SketchUp Saturday, the second coming

Reader Rachele just left a comment about her frustration over not being able to get SketchUp to snap and place objects precisely within a model. I can relate whole heartedly with her frustration. After ten years of working with software that snapped indiscriminately and automatically, I expected SketchUp to work the same way.

Well, it doesn't and the reason it doesn't makes perfect sense now that I've mastered what SketchUp calls inferential geometry. In SketchUp, you are always working in three dimensions, so you have to think in three dimensions. Working with rendering programs usually means you're working in two dimensions and imagining the third, depth. In SketchUp, you don't need to imagine the third dimension because you never leave it. This takes a bit of getting used to. Here's how Google explains the snap function of the move tool.