building mechs, armored core style (and a question)

[FourTonMantis]

So I just recently discovered Sketchup, and after going through a short period of various excitement (This is a cool program...time to try something serious...I'm going to ram my fist through the screen...oh that's how you do it...this is actually fun), I've built the beginning of a mech. I'm satisfied so far, but have a question. On the circled planes, I wish to insert pieces extending outward to accommodate legs and arms. The problem is, I want them to be symmetrical on both sides. Is there any way I can add pieces to the opposing sides so they'll extend out symmetrically?

Thanks.

[J Wilson]

This link (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=159590) goes into how you do it. Essentially, you want to start the model by building half of it, then instance and mirror the other side. I run into a problem all the time where I realize after I've started that a certain element would have been easier if I had instanced and mirrored some parts.

[Chirp Chirp]

This question seems to come up a lot so I made a quick tutorial. Open the attached SketchUp file.

[Portus]

One question, after you intersect with model how do you select just the half of the model?

[Chirp Chirp]

Oh, if you noticed on scene 7 of the tutorial I posted the view is top down. This makes it easy to do a box select on the side of the object you want to remove. Once its selected, turn the selection into a group then delete the group. You can always just erase away the geometry you don't want but if you make it a group first it does a clean cut and its a lot faster.

[Portus]

Thanks that worked great, just used the eraser for now, I keep forgetting in using the eraser tool more instead of doing control+x all the time.