0:06 To finish the railing for our bridge, let’s add a few vertical posts.
0:12 I’ll draw a rectangle on this platform and make it 1 inch by 1 inch.
0:18 Then I’ll pull it up 30 inches, and make this a component.
0:26 To place these on the bridge, lets toggle on our hidden geometry. This can be found under the 'View' menu.
0:35 Remember that SketchUp is entirely made up of edges and flat surfaces.
0:40 Toggling hidden geometry shows all those edges that are smoothed or hidden that give the appearance of a nice smooth curve.
0:50 This can be useful for a number of reasons but for us, we are simply going to place a post on each of these hidden lines.
1:00 Move our post by an endpoint and snap it to the nearest hidden line.
1:06 Then if we zoom into that area we can move the post by a mid-point and center it on this mid-point.
1:15 Now we’ll use the hidden geometry as a reference to make additional copies of our post component.
1:22 Just make sure the post is selected, then copy it from one hidden edge to the next.
1:29 As long as you are using click-move-click, the new post should stay selected and you can quickly copy this to each new end-point.
1:42 Be careful as you start to copy down the other side.
1:45 This particular section is very close to the green direction, so it wants to snap to the green axis.
1:52 I’m going to zoom in to make sure I’m snapping to the endpoint.
2:00 The rest should copy easily.
2:10 I made my post a bit too high, they are sticking out at the top, so I’ll edit one and push it back down by an inch.
2:19 We can turn off hidden geometry at this point.
2:23 Now select all the posts we just created and let’s make all of these a nested component.
2:32 Then copy that nested component to the opposite side, making sure we are copying from and to meaningful points in the model.
2:48 Steps:
0:00 - Move and copy the railing post based on the hidden lines of our bridge. - Select all the copies and nest them together into a larger component. - Copy the nested component to the opposite site.