Okay, tried that, but it is still not working. The surface I want to move is still refusing to be anything other than horizontal.

One of the things that really frustrates me is the way Sketchup seems almost determined to move things toward or away from my viewpoint instead of left and right or up and down from my viewpoint. Maybe I missed the technique to get this right?

For example, I wanted to create a surface and then pull the corners to specific places on my object so that the surface would fill a gap in a frame. Sounds easy. I create a surface in about the right place, then take a corner and pull it toward where I want the corner to be. Sometimes the corner jumps from onscreen to behind me (the viewer) for no apparent reason. The corner just does not seem to want to be pulled to the right place. If I reorientate the model I see that my surface is still horizontal rather than two of the corners being pulled down a bit and two up a bit (making an incline). I see that the point had been moved away from my viewpoint and way beyond my model. So I try and move the point from that side perspective, and again, instead of sketchup moving the point just right and left and up and down from my vantage point, it moves the point off into the far distance. It is almost as if sketchup is trying its level best to mis-interpret what I want.

I understand about using the cursor keys to specify direction but sketchup seems to completely ignore them (on my MacBook Pro).

What am I doing wrong?

Hi,

I find it irritating when I'm trying to select a line (edge) and a surface behind the line gets selected instead. Is there a way of telling sketchup when I'm only wanting to select lines?

Often a line is running along the edge of a long cylinder (which is also made up of lines). Is there an easy way to get sketchup to select the line I have drawn rather than the lines of something else?

Okay, done that. Great. Thanks.

I have curviloft (about a year old), I've had a go with it but I don't really understand how to use it; I could do with a step by step guide as to how to use it for this purpose. Should I get a newer version or is the one I have still valid?

I don't think we need a diagram, my problem is very simple. I have a horizontal line, plus a near vertical line, and 2 more lines that connect the ends of these lines to each other. If there were a surface between these lines is would be square but warped, one edge would be horizontal and the opposite edge would be near vertical. How do I create this surface from the lines?

Hi,

I need to create a warped surface. I first drew four straight lines (non coplanar), I selected them, and then used the Weld plugin. It asked me whether I wanted to create a surface to which I replied yes. But it did not create the surface.
What should I do?

Thanks,

I'm surprised by all this help. Thanks very much to all of you.

Gaieus, I suspect that making two different tools look alike was not a good UI decision. I hope they change the rotate tool to look more like the rotate icon.

Box, how did you make that video? I can see that it would be a good tool to show my future problems.

Hi,

I have an object that I need to rotate by 90 degrees. I watched the instructional video that shows how easy it is to do. But I could not get my object to rotate. I get the rotate symbol to locate on the right surface of the component. Then as I rotate the rotate symbol my object stays put. The only visual difference I noticed between what I am doing and what the instructional video shows, is that the selected object in the video is surrounded by a yellow box, whereas mine has a blue box. I thought that perhaps components can't be rotated so I exploded it and made it a group, but it still did not work. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

The instructional video refers to another video that contains info on arrays, but I dod not see any video with arrays in the title or description; which one is it?

Thanks for your help.

Sketchup seems to operate with just one 3D view. I find it difficult on complex drawings to, for instance, join 2 objects together, as I only have 2 dimensions of cursor movement. Some other drawing software, eg Art of Illustration, has 4 views, one for each of the three dimensions and one providing a 3D or camera view. This is much better. Is there a plugin for sketchup that provides these 4-views?