Subtitles of the Movie

So now we're going to go ahead and continue where we left off on our last lesson and I want ahead and saved out the model that has the changes that we made to the Outliner as simple house underscore mods.skp, which you can download from the Project Files. However, if you made the same changes and saved out that file you can just use that file that you saved out the changes for. Now, the first thing we want to talk about here is Hiding and Showing Geometry. Now we can select our geometry in the model or we can select our geometry utilizing the Outliner, so I'm going to go ahead and use the Outliner for this lesson so that we can really get comfortable using the Outliner. The first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to select this base and as I select that base I can go up to Edit and choose Hide. Once I've done that this geometry is hidden and if you go over to the Outliner you'll see that it's hidden because it's grayed out and it's in italics, that lets you know that this geometry is now hidden. Now, interestingly enough we can actually view that hidden geometry by going to View, Hidden Geometry, but we're not going to do that right now, that's just one way that you can see that geometry. Now we can get that geometry back by going to Edit, Unhide and we can choose the last thing that we had or we can choose All and if we have it selected in the Outliner we can choose Selected, but for right now I'm just going to go ahead and choose All. Now when we do that here comes our geometry back. Now this is simple enough for a simple Hide and Show type of function where you are only going to be doing it every so often. But if you're going to be doing this a lot, this can be kind of tedious and so there's a better way to work in SketchUp as far as hiding and showing geometry and that's Layers. Now, how we access Layers is we go up to View, Toolbars, Layers and you'll see a very simple Toolbar pop up and we're going to go ahead and dock that right here and you'll see that it only has two things. It has a drop-down menu, right now only contains Layer0 and it has a little icon here and this icon actually allows us to launch the Layers Palette. But we can also launch that Layers Palette by coming over here into Window and Layers. I'm going to go ahead and click on the icon just so you see how that works and there is the Layers Palette. Now I'm going to go ahead and dock this right underneath so that we really have the ability here to work as our interface would be more functional for us. The reason why I put this Toolbar and this Palette right next to each other is because they work in conjunction. In the Palette you are actually creating and managing your Layers. With the Toolbar you're assigning the Layers. And what I mean by that is, if we select the base and we want to put it onto its own layer well, first thing we need to do is we need to actually create that layer and so we're going to use the Layers Palette for that. When we click on this little Plus icon we can create a new Layer and I'm going to name that Layer base and I'm going to hit Enter. Now you're going to notice that this Layer that we've just created is automatically assigned to be visible and it's automatically assigned a color, and your color may be different than mine. We can change this color to whatever you'd like, so I'm just going to go ahead and click on that and I'm going to choose something, say, bright green, like that. Just something real noticeable. And this will be for our base Layer. Now, now that I have a Layer set up in my Layers Palette and I'll do one more for, just so you can see how that's done again. So we're going to go ahead and add a roof Layer and this time we're going to go ahead and set this for maybe a bright blue, something like so. This is going to allow us to actually have Layers that we can now assign geometry to and you'll notice if we go up to the Layers Toolbar now we have those in our drop-down list. Now it's important to note that if you don't have any geometry currently selected and you assign a layer here in the drop-down list what you're effectively doing is you're telling SketchUp I want to create new geometry on that layer and that is also the same as coming over here and clicking this little radio button next to a layer. You're telling SketchUp that you want to create new geometry on this layer only, instead of creating it on the Default Layer of Layer0. I don't recommend doing that. I recommend staying on Layer0 most of the time unless you have a particular purpose for going to one of the other Layers that you are going to want to do and there are maybe instances where that might be useful to you, but for right now just try to keep all your geometry creation on Layer0. Now once we've selected the base here in the Outliner I can assign it to my base Layer by going to my Layers Toolbar and choosing base. And now that is on this base Layer and if I simply click on the visible icon there you can see that now I have the ability to hide and unhide that layer very quickly and very easily. Now I can also do the same thing with the roof, so let's go ahead and get the roof and now I have the roof selected, now I can go up to roof and assign it to roof, like so and if I go ahead and get out of that in the Outliner so that we're back to our basic view, I can go ahead and hide and show that roof at will now utilizing the Layers Palette. Now what are these colors for and why do we want to change them? Well, if we go over here to this little fly-out menu we can see at the bottom there's an option: Color by layer and what this is, is a visual representation of what layers are our geometry currently residing on. So, for instance, our base is currently on our green layer. Now let's say, for whatever reason, that I wanted to go ahead and move Sang onto the base layer, well, I can do that by assigning him to base and as soon as I do that you can see that now he is, in fact, green. If I wanted to go ahead and take this little overhang and assign it to the roof layer I can go ahead and click on the porch overhang and assign that to the roof layer and now you can see that once we get out of that, that it is, in fact, blue and they are just as easy to show and hide as they were before. Now if we go ahead and turn off Color by layer you can see that the geometry was, that was only a preview. It has nothing to do with the actual shading of the geometry. The other options here are: Select All, which allows you to select all the Layers and the final option is Purge. Now why would you need Purge? Well, let's say you created a couple of extra layers and, for whatever reason, you forgot to put anything on those Layers, but you don't remember where they are or what was on them and you don't want to sort through all those Layers to figure out what you keep and what you get rid of. If you choose Purge it will kill all those empty layers for you so that you don't have to go sorting through there to figure out what's on what and that can be a real time saver when you're trying to clean up your document if you've made some mistakes of creating Layers and not putting things on them. You can also take a Layer and mov your geometry back onto Layer0, which is your Default Layer by simply clicking on that Layer and clicking the Minus sign and you'll have a choice. You can move the contents to the Default Layer, which is Layer0; you can move the contents to the current layer, which is Layer0 currently because we have the radio box; or you can delete the contents. Now this Delete contents is the one and only way that you can actually change the geometry using Layers. Layers will allow you to delete whatever's on the Layer if you choose to do so. Other than that, Layers are exclusively for hiding and showing geometry. They have no impact whatsoever on your geometry in any other way. But, for right now, I'm going to go ahead and say Move contents to Default layer. And when I do that and I go over here to Color by layer, you can see immediately that that base layer is now reintegrated back into our house model. So this can be a way that you can create Layers, move stuff off onto Layers, move stuff back onto your Default Layer, assign colors, get visual feedback, clean up your models and just basically make it a whole lot easier for you to work as you're working.