X-Raying Objects
You can “see through” objects in SketchUp, which is very powerful in a number of situations; for example, when you have two objects that obscure one another and don’t want to keep rotating the drawing all the time, or when you have two objects that overlap and want to position them correctly with regard to each other.Turning on X-ray view is easy. We’ll again use the Engineering–Feet template and draw a few cubes; then we’ll X-ray them to show how this works:
1. Click the Start Using SketchUp button.
2. Select the Rectangle tool and draw a horizontal rectangle.
3. Select the Push/Pull tool in the toolbar and pull the rectangle up into a cube.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 to draw another cube.
5. Select the Select tool in the toolbar.
6. Draw a selection box around one of the cubes to select it.
7. Select the Move tool in the toolbar.
8. Move the selected cube behind the other cube. You can see what this looks like in Figure 9.1.
FIGURE 9.1 One cube obscures another.
9. From the View menu, select Face Style. A submenu appears.
10. Select the X-ray item in the submenu. This turns on X-ray viewing and makes all objects “transparent,” as you can see in Figure 9.2.
FIGURE 9.2 Using X-ray view.
Note that you can now see through the obscuring cube to the cube behind it. Very cool.
As you can see, X-ray vision is a great tool to help you manage multiple objects when they start to obscure each other. To turn it off, select the View menu’s Face Style item to open the submenu, and select the X-ray
item again to toggle X-ray vision off.
Thanks :
Steven Holzner,
SamsTeachYourself Google SketchUp 8 in 10 Minutes
