Subtitles of the Movie

In addition to our standard Navigational Tools which I've shown you in the previous videos, I wanted to talk to you about this group of Navigational Tools which are located at the end of our Large Tool Set, which are the Position Camera Tool, the Look Around Tool and the Walk Tool. They're all very closely related to one another and they have kind of a unique perspective on how to navigate. I wouldn't use these tools for creating models but they're very useful for navigating through your models once you've created them and to create an environment where you can play with these tools I've actually created a very simple SketchUp scene that you can download as part of the Workfiles for this particular training. It's titled silly wander.skp and skps are basically the SketchUp file format. So before I show you how to use these tools I'm actually going to pull back a little. We're using the Standard Navigational Tool and I'm going to give you kind of an overview of what this model looks like. So I'm going to click here to create my center of rotation and I'm simply going to pull myself back utilizing my 3D Mouse and you can see here that this is a fairly large, but simple SketchUp model that has a lot of room to move around in and there's a very good reason for that and I'll show you what that is here. So I'm first going to click on the Position Camera Tool and when I do that you'll see on my Status Bar that I have Select camera position and I also have a Height Offset of 5 foot 6, which is the standard Height Offset for this particular tool. And if I click back here what it's going to do is, it's going to put me in position to be at the ground at 5 foot 6 where my cursor is currently highlighted with that little blue circle. So if I click here and I let go it's actually going to pull me in and place me at 5 foot 6 and immediately what's going to happen is I'm actually going to be looking around the model at that eye height and if I simply just click and drag using this Look Around Tool that I'm immediately placed into, I can look up, I can look down and I can get a perspective as if I was actually standing in the SketchUp model at this particular eye-height. I can also go up and down utilizing the Look Around Tool or before I begin with my Position Camera Tool I can put in whatever I want. In this particular instance I'm going to say I want to go up to 20 feet so I hit 20 feet and hit Enter and I immediately rise to 20 feet. My position hasn't changed at all, only my height. If I want to go down to, say, 6 inches, I'm going to hit 6 inches and now I'm down at 6 inches, so this is more of a worm's eye-view kind of position. And, again, my position hasn't changed, only my height. So, again, the idea with these two tools and how they work together is that your position never changes, simply the eye height does. So I'm going to go back to my 5 foot 6 and I'm going to go back and grab my Position Camera Tool after I pull myself back out of the model again. So with my Standard Navigational Tools I'm going to pull myself back out of the model, and I want to show you how to look at a particular object from a particular point of view and so in this particular instance what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to get a point of view from Sang and I'm going to say, OK, I want to see from Sang's point of view and I want to have him looking at the car. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click my Position Camera Tool and I'm going to click on Sang's head and then I'm going to drag out to the car and what this will do is put me into the position of Sang looking at that car. So here we go. Now in this particular instance the column is in the way, but you get the small amount of the top of the car through Sang's position and, again, you know, this is very true-to-life, as Sang, in his particular position, would not see this car and if it was important that Sang could, the logical thing to do is either move the car in the model or move Sang in the model because this is giving us an accurate representation of where Sang actually is in his environment and what his point of view would be, which again in certain circumstances can be very, very useful. Now, let's say that I wanted to start from where Sang is, but I wanted to actually move around this model, utilizing this exact same eye height that I'm currently at. Well, the easy way to do that is with the Walk Tool and what the Walk Tool does is it actually allows you to click and create a point of interest. So I'm going to click on these girls here with the dog and I'm going to actually drag my mouse up slightly and you can see here that I've actually run into Sang because Collision Detection has been activated so I'm actually going to back away from Sang for a second because I was actually on Sang, but I'm going to click and drag on these girls and I'm actually going to go around Sang and I'm going to go back. If you notice, my cursor pretty much stays where it is and only when I click up I go forward. When I go down I go back and when I go side to side I'm actually turning. So this is really a very sort of video gamish way of navigating your SketchUp models, but it allows you to explore your environment as if you were literally walking through it. Now the closer I am to the cursors the slower I walk. The further away I am the faster I walk. So I can control my speed of movement by how close I am to those crosshairs and I can explore my environment, again, utilizing this from that standard eye height. And if I simply click on my scroll wheel you'll see that I'm now in the Look Around Tool, so I can utilize the Look Around Tool, let go of the scroll wheel and I'm right back in my Walk Tool. Now the Walk Tool has this Collision Detection that allows for us to go ahead and do things like climb stairs as a real person would climb stairs to enter into an environment and to explore that environment. But let's say that we wanted to go through a wall, for whatever reason. Well, we couldn't because as soon as we walk up to that wall we hit it and now we're stuck and the only way we can get past that is to back up. So, how do we get through the wall? Well, in SketchUp when you're using the Walk Tool you can simply hold down the Alt key and this will allow you to walk through solid materials. So, boom. Now I'm on the other side of that solid material and this allows me to, again, continue exploring the model without having to deal with being stuck in a corner or something like this. And even this car, which is a pretty simple object, again, if I walk up to it I'm going to actually bounce off of it. See? I can't go past the car, but I can go through it with the Alt key, so there I am. The other thing with this Walk Around Tool is that if you want to go to a particular eye height you can by simply holding down the Shift key and this will allow you to rise if you're above the crosshairs, or lower if you're below the crosshairs. If you keep your eye on the Measurement Toolbar here, you'll see that that determines where we are in terms of our scene. So right now I'm rising, right now I'm lowering and I can see that my Measurement Toolbar is going up and going down depending on where I am. And as long as I have that Shift key depressed, instead of moving forward and back I'm going up and down. But as soon as I let go of it, now I'm back at that stationary eye-height of 11 foot 2 and 3 eighths inches and I'm moving around again just as I was before. And, again, if I go up the stairs I go up the stairs. If I go down the stairs, I go down the stairs. So, the movement, even though I'm 11 feet tall at this particular moment, the movement hasn't changed any. So this is really, really useful for getting a particular eye height and moving around in the scene for this. Now let's say that even with pulling far away from my model I'm moving too slow and I want to cover big distances very quickly. There is the option to Run and I'll show you. If you hold down the Ctrl key, or on the Mac the Option key and you go as if you're walking you'll actually go into a run and now I'm moving very rapidly. And so this is one of those situations where if you're wanting to go through a scene very, very quickly for some reason that that's the way you do it, is you hold down the Ctrl or Option key and that will allow you to move much more quickly as if you were running.