Subtitles of the Movie

So now we're going to go ahead and take a look at the Dimensions Tool and the Text Tool and the first thing we're going to start with is the Text Tool. Now, if you click over in some empty space in the model where there is no geometry, you can enter text by typing it in or if you have a word processing software, you can Copy and Paste text that you've already typed someplace else and which is exactly what I'm going to do right now. If you click off, that text is now on the screen. But if we double click it, we have the ability to edit it so I'm going to change the word almost here to the word nearly just to go ahead and show off that we can edit this at any point in time that we want to. This text does not move. It is set to the screen and it will always stay at that spot on the screen irregardless of how we rotate or change our geometry in any way, shape or form. However, you can move it. If we grab the Move Tool, we can simply click and drag this. Now, bear in mind it's not going to go back in space. It's only going to go on the screen so if we wanted it someplace else on the screen like so, we can easily do that. The next form of text is what's known as leader text and leader text you can pull from any surface or any point in SketchUp. It's important to note that this will actually pull off information so if you have a component or a group in a model, it'll pull off the name of that component or group or even a layer. However, if you simply pull off of an object in SketchUp, like, say this, it's actually going to give you a set of measurements that correspond to that particular point. I don't want those measurements here. I want actual text so I'm going to just go ahead and type in something like so and then I'm going to go ahead and type in something like here. And in this particular instance I'm going to say Front. There we go. So now I have a couple of nice pieces of text that are pointing at particular spots in my model that tell the people who view the model what exactly they're looking at. Now, I can also get accurate measurements and I find this to be much more useful for measurements. This is the reason why I disregarded the measurements over here. We actually have the ability to do things like measure diameters by simply clicking on the circles and now I have a diameter. We can measure radiuses my clicking on arcs. We can measure the length of something by either clicking off of the length of that particular edge or we can click on a beginning point, click on an end point and then pull off to get the exact same type of thing. So just depends on your preferred method. Now, it's important to note, when you work with this, that you can pull in several different directions to get different results. So if I pull in the blue axis, I'm going to get this result. If I pull on the green axis, I'm going to get this result and if I pull on the red axis, I'm going to get this result. This is very important because if you don't pay attention to what you're pulling on, you may get a measurement that you don't expect, particularly on angles. The other thing you can do is you can edit these values. Now, bear in mind that these values are all dynamically linked so the second that you make a change, those values may or may not be true any longer. So I'm going to go ahead and just enter five feet and click off and now this value and this value should be the same and this value is linked; this value is not. If I go ahead and make a change, like say, go ahead and pull down this face, notice how this value here changes. This value does not because it's a false value. This is just something that you need to know. Now we can edit all this text and we can do that by either Context clicking and saying Entity Info and choosing to align those things here or change whatever we want to change here. Alternately, what I find to be more productive is to go up to Model Info under your Window Heading. Now, here we can adjust all of our dimensions at once and I'm going to go ahead and zoom back so we can see all our dimensions by simply saying Select All Dimensions and now you can see I've got all my various dimensions at one time. I can change the font. I'm going to go ahead and choose Tempe Sans and I'm going to go ahead and choose to set it for a physical height and I'll show you why. If we zoom in right now and zoom out, what we have is what's known as point size type and everything remains the same on screen regardless of whether we zoom in or zoom out; it maintains its size in relationship to this screen. At a certain view, this can be very hard to see our model through. If we go for a physical height instead, look what happens when I apply that. That text all scales in relationship to the model instead of scaling in relationship to the screen and I just find that easier to look at. The other thing we can do here is we can actually control the end points. For right now we're looking at Closed Arrow, which is the default. Personally, I like None and you can see what that looks like. We can also choose Slash, Dot, Open Arrow, but as I say, I like None and that's what I'm going to leave it as. The next option is we can actually align this to the screen, which is how it's aligned now. Notice all the text is aligned to the screen or we can align it to the actual dimension line itself, like so. You can choose Outside, Centered, or Above. Just depends on what you like. I happen to like Centered. And under Expert Dimensions we have the options of Showing the Radius and Diameter Prefixes, you can turn those on or turn those off if you want. Hide When Foreshortened; I find this to be very useful and of course you have a slider here to control how aggressive that is. Hide When Too Small, you have a slider here to control how aggressive this is and this last one's very useful: Highlight Non-Associated Dimensions. Well, remember we entered a false value here. If we want to know that this is a false value, we can highlight it so that we can go in here and change it and how we change this is by simply double clicking on it, deleting it out and then clicking away. And that will re-associate that so that so that we get a proper measurement from that point. I'm going to go ahead and close this out. We can also make those same types of changes under the Text Heading by going here to our screen text we can go ahead and change the font and color for this by going to the Tempe Sans and this time I'm going to use something like a Bold Italic and maybe make it a bigger font. I'm going to go ahead and change the color of that, something like so and I'm going to say Update and notice here now it's going off the screen. Well, that's easy enough to fix. Let's go ahead and grab the Move Tool. There we go. Now we also have the ability to enter our leader text in the exact same way so let's go ahead and select our leader text, change our font, Tempe Sans, I'm going to the height option, I'm going to go ahead and change the end point to none because that's what I like and this last option is for pushpin. Pushpin is fixed and this is the way I like it to be. I'm going to update the selected text. If I go ahead and change this to View Based and Update, it looks the same until I start to rotate and now you'll see that these actually rotate with the screen. I don't like the way that looks so I'm going to go ahead and leave it Pushpin and now you can see that it stays fixed no matter where the screen goes. So those are the options I like. You can choose whatever works for you.