Offset
A parallel copy of a face's edge, in or out.
Keyboard: F
How to use it
- Click a face.
- Move in or out and click - or type the distance and press Enter. A minus goes inward.
What it is for
Wall thickness. The offset itself does almost nothing on its own - what it leaves you is two faces where there was one, a border and a middle, and then push/pull decides what they become.
That is the whole idea. Offset a floor inward by 8" and push the border up and what comes out is a wall with a room inside it, not a solid block - the corners stay sharp and the spacing stays exact all the way round, which is what makes it a wall rather than a shrunk copy.
Worth knowing
- Alt keeps the overlaps. A rounded corner taken in further than its radius is squared off for you; with Alt held the loops are left exactly as they fall, which is SketchUp's behavior and is occasionally what you want to see.
- It works on curves too - offset a circle and you get a second circle inside or outside the first, at an exact distance all the way round. The band between them is not yet a face of its own, though, so it is not the way to make a pipe wall: for that, draw the two circles and push the outer one, or use the drill to take the middle out.
- Rounded corners grow rounder going out and tighter going in. Taken in further than a corner's radius, the rounding is used up and the corner comes out square - the same as SketchUp.
- The new edge splits the face it came from, so the border and the middle are two faces you can push separately.
- SketchUp puts this on F as well, which is why it is not on O.
See also
- Push/pull - what turns the two faces into something
- Typing measurements - a minus goes inward
- The drill - the other way to make a hole through