3D drawing with the “Line” tool (1)

Before we can draw in 3D, we must modify 2D drawing area to a 3D drawing area.
If you have already made a drawing, use the “Rotate” tool, and click and drag in the drawing area to have a “3D look”.
Or, another way, click the “ISO” button in the “Views” toolbar.

If you have not drawn anything yet, you can start with a new file, first change the display to “Metric-Centimeters- 3D” as we had seen in lesson 4.
Select the manneken with the “Select” tool and delete it by pressing the “Delete” button on your keyboard. This does nothing.

OK, now we have a blank 3D display, we can start drawing.

I begin by drawing a rectangle in 2D, which runs parallel with the green and red axis.
This we had already seen in the previous lessons, so here I do not need to tell you again.
To add a third dimension, we have to add height, this is the blue axis.

Just click a corner, or to put it in SketchUp language, click “end point”.
Move the cursor up, parallel to the blue axis. This is your clear as you will see a  textbox that says “on blue axis”.
Click when you’ve reached the desired height, or type a distance in the VCB box and click Enter. (1)
Move the mouse pointer over to the second reference point, in this example the highest angle, and move the mouse pointer to top (2).
When you see the two guides, one for green axis (which means the line that we are going to draw is parallel to the green axis), and a dotted black line (which means that the click point is just above the reference point), click (3).
The second edge of the vertical plane is shown.
Move the mouse pointer to the third corner, that is straight down, when you’ve reached the end point, click the third time (3).
Once you have clicked the third endpoint, the newly drawn upright rectangle is filled (4).

This means that we have correctly aligned the drawn rectangle.
If this not the case for you, then there are two possible reasons for this.
One, the edges are not completely closed, which seems to me quite illogical when you use the click move click method, or two, the drawn vertical rectangle is not plane. Which means you did not draw the second edge parallel to the green axis (see figure below). To view this later, use the “Rotate” tool.

In the next lesson we will finish our cube.

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