But as you hover over other geometry in your model, you begin to enter a minefield of inference points and faces to snap to. When you move an object along “empty space”, it will always align to a plane (as described above). So it’s a combination of the camera position and mouse position that determines which plane SketchUp will lock to, when moving an object across empty space. Just know that if you move your mouse to a different position on the screen, SketchUp may jump to a different plane orientation which more closely represents the direction you’re trying to move. But this gets a little too nitty gritty, and really isn’t something that needs to be explored. There is a certain relationship between the mouse position, and how the axes origin is positioned between the camera view and the horizon in the distance. Most times, you’re not modeling while the camera is perfectly aligned to an axis, so how does SketchUp choose which plane to lock to when you’re viewing the model at an angle? Mouse Position The same thing happens with the red axis. If you align to a front view, the movement will lock to a plane perpendicular to the green axis. When you orbit the camera to a top view (looking down on your model), SketchUp will strongly favor locking to a plane perpendicular to the Z axis. The plane will always align with either the X|Y, X|Z, or Z|Y plane. The point from which you start the move will always intersect the plane, but the orientation of the plane will strongly depend on the orientation of your camera. When you move an object across empty space, SketchUp will primarily move an object along a single plane (unless you are snapping to some other geometry in your model). You might consider it to be an “invisible” third input in addition to the X and Y movement of the mouse. The position of the camera plays a strong role in suggesting to SketchUp how to move the object. Like I said, there are several factors that determine the “strength” of SketchUps various inferences, whether it’s a point lock, edge lock, face lock, or plane lock, so there are several combinations of things you can do to increase the likelihood of SketchUp moving an object the way you intend it to move. However, I think it is helpful to at least dive in just a little bit to try and understand exactly what SketchUp is doing. And I think it does a pretty darn good job at that. The inference system is supposed to feel very intuitive, natural, predictable, and obvious. And that’s not really the point of this tutorial anyways. Now there is a lot of calculating that SketchUp is doing “behind the scenes”, so to completely reverse engineer SketchUp’s inference system is sort of beyond what I’m trying to do here. When this occurs, the first thing most people will try to do is move it directly into position, only to find that SketchUp will not move the object into place, no matter how hard you try. There are many times when you need to move an object to a position that has a different X Y and Z coordinate than its current position.
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