction you'd like the line to go. You can click and release to choose an ending point and then continue on drawing your shape. Let's practice creating rectangles using the line tool. When using drawing tools like the line tool, it's really important to click and release and not click and drag. As I'm drawing, I can see that SketchUp is trying to help me by creating inference points. Those are these small threads, this one is red, that you can see appear as you cross over a plane of an endpoint or a midpoint. So you can see that small red thread that appears here and a green thread that appears here. This is SketchUp's way of helping me refer to other points of my drawing and to help keep my geometry aligned where it's appropriate. If you're having trouble getting an inference point to appear, you can just simply hover over it with your cursor, don't click and release, just hover, and a new point of inference will appear. I'll talk more about inference points in future videos. Now oftentimes, we'll need our lines to be specific lengths. So again, first we'll choose the starting point, click and release and begin to move your cursor in the direction you'd like your line to go. Instead of clicking and releasing to choose an endpoint, I'll simply type in the distance that I'd like my line to be. In this case, I'd like my line to be eight feet, 8' enter. I can see that distance in the lower right-hand corner measurements box. It says 8'. Now, the instinct may be to click down in that box and type in the distance, but there is never a need to click in our measurements box, it is always waiting for our input. So as I turn the corner with my line tool and move my cursor you can see in that lower right-hand corner the measurements box change. So I can click and release when I'm happy with the distance or I can type it in, because again, it's always waiting for our input. I'm going to type 5' enter. If you ever happen to type in the wrong distance, perhaps I typed in 5 enter, which is 5 inches, I can always override that by typing the correct distance directly after that. So I'm going to type 5' enter. As long as it was the last action, I can always override it. Now, I'll continue on to close in the shape. And one more note before we move on, the default in the measurements box is inches. So there's no need for me to type 36 and then the inches symbol for 36 inches. I can simply type 36 enter, but I do need to type in feet. So if it's three feet, I would need to type 3' enter.

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