From the course: Learning SketchUp Free

Creating polygons and circles - SketchUp Tutorial

From the course: Learning SketchUp Free

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Creating polygons and circles

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- [Instructor] Now let's move on to drawing circles and polygons. We're going to start off with the polygon tool, and you'll find it here next to rectangles. So go ahead and pull this out. You'll see we have circle and polygon. Now these work very similar, circle and polygon, but let's start off with the polygon tool. Now, when I select that, notice in the bottom right hand corner, we have a number of sides. In this case, I'm defaulting to six. So if I click and drag, I will draw a hexagon. So let's go ahead and do that, left click and drag. And notice how I can snap to different axes, such as the red or the green axis. And also in the bottom right hand corner we can type in what's called a radius. So if I want to, I can give this a discreet size. So in this case, if I wanted to type in say three feet I can do that, and it will be exactly three feet radius from the center to the outside points. Now, if I wanted to draw something other than a hexagon I can type in a new number of sides. But in order to do that, I need to reselect the tool. So let's go ahead and reselect the polygon tool. Notice how I have number of sides as six. I'm going to type in eight, hit enter, my icon changes and notice how I'm drawing eight sides now. So I will draw an octagon, and again, I can drag that out however big I want. Let's try this one more time. We can do a polygon, and let's just do, say, three, and this case we can draw a triangle. Now the circle tool works very much the same as the polygon tool. So let's go ahead and left click and select the circle tool. Now when I do that, notice on the bottom right hand corner I still get a number of sides. In this case it's 24, which is quite a bit. Now, one of the things that the circle tool does is it gives you a default number sides that's large and that gives you a smoother looking figure. So I can left click and drag out this circle, but if I go in and I zoom in, you'll see, yes, I do have a number of sides here. So if I wanted to, I could reduce or increase that in case I need more detail or less. So let's go ahead and do that again. I'm going to take my circle tool. In this case instead of 24, let's go ahead and type in 10, and that will be a much smaller number of sides. And in this case you can actually start to see how this works. And so in a lot of cases this actually looks a lot like a polygon. Now you're going to notice the differences between polygons and circles once you extrude those into geometry using the push pull tool. So I'm going to go ahead and select my push pull tool, hit P, and then just pull one of those up, pull that one up, and then let's pull up these two circles here. So once I do that, you'll see the difference. And the difference is is that the polygons have hard sides. And so each one of these sides is represented by a line. The circle derived figures don't have that. And so these have soft sides. And so SketchUp is basically smoothing those edges so that it looks like a smooth surface. And so this gives you a couple of things that you have to watch out for. In this case, if I select one of these sides I select the entire radius of it. And if I try and push pull it, well, I can't because I can't push pull in multiple directions. But on the polygon ones, each side is discreet, so each one is a separate face. And so what I can do is I can hover over that and then do a push pull on that if I wanted to. So the polygon tool and the circle tool work very much the same. They create an object with a radius and a specified number of sides. The difference is that when you extrude those into geometry using push pull you'll get soft sides on the circle. So I'm going to go a little bit deeper into this in the next movie.

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