How to use the Follow me tool in Sketchup

The Follow Me tool in SketchUp is very useful for extruding a 2D profile along a path — for example sweeping a balcony cap, a wall moulding, a handrail, or a pipe. It works from one path and one profile (closed face).

Tutorial video:

Steps by steps:

• Draw your profile as a closed face. If it is just loose edges with no fill, Follow Me has nothing to extrude. Work inside a group or component so the new geometry does not stick to nearby faces.
• Draw your path (a line, polyline, arc, or circle) touching the profile. The profile should sit roughly perpendicular to the first segment of the path — Follow Me keeps the profile perpendicular to the path the whole way, so a tilted starting profile produces a twisted or pinched sweep, which is the real cause of most “Follow Me is broken” results.
• With the Select tool, click the path first (Ctrl+click to add several connected edges), then activate Follow Me, then click the profile face once. Pre-selecting the path before picking up the tool is the only reliable way to run Follow Me — the click-and-drag mode is unpredictable on anything but the simplest shapes.
• If your path is the entire perimeter of a face (a circle, rectangle, or any closed loop), select that face instead of clicking every edge — SketchUp follows the whole boundary loop automatically. This is the trick for a lathe: a circle as the face-path plus a perpendicular silhouette profile spins it a full 360°.
• Done. Follow Me bakes raw geometry rather than a parametric sweep, so it cannot be edited afterwards — group the result immediately and keep a copy of the profile in case you need to redo it.
• On curved paths, more segments mean a smoother sweep but the polygon count multiplies: profile segments × path segments. A 24-side circle swept along a 24-side arc is already ~576 quads, so keep circle/arc segment counts modest on large models or the file balloons.
• Repeat the same procedure for the other elements of your model.