SketchUp

This year I was eager to put my (limited) knowledge of Google SketchUp to work designing our family's gingerbread masterpiece... our fifth entry in the Wilmot Gingerbread Contest.

One nasty habit of SketchUp that I found particularly annoying for this task, was the way it joins pieces together as you extend or overlap them. I was hoping for a parts list at the end of the design that I could use when baking, and following the tutorials wasn't getting me there. To get around this, I found that creating each piece separately and then turning it into a component would allow me to place the piece in the model without having it become part of the other pieces. In the end, I looked over the list of components for my list of pieces to bake.