You can customize SketchUp so that it fits you like perfectly worn-in blue jeans - the pair you wear so often you worry how you'll ever leave the house after the inevitable hole appears in the seat, because how you could ever leave the house without those jeans? Or maybe you're more the button-down-shirt-and-trousers type? The point is that you can fashion SketchUp to reflect your specific situation:

If your model is geolocated with the Add Location feature and you want to display it in Google Earth, you may need to take a few extra steps. Here’s a quick overview of the tips and tricks that help your model looks its best in Google Earth:

If you like arranging furniture, blank terrain is as exciting as moving into a new home: Everything is clean and open and ready for your stuff. Can’t wait to set the house you designed onto its site, model a winding path through your garden, and fill the landscape with plants and trees? You’re in the right place. In SketchUp, two Sandbox tools help you place objects on terrain:

Whether you import terrain into SketchUp or create your terrain completely from scratch, you likely need to sculpt your terrain or make minor adjustments. With specialized Sandbox tools, you can create berms, ponds, terraced landscapes, and so on. The Smoove tool enables you to model hills and valleys on a TIN (triangulated irregular network). With the Add Detail tool, you can split a selection within a TIN into smaller triangles so that you can model detail where its needed.

Hiding terrain can improve SketchUp’s performance. Terrain can gobble up a noticeable chunk of your computer’s processing power, but SketchUp doesn’t ask your processor to render hidden geometry. Having a way to hide the terrain is also handy when terrain obscures the bottom parts of a model. Hide the terrain, and it’s out of your way.

In SketchUp, importing preexisting terrain is your easiest route to creating terrain. However, the tools for creating terrain from scratch are useful in the following scenarios:

Does the terrain that you want to model exist somewhere outside your imagination and in digital form? Hurrah! You can just import it! Well, sort of. Also, after you import terrain, you usually need to edit it. At minimum, you likely need to clean up the imported data by reducing the number of faces to improve your model's performance, tracing contour lines, or a few other tasks covered in Editing and Fine-Tuning Terrain. But for now, enough of the sour details.

Terrain is important to many SketchUp modelers: Your building needs ground to stand on, or maybe you're modeling the ground itself to create a landscape. But wait. SketchUp's Sandbox tools - the tools you use to model terrain - can also create forms completely unrelated to terrain. How can terrain include all these other possibilities?

You can add additional camera types to the list of camera types included with ACT (found in Tools > Advanced Camera Tools > categories > camera) by editing a CSV file on your computer. This file is found here on Microsoft Windows:

Following are the contents required for each camera definition in the cameras.csv file: id A unique numerical identifier for your camera. name A descriptive name for your camera (this will appear within the Advance Camera Tools submenus in SketchUp). description An additional description for your camera.