Getting the right kind of top view in LayOut

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist



Some of you might know about LayOut, the all-new 2D presentation tool that we developed to accompany SketchUp. It's included with SketchUp Pro 6; if you don't already have it, you can download a free trial of Pro 6 to give it a spin.

Anyhow, I thought it might be a good time to write a Tips and Tricks post about the newest member of our family. Lots of folks are using LayOut, but a little extra help never hurts. In addition to this post, you can get started with LayOut in a number of different ways; check out this Help Center article for more information.

This post deals with how to get the right kind of top view of your model once you've placed it in LayOut. If you've ever tried to do it, you know exactly what I'm talking about—top views are almost always rotated awkwardly by default, and that's usually not what you want. Most of the time, you want the straight lines in your top view to line up with the edges of your page. The following image shows what I'm talking about: on the left is a view with a rotated top view; on the right, one where the model is "lined up".


As always, there's a nifty trick for getting the second (and more desirable) kind of top view. It involves one extra step: choosing to view your model from the front, back, left or right first, then choosing top. In doing so, you're telling LayOut which way to rotate your top view; the software always produces a top view by spinning the model "towards you".

Here are the steps, for the next time you need to do it yourself:

1. Insert a SketchUp model into your LayOut document.
2. Right-click on the model view that you just inserted and choose Standard View > Right (or Left, Front or Back) from the context menu.
3. Right-click again on the model view and choose Standard Views > Top.
4. If you want an orthographic (no perspective) view of your model, right-click again on the model and make sure Perspective is deselected.