Sketchup comes with many preset keyboard shortcuts, but gives you the ability to change them or add your own. Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Custom Shortcuts This keeps the mouse in the modeling screen where all the action happens. Instead of using the mouse to select a tool from the drop down menu or the toolbar, you use your non-mouse hand to select it on the keyboard. It’s the same muscle memory that makes learning the keyboard shortcuts so beneficial. You just know where they are and your hands start typing away. You know what letters you need to press, but you don’t have to think about where the letters are. Think about when you type on the keyboard. The really cool thing about Sketchup, is that it allows you to create your own custom keyboard shortcuts so you can create an optimal interface to fit the way you use Sketchup. When you learn keyboard shortcuts and commit them to memory, your hands will “remember” what key to press instinctively. It is a way to make the modeling process more natural and artistic, as opposed to technical and programmatic. I recommend that you print out this cheat sheet and have it next to your computer as you're learning SketchUp.Using keyboard shortcuts can save you a significant amount of time during modeling. Continue in this way mapping all 26 letters of the alphabet plus the space bar, so that you can match up SketchUp to this cheat sheet. I'll type eraser, click on the function and type E. I'll just type unhide, and then click the function in the list, and then press W. I'll click in here and type the next one which is Edit/Unhide/Last. Let's go ahead and clear the filter and do our next shortcut. In Windows there's one additional step, that is you have to click the Plus button to actually map the key. In this case, I'm interested in Tools/Rotate, so I'll click on that and then just press the letter Q on the keyboard and it's mapped. So we could scroll down the list and find Tools/Rotate, but it's much quicker if you just type in rotate into the filter and it will show you all of the functions that contain that word. And as you see, they're organized by menu. Either way, you'll come into this dialog box where you can choose the Shortcuts page, and this shows you a list of all of the different functions that can be mapped. Instead you'll have to use the Window menu and choose Preferences. In the Windows operating system, there is no SketchUp menu. So I'll click on SketchUp and go to the SketchUp menu on the Mac and choose Preferences. So let's go ahead and get started mapping these in the SketchUp program. So this is my own idiosyncratic list, as you can appreciate, but I think that these are the most important tools that you'll want to toggle on and off as you're using SketchUp. So Rotate should be R, but R was already taken for Rectangle so I had to assign Rotate to a different letter and I chose Q because it's in the upper left-hand corner of the keyboard and I can remember it that way. But in some cases, the letters don't match up. So for example, L is for Line, M is for Move, A is for Arc, R is for Rectangle. Now the way I've done this is to map the most commonly used commands to the different letters of the alphabet. Alternatively, you can print this out and then have the physical piece of paper next to your computer. I'm going to double click on the PDF file to open it and resize it to fit the screen, and I'll just move this over here. And then later feel free to change the shortcuts to your own liking. At least for this course, I recommend that everyone just stick with the shortcuts as I have them so that we can all be on the same page. The PDF is for printing, and the TIF file allows you to edit the information in an image editor such as Adobe Photoshop, if you want to make changes to the mapping of shortcuts. I provided two different files that contain the same information in different formats. Let's begin by dragging the SketchUp application window so that it fills about half the screen like this. In this video, we're going to create a series of keyboard shortcuts to make working with SketchUp much more efficient.
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