Transcripts
1. Introduction: My name is Daniel Brown and I'm the owner of SketchUp trainer.com. I've been teaching SketchUp full-time for over a decade. And I'm happy to provide this course to you. Look, we've all been there countless of times where we've searched the Internet looking for video tutorials on how to Learn SketchUp. Only the fine that we've learned something more relevant or better yet. We learned from self-proclaimed experts that taught us bad habits. Well, I'm here to fix that. And have you learned sketch up the right way? In this course, we'll learn the basics and understand the fundamental techniques to give you a strong foundation to use SketchUp efficiently in any workflow that you are going through. The exercises have an architecture and interior focus. So we'll learn how to create a model from scratch. Add materials and textures will bring in furniture from the 3D warehouse, will create scenes, will export images and an animation, and will even send the file to lay out where we can create a paper document to allow us to add dimensions and annotations and export it out as a PDF document. We have a lot to cover in this course. So let's get started learning SketchUp the right way.
2. Setting up the Template in SketchUp: To get started in SketchUp, we first want to set up the template. When you launch sketch up for the first time, you're likely going to be given this welcome screen. On the welcome screen here, you can sign in, up in the top right. Once you're signed in, the screen will allow you to set up your template. And it may even show some of your recent files that you may have opened. You can also find out information about your license down here. And you can even open a file if you don't see it on your recent files below. Now, I don't like the simple template and what I want you to do is click on more templates up here in the right, click on the heart under Plan view inches, and then click right above that image on that square there. That is now going to set up the template in a nice clean white model space. The reason why I like this is it starts us off in a plan view. So it starts us off looking above. And then as we begin to orbit and navigate, we can of course go into 3D. But I generally like to start in that plan view because it gives it a nice clean look. And typically, I go back to the days of where I was drawing by hand on pen and paper. So I always like to draw sort of in top view first and then kind of work from there in 3D, also to the blue background and the gray floor. It just, it looks cheesy, it looks cartoonish, It doesn't look professional. Now we can do the same thing over on a Mac, and it's pretty much the same exact thing. We are going to click more templates, are going to click on the heart. And then we're going to click right above. One thing to know though, on a Mac is if SketchUp doesn't maximize, So if it doesn't fill the entire screen, just double-click anywhere in the title here. And that will maximize the SketchUp window to the available space on your monitor or on your display. And then every time I go to File New, you're gonna notice that our template is now locked in this plan view. Feet and inches, I'm sorry, inches Actually. Now that we have the template set, let's go ahead in the next video and take a look at how to set up the toolbars.
3. Setting up the Toolbars in SketchUp: Setting up our toolbars is pretty straightforward, but there are some UI differences between setting it up on Windows than there are intending it up on a map. So let's first take a look at how to set it up in Windows, and then you can skip ahead if you want to set it up on a map. First thing in Windows is we're gonna go up to view and we're gonna click on toolbars. Now by default, SketchUp gives you what's called the Getting Started toolbar. And it does just that. It gets you started, but it doesn't give you all the tools that you want at your fingertips. So let's uncheck the Getting Started. Let's turn on the Large Tool Set. Just going to give us all are nice. Drawing tools, modification tools, navigation tools and sort of orbiting tools. I'm going to press the down arrow key, and that's just going to kind of open this toolbar up a little bit more so that I can bring on standard styles and views. Now Standards is optional. I'm going to actually turn it off for the recordings, but it basically is your File, New File, Open File Save, and your cut copy paste on doing 3D. So you can choose to have that up. I'm actually going to remove it. But typically most users keep that on, particularly for undo and redo for styles and views. I'm just gonna click close down here. In some cases, you might get two rows that appear here. And what I'm gonna do is just grab the left part of the tool and just kinda drag it over, grabbed the left part of the tool, and just kinda drag it over. And I'm also gonna track this up. So that sets up our Toolbars on Windows. Let's see what this looks like. Over on a map, on a Mac, you get a similar Getting Started toolbar up top here. But where Windows tools are docked, mac tools are floating. So we need to bring up the large tool palette, that's a floating tool palette. So we're gonna go up to view. We're gonna click tool palettes. And then we're going to click Large Tool Set. And I usually just kind of float this over on the left side here. Now for the tools top here, I'm gonna go to View and I'm going to click customize toolbar. What happens is a lot of the getting started tools are actually duplicates of what's in the large tool set to the left. So I don't need two versions of the select tool here. So I want to take the top one and just drag it down. So I'm dragging it out of the top tool set there. And think of this like dragging applications out of your start screen on a Mac. You can further customize this later and you can add more tools back into this. But for right now to get started, what I typically do is bring up standard views. I'll bring up styles, and then we are bound to make some mistakes. So undo and redo isn't bad to have. And I'm going to flip these. I'm gonna drag this over to the left just so that it looks similar to my windows here. And if I switch back over real quick, you can see I have the styles first and then the view second. And I'll go back over to a Mac. When you're done, go ahead and just click done here in the bottom right. Or sometimes with a smaller display, you might not be able to see this. You can always just press return or enter in URL, close that out as well. Now we're Windows has the default tray, Macs have the palettes that flow both you wanna find under window. So if I go to Window Entity Info, for example, it's going to open up that individual tool. Whereas over on a PC, Those are all docked in the tray. So big difference just right out of the get-go, if you're on a Mac, is you want to have these floating palettes, these, these entities that just kinda flows in quite honestly, just to get started, just close them all out. You don't need them. You don't need them right now to get started. So if you had the instructor pilot that comes up, you can go ahead and close that away. And then also over on a PC, if you have these open, just clean up the user interface, It's less distracting. And you can just kinda doc all of these if you want to, to, you can also just close it out altogether. And like a Mac user, if you want to get those back, just what's different is instead of going window Entity Info window materials, you go Windows default tray and you can just bring the whole tray backup either way. This here is the default template and toolbars that I typically use, whether I'm on a Mac over here or if I'm on a PC here. In our next video, let's take a look at how to set up some system preferences that are gonna make SketchUp just work a little bit better for us.
4. System Preferences in SketchUp: There are a few system preferences we want to change to make for a better experience when we're first using SketchUp. So let's take a look on how to change some of these system preferences. And Windows will go ahead and go to Window and click on Preferences. And over on a Mac, we're just going to click on SketchUp and then click Preferences. From here. Both interfaces look pretty much identical. The only difference is on a PC, we're going to click okay after we do some changes. Whereas on a Mac, When you're done, you're gonna close out of this little red circle. I'll switch back over to a PC and primarily work off of this PC here. The first thing that I want you to do is under drawling. Under Drawing, SketchUp wants to auto detect if you're clicking, releasing or click and dragging. And what I find with Auto Detect is that if you have a very sensitive mouse, rephrase. What I find is if you have a really sensitive mouse, SketchUp will accidentally click and drag instead of Click and releasing. So just so you're aware, when you're using a mouse in SketchUp, you always want to click and release. You don't want to click and hold and then release. So that's another way of just saying click and drag. So you don't want to click and drag. You always want to click and release. Pretty much every tool is going to be like that. The only thing that you want to click and hold is your scroll wheel when you're orbiting. So that's going to be really one of your only click and drag or click and hold tools. Everything else is going to be clicking release. So back in here, if we change this, then we can do move, click, click, Move click, which is basically click and release. The other thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna disable pre pick on push-pull. Basically you don't need to pre-select before you push pool. And if you accidentally did, it will just disable it. So it just helps prevent some errors. Next, go down to General and uncheck, create a backup. And I know that sounds a little scary. A backup file in SketchUp is a dot S K B file, native sketch of files or escapee. And what that backup can potentially do is if you accidentally deleted your SAP, you could rename the SK B and then change the exception to escape and then open up the file because that to duplicate or that secondary backup files created. Now, what I've found over the years is that a, I've never open this or ever needed to restore from a backup file and be it just takes doubles my hard drive space because it's creating that file. So disable it because sketch up, although it says auto save here, don't think of it as SketchUp constantly, auto saving. Think of auto save as your recovery or Azure backup file. So I do always set it to auto save every five minutes. And this way, if SketchUp were to crash, the next time you open SketchUp, you'll see in your recent files, this will be highlighted red and it'll save recover. And basically when you click on that file, it'll ask you to choose between the time of the last saved file, the last time you actually saved it, versus the last time SketchUp auto kind of created that save ish sort of recovery file. That's kind of the best way that I always tried to explain it is that it's not auto saving. You still want to certainly save that auto save is your recovery, that's your every five minutes. There are some other settings that you could potentially do here later on. For example, if you like displaying crosshairs, that's something I do a lot when I'm space planning. And also if I'm using an external image editor like Photoshop to edit any JPEGS are images. You can set those up here as well. You can also further modify your workspace. You can reset how large the workspaces change your template here as well. And if you ever add shortcuts, This is where you can filter through and manually type in any keyboard shortcuts. So now that we have our template set, our toolbar set, and some of the System Preferences set. We can now begin drawing in SketchUp and having a better understanding of the key concepts and principles when we're inside of sketches.
5. Faces and Edges are Everything in SketchUp: Before we dive into a project, it's important to understand some of the key fundamentals and basic principles when your drawling and sketch up one of those first ones is faces and edges. Let's take any object in SketchUp can be broken down into a face and the edges that make up that face SketchUp as a surface modeler. So in order to create a surface, you need to draw lines or edges. They need to be coplanar. Then that way they close the loop so that you can create the fill. So let's quickly do this. Let's go ahead and click on the Line tool located here. Also, L has a keyboard shortcut. I'm going to start somewhere in the bottom left-hand corner are quadrant here. Click and reliefs to start my line and I'm going to move in the red acts as I do this, you get this rubber band effect and sketch up wants to draw in whatever position that you are. So if you let go of your mouse right now, SketchUp will draw in that angle or in that position. So if you want to stay in the red axis, just hover until you find the red axis. Let your mouse go. And now at any point, SketchUp is waiting for your input. So notice I'm not holding down to the mouse at all. I can now just use my right hand and type on the keypad whatever distances that I want. So you're not holding your, not dragging any of that. You have that freedom to move your mouse and move your hand to actually do that. So I'll go back in here and I'll type in to 0-0 apostrophe or foot symbol. So since I'm working in feet and inches, you'd never have to put the inch symbol, so the quotation, but since I'm taping phi, I do have to put the apostrophe, so 200 foot sign and then enter. After you enter that, don't click on the cursor. Don't move the cursor because you can further type in a different value and hit enter. So SketchUp, again, always waiting for your input. Once you move your cursor, you're now in a new command. I'm in a new line. So this is essentially drawing, kind of, it's not drawing an actual polyline, but it's drawing the continuation of this. So if you want to get out of this, if you want to get out of any active tool in SketchUp, press escape. If I want to start drawing that again, I'm gonna go down to the endpoint, going to click and release, going to lift my cursor up, drawing cream, some drawing in the y axis, I'll type in a 100, but sine and then hit enter. Now another important note is what's called inferencing. As I move my cursor to the left, let's say I forgot that original distance. I can move my cursor down and hover over this point, but don't click just hover. See other little green endpoint is there. If I click, it's going to draw a triangle and I don't want that. Instead, I'm just going to hover. And then I want you to hover up and to see the dotted green line began to appear here to see the red line turn. And now you get the inferencing and get that snapping there. So I just referenced and drew the same length. But the other line, I'll click and release and then I'll bring my cursor down to close the loop. Remember SketchUp is edges and faces. So if you fill or close the loop, you're creating that face or that surface. If I continue to hover, you'll see another snapping point in that SketchUp has what's called bases. So it'll say on face, where it'll say on edge or on endpoint, or even on midpoints, you'll see all of those snapping reference. And I'm going to undo. So I'm gonna go back into edit, undo, undo because I wanna show another trick and that is locking in a axis. So if I click and release on this endpoint here and begin to draw, maybe I don't want to reference this endpoint here. I just want to kind of lock in it right down three arrow keyboard shortcuts. Right arrow key is read, left, arrow key is green, and you're up, arrow key is blue. So in this case I'm going to press and release the right arrow key, not holding it, just press and release. And as I move my cursor, I'm independent to move it and actually adjusted. So this is how I can reference and infer so that it's drawing in the same plane, in the same ortho. And then I'll go ahead and click and release that draws the line. Then I'll click and release again to finish drawing the line, we can also erase an edge. So I'll click on the eraser tool here. I'll make sure that the cursor is in that little circle. You zoom in a little bit closer. You can see by click here, it's not going to do anything. You want that circle to be on the line. And if you erase aligned, not only do you erase the surface a, you erase the edge too. So if you want to get that surface back, you need to actually generate the edge as well. So remember we set up that template to, in a plan view, SketchUp will always draw, even if you orbit and are in 3D, SketchUp will try to always draw on the ground plane. It does sometimes get off that. So be careful when I am begin drawing, I try not to orbit because it is likely that it could drop accidentally into a different axes. So that happens to you. It's always get back up to your top view located here. And then you can also, because I have some stuff in here, I can always zoom extents as to Senate, erase this little edge here while we're here. And then I'll zoom extents again now that we know a little bit better of editing edges and surfaces, let's take a look at how to edit push pool or how to create 3D objects using full.
6. Introduction to the Push/Pull: Sketch ups patent that tool is the push-pull tool, allows you to take any surface and extrude it perpendicular to that surface. So let's take a look at how that works. You can start with the rectangle that we had in the previous video, or you can just always start a new document as well. I'll just start a new document and maybe I'll take the rectangle tool here and I'll just create a little rectangle. I click and releasing, move my cursor down, clicking releasing again. Now before you push pool, I made a plan view. So I'm looking at this from above. And when you do that, it's very hard sometimes to see if you're, when you're pushing this, if you're actually in 3D or not. So what I like to do first before I click push pool is actually to orbit and to orbit on a mouse, you're gonna press and hold the scroll wheel down. And a little tip here is think of your model space as a clock. So move your cursor down here to six o'clock. Press and hold the scroll wheel and move your cursor up and then release. So this again is one of the only click and drag, click, drag, Elise, click and drag release. So I tend to kind of use smaller gestures as well, which makes it a little bit easier. Also, don't forget your icons up here. I can quickly go back to a top view, or I can go quickly to isometric view. Let's say you're on a laptop and you don't have a mouse. One, I highly recommend a mouse going by any mouse that has a scroll wheel. It'll be much faster and much easier on your hands when you're using SketchUp. But if you are without a mouse and you're using a trackpad, first thing you want to do is press 00 is the keyboard shortcut for orbit. If that keyboard shortcut isn't working for some reason or oh, didn't work. You can always press orbit here two, or you can go to System Preferences and you can change your shortcuts as well. So with O selected on the trackpad, you're going to click and drag and release. Look in drag and release, like in drag and release. So now that we're orbited and we're in the space, let's really kinda focus on what push pull is and how it works. So we're going to click and release on push pool. We're going to hover over the surface. We don't have to pre-select, we can just hover, you'll see it highlight, we'll click and release, and then we'll move our cursor up. And then we can do one of two things. We can lick and release to set it to whatever dimension we were at. So that's really good if you're just kinda working conceptionally and don't need to worry about scale and undo. So I'm going to Control Z or Command Z on a map, control C on a PC. I can also push this up. And if I want this to be a fixed height, you're going to let go of your mouse and then type in whatever distance that you want. So for me right now, you can see in the value control box I'm around 75 feet. So I'll type 75 foot sign and then make sure I hit Enter or Return efforts. Now that I have a box, the other important thing to understand about push pool is how to break an object. So if I take the line tool and I draw an edge from here to here, I'm then going to take the Select tool. You can see I broke that into two separate edges. I take another line and I draw, but I don't quite hit the edge. It doesn't create a brake, still keeps it as one surface. So this is the beauty with push pool in that if you can draw a line to break that edge, you can then extrude that surface and make a more complex shape from it. Feel free also to scroll in an owl, making sure you keep your cursor on the object. Otherwise, if you scroll too far down and it's very easy to go pass the object. You can also hold down orbit and hold down shift, and that will also pan for you. Otherwise, h is the keyboard shortcut for pan, or you can click on the Pan tool here as well. So again, I can break that geometry whether it's with a rectangle, a re-form surface, or even a circle. I can push pool from that object to create any of that new geometry. Now where the push pull tool can run into some conflicts is if you need to separate out geometry. So if I needed this box separate from something. So in the next video, we're gonna take a look at how to separate objects and really what the difference is between individual geometry, groups and components.
7. Making Groups in SketchUp: Understanding how to group and may components is by far the most important thing that you can learn as a first-time user in SketchUp, roofs and components organize your geometry, not tags or an older version of SketchUp layers. It's the act of grouping it or making it a component that contains it. So let's take a look at how that's effective and what that really means. You're inside of SketchUp. So I'm just going to draw a rectangle in the model space here using the rectangle tool going to orbit up and over. And then I'm going to take the push pull tool and just click and release on the surface and lift it up just to give it some height and click and release to set it a pan the screen a little bit using orbit and shift mental scrolling. So this object, this box is not contained. It's all individual geometry. We can break apart as we did in our previous video. We can also run into some challenges when we go to move it because everything's connected and everything sticky. So for example, if I draw a rectangle on the edge here and then push this owl. If I wanted to move this little box here, I would need to take the Select tool and select this surface. I'll hold down shift and I'll click on this surface, and I'll click on this surface. So it looks like I pre-selected just the object. Now if I do the move tool, I can then move the object by clicking on it. And then beginning to problem though, is it's sticky. It is connected to the original box. So how do we prevent this from happening? How do we prevent this from taking effect of our entire model? The short and simple solution is group as soon as possible. So in this situation, what we're gonna do is undo. And right here this would be a moment where I would say, you know what, this object before I push pool, should I make it a group or a component or leave it as part of the geometry. If you're just working conceptually and you're not trying to keep a super organized model by all means, push it out. It doesn't matter. But if you're trying to separate parts, maybe you're separating walls or cabinets from walls or door openings, things like that. You want to take the Select tool, double-click on the surface, and then right-click. And that's gonna give you the option to either make it a group or to make it a component opponents I'll talk about in just a sec grouping just isolates it. So if I make it a group, it's now no longer part the rest of the geometry and actually removes itself from it. And you can see I can move it freely. The challenge with groups and components for that matter is you have to be in them in order to modify them. So I can't just simply take the push pull tool and expect to push this. Because when I'm actually doing is I'm pushing the back surface or here, I might be pushing this surface down. So when you're working with groups and components, make sure you hit the space bar, which is the shortcut for select with the spacebar, you can then double-click on the object to open up that group, you're going to see that dotted line around the object. That's our visual cue to know that this is a group or that it's a component depending on what it is. It allows us to know that it's separate from the rest of the geometry. So now if I take push pool, which is p as a keyboard shortcut, I can now extend this object L. And you can see I can sort of make any sort of change to this as if I was, you know, outside the object as well. Other tip here is when you're done modifying this group, Don't forget to close out of the group. You don't want to try to draw, for example, a line break over here because I'm not drawing that break right now outside of the group, I'm actually drawing it. Part of this, be careful. Little tip is Space-bar for select and then escape to close out. And now if I take the Move tool, so m And you can see I can click and release to move that. And this is still in its own geometry, so it's not actually group. And if you, if you realize you forgot to group something or you want to just group the rest of the year geometry, you can take the Select tool and you can Triple-click a select all the entities. So it Triple-click, might have to click a couple more times to just in case that's going to select all that geometry so that you can then right-click and make it. One other thing that you can have is you can have groups within groups. And this is more complex. It's something that we'll get to in other videos. But basically you can have a group like we have here. And when I double-click inside of that, I can have a subgroup. So I can have maybe the roof is a subgroup of the geometry. That way it's separate or think about it as this being a table and this being a chair. All right, maybe I had a couple chairs here and I want to move this whole thing around by Select All I can then R2P all of this. And that way it's containing that into one object that I can then move. But then if I want to modify that individual object, I still need to double-click inside them, the major groups, first group, and then double-click again inside of the secondary group or the intake. So again, you can have groups within groups, within groups, or even components within components within components. That way it further allows you to organize the file here. Now these are ways in which we can organize groups. However, in the next video is take a look at what the differences between a group and a component.
8. Making Components in SketchUp: As we learned in the previous videos, one of the easiest way to organize geometry is to create groups. The difference though between creating a group and in here, which is creating a component, is that components act like cloned objects. So things like furniture, things like Windows, things that repeat, you want to create as components. That way when you modify one, a modify all of them. So groups really good. Just as a sort of safeguard, you group something that's containing it, that's good. But then when you go to copy it, you want that change maybe to reflect or to duplicate. That's where you would make a group instead a component. And let's take a look at how that actually works in real life. So I'm just going to draw a rectangle here, then a orbit. And I'm gonna push, pull this up, up, down like that so that it looks like a stair for me. I'm going to take the Select tool. I'm going to drag a window around that object. And then I'm gonna take the Move tool. I'm going to press Control on a PC or option on a Mac. And that's going to toggle that little plus signs that allows us to copy. I'm going to click and release on the object to start my copy. And then I'm gonna move my cursor down in this direction. I'm gonna click and release to set it after I've set that copy. After I've done that click and release, I can now type two x and press return or enter to make two copies. So again, select tool, select a window, Move Tool, press control on a PC option on the Mac, click and release to start your copy, move in the direction like unreleased to set, and then type in 2X and press enter. So we have three staircases. The far one I'm going to leave as individual geometry, the middle one, I'm going to Triple-click. So it's selecting everything within that selection. I'm going to right-click and make the middle one a group. I'm going to Triple-click the front one and make this a component. First difference between creating a group and a component is you can name a component. There's also some more advanced features like how it glues, whether it cuts openings, you can create face me, people that always face the camera. You can add metadata to it as well. The only two things you're going to worry about right now is the name or the definition, I should say. And just make sure replace selection with component is checked off and then go ahead and click Create. So I'm gonna do a control a, which is on a pc, select all Command a on a Mac. Or you can always go to Edit, Select All. And I'm gonna do Move Tool Control on a PC option on the Mac click and release here and move my cursor up and over as we're trying to make a copy of our step here, click and release to set it. And then let's just give it a couple of copies. So let's say ten x and then return. So we have a staircase going to zoom out just a little bit, or it might even zoom extents. So on the surface, these all look the same. But what I usually do with first-time SketchUp users, or if I get a model from a user, attempt to take the Select tool and I start to click are out. So I'm just double-clicking here or triple clicking. You can see, I can see all the geometry. If I double-click here, you can see as I select, it's only selecting this geometry. That's a good visual cue to know that it's a group. Whereas notice when I Triple-click or, I'm sorry. Double-click inside, then I start clicking on the surface, steal everything highlights. That's a good visual cue to know that it's a component. So main difference. Groups are fraternal twins. Components are identical twins. So as you make a change to one that stays, they always stay identical, right? They always stay together. Whereas a group, if you modify a group, it has no reference to the original copy that it was. And again, there are certainly benefits to just creating a group and there are other benefits obviously to make it component. So in this case, for a stair, components are a huge time-saver because I can now double-click inside of one of those steps. I can create a break in the front and maybe take push, pull and push that out a little bit. And I could even bring that across and maybe push this back, are actually pushed this four, right? So as I make the change to one, it's affecting all of now. There are times though with components that you have a unique situation, right? You've built this step to a certain point, but then you realize you need to make it unique because it needs to change or be different from the original. And notice in your component library and our default tray, which is here on a Mac, you're gonna go to Window and click on components and you'll see it Ben as a default tray. So on a Mac, if I go to Window and click on components, you'll see go ahead and click on just the home button just to make sure it's back to the default. And same thing over and windows. If I click on the home button here, you can see that component that is created. Notice what happens though when I want to make this unique. So if I right-click, I can make this unique and that way it creates its own identity. It's now step number one. So if I copy this, take the Move tool, press Control, click over to copy it. Notice when I make a change to this one, it only affects these two. So that's the beauty of components. Components, fear and AutoCad User components work like blocks. Your illustrator user components work like symbols. Now, you can intermix groups and components, and this is where it can get a little confusing and it's where using hierarchy or organizing the model can be really effective. For example, with our staircase, just going to delete those with our staircase, I maybe want to move this all as one single object. So if I take the Select tool, I have to hold down Shift and I'm going to click to add these to my selection. So I don't want to have to do that act of pre-select, right? I just want to contain this until one larger route by right-clicking and then making it a group. So remember, if you copy a group, any changes you make to that group do not affect the original group. So the group of stairs can change. But remember that the component itself that's nested in this is a component. So whatever changes I make to that do affect, Let's look at a different scenario. What if instead, I'm going to copy this over load? If I made this by right-clicking, by make this not a group but a component. And I call this a staircase by making it a component, by making the steps components and inside the steps is the staircase component. So having a component in a component versus components within groups, I have a component, whatever change I make to this one also affects the other component. So this is how you can do components with a components or groups within components and so on. And so that's not confusing enough. You can also explode groups and opponents, and I rarely suggest you to explode those only if you need to remove that hierarchy. So to explode a component you or group, you right-click and select explode. So that will explode the containment of it. But if there are secondary components, like there are here, these will still keep their component attributes. If you right-click and explode the individual component, then it becomes similar to the original over here, it becomes trade geometry. So you really wanna do this where you're exploiting it back to nothing. If you do that, what I tend to do in a can always convert a group to a component, but you can't compose, can't convert a component back to a group unless you explode it and then group it. So the major takeaways from this are simple. Group as soon as possible. If you know you're duplicating the object and you want it to mere those changes, make it a component. So when in doubt, make it a group, you know, it's gonna replicate, make it a component.
9. Drawing the Walls: Starting a SketchUp model can feel like a daunting task. You're not sure where to begin. You might have some ideas that might start from a sketch or a plan or cat file. In this series, we're going to take a look at really how to kind of start with an idea with some measurements and how to draw from that. So I had this idea for several years of how I could build this kind of remote retreat sort of house with a simple and minimal design aesthetic. And it's turned out that it's actually a pretty good training tool. So throughout these videos, we're going to use this project as a way to learn a lot of the key tips and tricks and using SketchUp for right now, let's just focus in on this main living area. So it's a very simple design in that the house is essentially two rectangles with a center for your sort of breeze way in between. So it's very sort of linear project and it makes just for her training purposes, it makes it easy to kinda start. So we want to get to here, but there's a lot of steps that we need to cover first, just simply even just drawling, right? How do we begin sketching and setting up that initial wall and geometry? So for me, I go back to my days in architecture school and I still like to hand draw. So if this is an existing location, I may go in and dimension out and do a rough sketch that maybe only I can read. But this at least gives me an idea of some of the framework and some of the constraints that we have for this project. So in our situation, we're going to define those guidelines are to define those restrictions. So we're gonna say that the interior walls or 16 feet by 30 feet, There's a breeze way here. There's maybe some windows, maybe some windows, a doorway here, and a window here for kitchen. So you have the sort of kitchen area if the living room, raceway, and then this is all sort of private spaces, aka your bedrooms, bathrooms, things like that. So again here, let's focus just on the public space. So how would we begin drawing this? There's couple of ways we can do it in SketchUp. So let's dive right in and use this as a reference. But you're more than welcome to create a similar exercise or use your own dimensions that you see fit. So I'm going to launch a new file and then I just want to draw the outside balls first. So what we're gonna do is because I know those dimensions, we can take the rectangle tool located here, and I always like to draw from the origin point. So my first click is going to be at that origin point. I'm going to move my cursor up into the right. Now, as I'm doing this, notice down here, don't try to click in the value control box. Just be aware of it as I'm moving up into the right, notice that there's a dimension comma, another dimension, right? So there's the red dimension first and then the green or y dimension seconds. So I'm just trying to make note of which dimensions first. And here it's going to be red being first. It sometimes does change for you once you're in 3D and that it's always the longer dimension first, right now, just be aware of what's there. So for the width, we want 16, but sign comma 30, but sine and then enter. So it's going to be a very small rectangle because we're dealing with the infinite model space. And we just need to take the scroll wheel on our mouse and slide and a little bit, you could also click Zoom extents as well. I'm going to undo for a second because if you accidentally drew 30 FY 16 feet, hit Enter, it, drew it that way. Just typing the distances the other way, right? So type in 1650 comma 30 feet. All right, so now we have our rectangle. This is our indoor area. And with the indoor area, we need to offset the walls to create the thickness. So to offset in SketchUp and we're gonna click on the offset tool located here. And what you wanna do is you want to hover over that surface. As I hover over that surface, it's going to highlight it, letting us offset all the edges that make up that surface. So if we click and release to start our offset, we can then move our cursor inward or outward, basically in relationship to that red dot there. If I notice it's here versus yours might be over here. Depending on where your cursor was, you're moving in relation to that. So I'm going to move outward and now I'm going to type in the thickness that I want the walls to be. I want them to be nine inches. So I'm typing nine and then pressing Enter. Notice I didn't need the inch symbol that need the quotation because inches is my default unit. Therefore, I never have to type for me. I like to build all the walls first before I create door openings or window openings. So you may see users might create breaks like this and then later go and push pull stuff. But I tend to find that that actually creates more work, right? Build the wall first and then carve it away.
10. Creating Door Openings: To create the walls, we just need to push, pull them up. So let's orbit first. I'm going to orbit, then click on the push pull tool. A hover over the surface will click and release to start the push pool and then I'll lift the cursor. And I went pretty tall ceilings here. So I'm gonna try and shoot for a ten-foot ceiling. So I'm going to ten feet and press return is the public area. I might do a shorter nine feet for the for the bedroom and bathroom over here. But for right now, let's shoot for ten. Now, as you push that wall up, notice the surfaces are white whereas the floor is blue. Whenever you create a box in SketchUp, if it had no sort of mass or if it was just sort of a frame, you always want the outside faces pointing up. So what happens is this surface stays there and the new surfaces are just kind of showing in front of it. If I orbit underneath, you'll see the white is out and the blue still stays there. But what happens is when you offset sometimes the surface now really doesn't make much sense, right? So it being blue doesn't really work for us because we want this to be the ground. Now not adding thickness to the floor. I'm not creating a slab. I would later as a separate group or right now, I just want the orientation to be the same. So right-click on the surface and select Reverse Faces. This just flips it so that everything that we see now is nice and white and clean to modify the walls, let's say for example, we needed to add a wall or maybe add another part. It's no different than what we did in previous exercises where you break the geometry and then you can push, pull that out. However, there is a trick to it. So right here on this wall. So if I go back into my plan view, we're going to focus on this right section over here first. So orbit and try to get into a similar camera position that I have here. So remember, there's going to be like a galley kitchen or long narrow wall of kitchen right here. And there's going to be a door opening right here going into that vestibule. So if I want to create a reference point of this five feet six, I'm not going to take the line tool. What I'm gonna do instead is I'm going to draw like Guide, guides in SketchUp our construction lines. They allow us to trace from those points to create our new geometry. So I use a lot of these. Think of this like if your hand drafting, your drafting in pencil, you're kind of sketching out the idea that you're going to sketch out where that reference point should be so that you can add, although it's the pencil tool and SketchUp for us in drawling terms would be like the pen tool to make it permanent. So that way we can permanently kinda break that and then be able to push, pull it. So construction lines are really, really affect the way they work is you want to click and release on the edge that you're starting from and move in the direction away from it. So as I move away from it, it's drawing a parallel line infinitely in model space. So think of it almost like an offset tool as well. Although it's not offsetting all the edges, it's creating a guide that's offset from the position that you clicked on. So for here, I'll type five foot sine six and press return. Now I want to four foot wide opening. So I'm going to click and release on the guide that I just drew and go to the right five with sine six and press return or Type in 48 or our opening size. So again, when you're typing in feet and inches, just to go back five foot sine six, we'll do five feet, six inches. So you don't need a dash, you don't need a space, just five foot sine six, and then return. And then for this one, I could type four foot sign and return, or I could type in 48 and hit return, either will get me to the same position. Usually if I'm measuring, I try to measure all in inches. And then that way I am just typing in an int values on, I'll have to do foot sign and then be inch. Now this entryway and the header of our windows, we have the height, so let's make it eight feet. So I'm going to start somewhere on the edge here. Click and release with the tape measure. I'm going to go up in the blue eight foot sign and hit enter. So now I have the three guides that I need to now create a rectangle that you can see the intersection now creates a little plus sign there. So With that intersection, I can now click and release during my rectangle down, click and release and then hit P for Push pool. And I can push that surface now away. And notice as I push back, it says something like offset limited. So it's only allowing me to push back to this edge here. So I'll click to let it push there. You can see if I orbit now, have a nice opening. Now for Windows, be careful because you don't get that same locking. It's very easy to accidentally push beyond the model like that. Now for here, I want to do two doors that are going to look something like this here. But I'm not sure yet on the spacing and the dimension yet. But we know that at least it's going to be a six or eight foot wide door. So for right now, what we'll do is we'll click and release on the left edge at this wall here. And let's just set up some buffers here. So I know, for example, I want to go at least two feet before the next OPE. And then over here, same thing, I'm going to draw a guide over here, bring this over. They've been 24 at return, may get lucky. We might actually do it as one whole door opening and really not sure yet. But for right now, let's just draw it as one big opening and we can always modify it later. And it shows us a good way that you can always change this design later as well. So that's gonna be another sort of more windows and a door, but it does go to the floor so great that as a door opening or over here or our last doorway, This is a doorway going to some sort of out the outside area. And I want it to align up the width here. So there's a couple of tricks that we can do to help us align in SketchUp. The first is, I'm going to take the tape measure. We're going to draw from this edge here. And I'm going to click and release and bring that down to draw would guide. And I'm going to bring it over till it hits this corner. So that gives us that guide back at five feet six and draw another guide to our four foot side. So I don't need a four foot wide door here. So I'm going to split the difference. So I'm going to draw a guide from this edge going down to this point here. And then I'm going to bring this in six inches. And then I'll draw another guide at 36 and then it guide eight feet. Actually, let's do seven feet. And from there we can draw our rectangle. We can then take push pool and we can push that away. Now once you're done creating all the door openings, will take a look next on how to do a window openings. But before we finish, let's delete these guides. So you could take the eraser, which is located here, and you could erase each individual guide. But the problem with this is it's likely you accidentally erase geometry. So try not to erase individual Guides. Instead, go up to Edit and then select delete guides that will delete all the guides from the model. So now we have all the door openings in place. Let's move on and create some of the window.
11. Creating Window Openings: Creating the window openings is going to be very similar to what we did when creating the door opening its orbit first. And I like usually doing this from the inside of the walls and on this wall here. So we have the living area. We figure there might be sort of a couch here. There's going to be sort of TV entertainment there. The kitchen is going to run along here with maybe an island here. So then a dining table maybe there. So wall we're just gonna do to sort of windows here. And that way if we decide to move this space around, we at least have a wall here to work with. So like we did with the doorways, We're gonna create guides. And again, I'm just kind of making this up and it's really just good practice to, so the first guide with the tape measure. So again, t for tape measure, Click and release to start the guide. Let's do 12 inches, will do Guide over here as well. So we'll click and release, go to the left, taken 12, and hit return. Now the width of the window is going to be four feet. So from the existing guide, I'm gonna go over 48. And I go from this guide to the left, 48. And then from the bottom, I'm going to bring this. But be careful. Notice as I'm going up, see, I don't see the line or to type in 36 right now, you'll see that I drew a guide on the floor 36 inches away from the interior wall. So be careful of your camera position. So I'm going to kind of orbit and be more in plan. I'm sorry, I'm going to be less than Plan and more in sort of elevation. I'm going to bring this up and I'm going to over-exaggerate it. So just keep lifting up, maybe go to the left a little bit and you'll see that blue line appear. That arrow lets us know that we're in the blue axis now. And here we're gonna tape in 36 or are still height. I'm going to click on that guide one more time and I'm a go up to eight and then press return. And so now I have all the guides that I need for this wall so that I can create the openings. So remember, you're always creating the openings later. You can add the windows and door groups and component. So I'm gonna do a rectangle. So go ahead and click on the Rectangle tool. And then with the Rectangle tool, you're going to draw from intersection here to intersection here, intersection here section, and then take push pull. Now with the push pull tool, as you push that surface away in a accidentally do something like that, right? So to prevent that from happening, always be aware of your outside edge for the wall. So with this outside edge, as I push, I'm going to keep moving my cursor. I know it looks like it's passed, but notice once it clicks, once a dials in, you'll see it locks back into place. Says on edge, that lets us know that it's only pushing to the edge of the wall. So I'll go ahead and click, and now it'll cut that spinning through. Let's also note, what's also nice to understand is that push-pull has a copy feature. So if I double-click on the next surface, it repeats my last push pull. But be careful, don't accidentally push your wall. You're gonna pan and orbit over, pressing home the scroll wheel with shift. And we'll take a look at this wall here. So for this wall, we want something that's going to look like this. Alright? We want sort of a window that's going to be able to so we can look out. So we have sort of a backslash here maybe. So we want that to go on this wall here. So I'll do take measure again. But this time I'm going to go from the edge, going to move my cursor over. And I'm going to move over until we get to the midpoint here. And you can see I'm at the midpoint because it's a cyan colored dot onclick and release to set that with the tape measure. Once again, you're going to click and release and go to the right. This time we're gonna go over to foot sine six and enter. So we could also go the other way. If we just go 30 inches, would be the same two-foot sine six, right? So we're drawing a guide in the center and then sort of offsetting it to the left and then off-setting it to the right. So we don't need this middle guide anymore. So we can press E or eraser, and then we can click to erase that at now, press T again to bring the tape measure back up once again. And for the sill height, I'm going to click and release during my cursor up. And right now let's see, the countertop is going to be at 36 inches. So I want to give a little space from there, so I wanna give another six inches. And then I want a window that I don't know, it doesn't have to be too tall. It just make it at 24 inches, like a nice narrow window there. We might extend it taller later. So again, it's a lot of just playing around understanding how guides work. You can create ones that you can later delete and then press our rectangle and just kinda draw that rectangle there. That way we can then take bush pool ensuring that we're on the edge. We could also too, if we knew it was nine inches, we could push type in nine press return or remember our last push pool was nine inches. So I could double-click and it's going to repeat that push pull as well. So with the door and window openings created, let's go delete all the guides by going to Edit and then selecting Delete guides. And then in the next video we can go ahead and start to kinda space, plan out what we wanna do for the kitchen.
12. Kitchen Space Planning: To create a simple Space Plan for the kitchen, we wanted to do what we similarly did for creating doors and window openings. And that is creating guides. Where this is going to differ though, is instead of subtracting geometry, we want to group or may components, blocks are objects that we're building so that we can put them as place holders for later, more detailed cabinet tree or appliances or things like that. So let's jump back into the model. And again, just to use a frame of reference, we're focusing on this area here to be our kitchen. We take a look back at the original model. You'll see that we'll have a sort of kitchen area here and maybe at bay or Island. I mean, so let's say we were not really sure yet on what we wanted to do and how we want a space this out. So first thing we need to understand is we don't want to create cabinet tree or other geometry that is part of the wall or part of the floor, right? We don't want this. So this is a perfect opportunity to take the entire model that we have so far, meaning the walls and the floor, going up to Edit, Select All, and making it a group. So for me in any project, I like to build all the exterior walls, create all the openings, and then group it right? Once it's grouped, I may not enter this for a while. So a good little tip that you can do is you can right-click. You can actually lock that group. This will prevent you from moving it and will also prevent you from accidentally deleting it. So a locked group will turn red, and then if you need to unlock it, you can always just right and unlock it. That's why I'm gonna keep it locked for right now. So let's scroll in and let's focus in on our space here. And let's go through a couple scenarios. First, we obviously need some position for appliances here. So a simple way to build some reference points is to create guides. So will again take the Tape Measure tool, will click and release on this back edge and we'll pull this out. 24 inches is most standard cabinets in fact are 24 inches wide. Now I'm thinking with this design, I'm thinking, you know, a linear approach in that we're gonna have AB, the oven over here, refrigerator here, and then maybe a sink here so that maybe the range will be on the island. Not quite sure yet. I might flip those, but generally in a design like this, we'd flank one side and the other and we might have to move this window around, whatever it might be. But let's just, let's just do this as a start, see how it goes. So typically, refrigerators and Wall units can range in sizes from 30 to 36 inches. So typically that's kind of where we're at. So if I take the Tape Measure tool, we're gonna draw a guide going from the left edge over. I'm gonna bring a guide at 30 inches. That's going to be for my wall unit. And then from the right edge here, and I go guide our 36 and press f for here. I know the wall unit and the refrigerator are just going to be placeholders for right now. So it doesn't really give us an advantage of making it a component. So I'm just going to draw my rectangle and draw my rectangle. Then going to take the Select tool, I'm going to double-click and then right-click and I'll make it a group though. Select tool, double-click, right-click, and make it a, I always like to make groups prior to push pooling, but be careful in doing so because a, you'll notice as you orbit you get that flickering. Just make sure before you push pull this, that you double-click inside the group. So if I double-click right now, we can then push this up. And I'm just going to push this up. I don't know what the height of this as yet. I'm just gonna give it 80 inches and this sort of standard door. Hi, so I'm gonna do Space-bar for select escape and then double-click here, and I'll push this one up 80 as well. Or see I can move my cursor over in kinda reference it until it snaps right there. I'll go ahead and click. I'll then take the Select tool and I'll click away from not sure, yeah, I want to break up any of the rest of this. And without adding too much detail, this is where we can just take the rectangle tool row, a large rectangle here. Take the Select tool, double click on it, right click, make it. You can also then once it's a group like this, rather than double-clicking on it. Once it's selected, you can press return, return with the selectable access and enter. Then I'll just push this up 36, just to give it our height. I'll hit the spacebar for select and then press Esc. And again, this is fine just to sort of get us started. So now let's take a look in our next video on how we can create the island.
13. Building the Kitchen Island: To create the kitchen island, this is where guides are also really helpful. So for space planning, let's make a couple assumptions. Let's say that we want the island to be 42 inches away from the cabinet tree. So that just gives us an enough sort of walking space and turnaround radius for a person there. Let's also let's give a little bit more leeway because we have traffic area coming in, traffic area coming in. So I don't when I walk in and sort of hit that. So it's actually give 48 inches on each side here. And if you want, you can erase the eraser. These guides we previously had, that way. We have now just the guides that were working with on the floor, just going to recenter my view and actually go back to a top view. And I'm going to pan down, sometimes it's just a little bit easier to see it from a top-down view. Now I'm not sure how big I want to make this, but I know I at least need 24 inches for some kind of Cabinet tree underneath. And then I'm going to add another 18 inches because I want benches or stools to be able to fit underneath this. From here, we can now take the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle around the edge here, and take the Select tool. And we can double-click on that right-click and make it a group. I'll press enter, open up that group, and then we'll push, pull it up 36 inches to give it that height. And if we look at my concept here, you'll see I have this nice sort of inch and a half frame or offset around it and it's going to recess in 18 inches. So a quick way that we can visualize that without getting into too much detail is to offset. However, if we offset like we did the walls, it's going to offset all the edges, right? So we don't want that. Instead, we're gonna take the Select tool. We're going to select the Edge and we're going to hold down shift because we're going to add this to our selection and this two are selection. So key tip here. If you pre-select during push pool, it only, excuse me, few pre-select during offset. It only offsets your existing selection or your pre-selection. So I'm gonna click offset, and now I'm going to click and release and I'm gonna pull this n. And instead of an inch and a half, let's actually do two edges. I would bring this in and I'll type in two and press enter. Now actually, let's go back. If you wanted to do an inch and a half, changing my mind, I can click and release, move that back and you can type it either as a decimal. So 1.5 and then return. Or you can click and release, move your cursor and type it in as a fraction. So one space bar one, slash two, and then enter. So make sure remember previously with feet and inches, you type foot sign and then the inch there was no space. However, with a fraction, you need to type the Int value if the space bar, so that you separate between the pinch and the fraction amount. I find it much easier just to type in the decimal amounts. So have a little cheat sheet or 0.1 to 5.25.375, so on and so forth. So we can keep it at 1.5. That's fine. You'll want to add to, it doesn't matter. I'm going to then push this back with push pool. I'm gonna push this back 18 inches. So the concept of all of this is we're creating brain works for potential detail that we're going to add later. So we're not worrying yet about me. Now. We're not worrying about any sort of high level detail. We're just trying to get those little nuances that way when we find the right component or we go to edit that geometry, this is that placeholder, that low poly version of it that's gonna make it easier for us to reference later. I'm gonna take the Select tool and I click out of that and I'm going to orbit back. And one of the last things that we can actually do just to kind of cap off the kitchen here is we can double-click inside of our cabinet tree here. And since we push this up to 36, I'm going to select this edge and then take the Move tool, going to press Control. And I'm going to copy this down by clicking on the end point here, copying it down an inch and a half. So 1.5 and then hit return. From there, I'm going to select this edge and I click on the Move tool and oppress control. I'm going to copy this over all the way over to here. So it's going to be ten feet, six inches. I'm copying it all the way to here. And I'm going to click to this is like copying and just kinda placing it right there. When you click, instead of typing five x, I typed 5X. Right now, it would just create five lines along that path, right? But instead of typing five x, I'm gonna type five slash and then hit return by typing five slash. It's dividing this into five equally spaced line breaks. So this is a good way that you can quickly kind of break these. Then you can better understand sort of what each sort of cabinet with this. And just visually this just kind of helps quickly, kinda break and subdivide this up. So we have a better idea of what that kitchen it's going to start to look like in the next video is take a look a little bit about the living room and how we can further Space Plan in there to help us create a bookshelf later.
14. 2D Massing Exercise: It's very easy early on in the modelling process, particularly for interior design, where you want to start putting in the actual furniture or finishes that you want. But I have a little caution doing that. And what I want you to do first is really think through the design. Whether it's on pen and paper or in what we're going to do, which is a little bit of pen and paper in SketchUp, We're going to space pan a little bit more to understand the size and shapes of the furniture that we need. We went to grab stuff from the 3D warehouse or if we create stuff on our own, we have a better idea of the overall constraints of size and dimension that we're looking for. Plus it's much easier to move 2D geometry around than it is to move 3D geometry around. So let's jump in. So inner design, you know, I'm, I'm thinking trying to go with maybe a circular table, maybe a couch at the end here, and then to sort of armchairs. Not quite sure yet. And let's say in this process, we're trying to figure out what's going to work. And quite honestly, that's where standard sizes and sort of options, that's really where Google is really helpful. So a lot of times when I'm doing interior work, I'll do a lot of what is standard dining room tables? What is the standard sectional size? What's a standard cabinet size? You know, a lot of that from years of experience you kinda figure out. But don't be afraid to jump into Google and do an image search for, you know, different sizes, for dimensions, the things. So what we're drawing is really just kind of what, what I've kind of found that kind of works for different dimensions, spaces. I go back one, I'm gonna just put that over on another screen. So all we're gonna do right here is we're going to create some blocks are, and create little sort of geometry here. So first we want to round or rectangular table here. And I wanted to see at least six maybe. So a size for that usually is somewhere between 44 inches wide by 84 inches long. So I'm gonna click on the Rectangle Tool and I'm not going to worry about Guides and constraints. If you want, you can actually go to edit, delete guides. And I'm just going to draw a rectangle in the model space here. And I type in 84 comma 44 and it returned. Now I want to make sure if I draw any chairs or any other geometry that, that doesn't intervene or mixed with any of that geometry. So I'm just gonna make sure I group it. Not going to worry about making a component because this is really just like 2D placeholder. You do a lot of this. You know, you might actually create a component library for your own leader on, but to not over-complicate things, let's just group it just to kind of keep it simple. Alright, so we've got our table there that's maybe go inside there. And I'm just going to draw with the Arc tool. Just going to draw kind of like an arc here and maybe another arc here. So click and release, click and release then move your cursor out. In realistically, I should be making the SS as individual components that I can move and copy. But just to kind of, this is really I'm not showing the client this, this is really just for me. So I'm just going to kind of draw it, something like that. And I'm not worrying about these being perfect. Certainly if you wanted to, you could take this and move and copy it over and kind of align them. Something we're gonna do later on once we have it in 3D. But right now, that's fine. I'm gonna take the Select tool and a close out of it. And I'm gonna do the same thing for our living room furniture. And for this, you really don't even have to be true in the dimensions and size, right? You can just kind of, I had a little bit. So for example, if I take the rectangle tool, I may draw a rectangle along here. And I'm just visually just trying to look and see what those dimensions are. It's about 19 feet by foot or two. So that I might just put it as a placeholder right now for a bookshelf and do a whole long wall bookshelf there, then it might draw another little rectangle here. And let's say let's do like a long sort of couch. It may be with the circle, will have coffee table that maybe with rotated rectangle. I'll click and release, click and release, and I'll move back to build ITU chairs. Again, it's not that the dimensions certainly are not correct by any means. If I take the tape measure, you know, you can see this chair's about over three feet wide. It's, it's a really large coffee table, are really large. Single chair. And same thing with this couch. This is almost a 12-foot wide couch. But generally, you know, you can see how quickly doing this quickly really allows you just to kind of be free. Don't be hold, held down to the constraints of SketchUp, wanting to draw sort of true to size or true to shape and locking into things. You know, just kinda take the rectangle, take the circle tool, and just kind of free form here because eventually you're going to just select all of these and delete them. But at least this is giving you the framework on where you want to do this within the model. And really to, it's really something too that you could do. You know, still by hand. I'd love still going by hand. Even here in Acrobat and just kind of marking this up, right? Maybe you have an iPad and you wanna kinda sketch out, you know, don't hesitate to use the tools that you have to help you kinda Space Plan that though, you know, here might do a little bit for organizing this leader. Whatever that might be, whatever gets you to, where you need to go for creating the geometry is really, really what we're striving for. So now that we have a direction with where we want to go for some of the furniture using the 2D placeholders helps us. But really to make it look better, we want to create or import from the 3D warehouse where we can actually bring in 3D furniture. So in the next video, we'll go ahead and do that.
15. Importing Components from the 3D Warehouse: Now that we have an idea for what we want the furniture placement to be in our space. Let's take a look, the 3D warehouse and how we can import components that other users have already created for us. So let's jump in access to 3D warehouse. We're gonna go up to a window and then click 3D warehouse. I'm gonna make the screen bigger just so that it's a little bit larger for us here, the 3D warehouse is a database or library of free SketchUp components. So the way this started years ago was when Google purchased SketchUp. It used to be a place where you can upload 3D models of cities and buildings that anyone could create. And then those would publish and be on the Google Earth build 3D buildings layer. However, that technology changed in SketchUp is now owned by trimble. So the 3D warehouse has become a repository where users can upload products. It's also been a place where manufacturers can also put their products. So it's a balance. It's a balance of manufacturers actually providing the 3D models of their products with everyday users like yourself, sharing and distributing models and objects that they've created. So there are a few tips that we can use to make it easier to find the right thing that you want. So let's first start in the dining room. So we need a dining room table. So let's just do like we do any kind of search. We'll just do a search. Hit Return here. And you're going to see right now the first set results, the 449 results are all from products. So these are from sort of trusted creators or manufacturers that are actual products that you could probably find off the shelf or online to purchase. So in short, these are kind of ones that are created and are clean and nice depending on what you're searching for, you might get not as nice results, or maybe you only get a couple of things that you can find. So that's where you want to sometimes searched by models. And this is where you're going to see more of really any kind of user uploading a dining room SET, right? So this could include chairs, it can include dimensions and just other elements that just maybe you don't want. You can also search different collections, which are essentially folders that people have created to bookmark multiple products or components within a particular subset. So it's a great way if you find something you like, you might find something slightly similar. There's also catalogues which work very much like collections. So for me, I tend to stay within the product Rome. If anything, I might use the categories over here, but I rarely kind of adjust these. The only time I may do is I might just the file size. Note that when you import components, you're importing all of the geometry and all the textures that are in that file too. This is where users can quickly see there file go from maybe one or two megabytes to 20 or 30 or 40 megabytes because a through and a lot of furniture, a lot of complexity. We can also two, instead of sorting by relevance, we could sort by popularity. I, you can see you get the idea here. So I'm going to browse through, I'm going to try to find a table. This one actually looks pretty nice. Let me find a table that I think it's going to work within the space. This one's pretty interesting, although I'm not too sure about the dimensions and size of it. So I can click on it to open up a preview of it. And if I like it, I can, of course click download. But if I want more information, I can click see more details. And this is going to actually bring us to the product page of it. So remember, SketchUp is used worldwide. So being in the States, we really don't work in metrics all that much. So you will have units or you will have models that are in a different unit then, then inches. So you'll see here that this particular model is bounded by a one by two by one meter object. So it's not that you need to understand conversions between inches in meters or inches and centimeters. The important thing to get here is people create thing and then other scales or other units. When we download this, it will automatically convert to inches. So you don't have to worry about it converting and sort of changing the scale or changing the size. What you may have to worry sometimes is users not drawing things to scale. But here's a good indication that this is pretty typical of a table. Also, while I'm here, we can take a look of other models by the author or other collections by this author as well. So it's really great when you find something you like by a creator, you can kind of browse some of their other stuff. I'm just going to, you can also favorite This. You can like it. And you can even create your own folder or collection to catalog things. I tend to just kind of ignore some of that and just kind of download it because I may not ever need this again for another project and it's easy enough to search. So we're going to load this directly into the model. We'll go ahead and click yes, it's going to download, and that's gonna place the object on your cursor. But see how I'm not exactly on the corner of the objects SEO, it's off a little bit. Every object that you create in SketchUp has a different inserting point. So we're pretty close. You can see we're pretty close to that size that we used. So I'm going to just use the bottom 2D geometry that I set here just to kind of set this table in place here. So I'll go ahead and click, Set it. One of the biggest tips that I can give you when you're placing components from the 3D warehouse is just get it in the model. Sometimes don't worry about getting it in the exact place. Because a lot of times you don't know exactly where that inserting point is going to be. So a user might create this with the origin point, not here, but they might create it somewhere, sort of off the model. And if that's the case, when you import it, it's a lot more difficult to kind of set and adjust. In the next video, let's further add more components within our model using the 3D warehouse.
16. Moving and Positioning Components: Let's jump back into the 3D warehouse and add more components into our space. So we're gonna go back up to window. We're going to click on 3D warehouse. It's going to bring us back to our previous page. So since we're on this product page, it's going to bring us here. So we can either click home or we can search by other models that maybe this creator has done. So I'm gonna go back to our search and type in dining table set. And maybe I'm just going to find a chair. So this chair works pretty good. I don't need to open up the product. It can basically click on this little Download button right here. And that's going to prevent us from having to go to the product page. So we'll click on that little button. It'll load it directly into the model. We'll click yes, download it, and then I'll place it on our cursor. And again here I'm just trying to kind of place it somewhere in the model in reference to the table. So right about there looks pretty good. Now with the chair in the model, we can rotate it, but I don't want you to actually use the Rotate tool located here. Instead, we're already on the move tool. And notice as you hover over an object, you get not only these and corner anchor points, but as I hover over the top, see the red plus signs that appear right there. That red plus sign is an anchor point for built-in rotate. So once you hover over, click as it makes that rotate symbol appear, and now you'll begin rotating it. The farther your cursor is away from the object, the less likely it is to snap to these 15 degree increments. So I'm gonna move my cursor closer here. So I'm right on that spot. And then I'll click this Edit in-place. Now with one chair set, I'm going to press the Control key or option on a Mac. I'm gonna copy from the bottom corner of the dining chair here. And I'm going to click again to set it. So I'm moving. Notice I'm moving in the red axis, a click there to set it. I'm going to take the Select tool and I'm going to select the base plan that we have below, and I'm going to delete it. We no longer need it. Now if you'd like to Space Plan in a true 2D plan, let's go up to the top view. And here we're still in perspective although we are looking above. So I'm gonna go to camera and click on parallel projection. This flattens our model into a 2D axonometric. If we were to orbit right now, we would see our model is in fact an axonometric and not a isometric. So I'm gonna go back to parallel projection. We go back to a top view. And what I like about this is I can select this table, I could select this chair and select the other chair. I can take the Move tool rest control, and rather than clicking on the object to copy, if I copy from a place on the ground by clicking and place it on another spot on the ground, it ensures that I'm keeping the object on the ground itself. So if I orbit, you can kinda see it still all on that plane. What many first-time users will do by accident is they'll copy this, but then click on the object and the lifted. So then you'll end up with your chairs kind of floating above the model. So certainly there are times where copying from the object or from the corner is effective. That was really good previously when we copied it over. But when I space plan for furniture, I tried to find an arbitrary point on the ground and then I click to copy it from there. So then I'll click to set it. Now rather than rotating these chairs, we can right-click and we can flip them. And we're going to flip them along the green direction. Because notice when we move this, well, you moved and copied it. We moved it along the green axis. So flipping is essentially like mirroring. The difference though is it's always in relation to the axis that you're flipping it. So if green doesn't work for your particular component that you download, just undo and then flip it by the red. Go back to our plan, maybe move it forward a little bit. And then I'll select this chair. I'll control or option on the Mac. Click and place it here, a hover over the top and click and then click to rotate it. Press control again or option on a Mac, copy it over to here, and then I can either rotate it or the Undo, or I can right-click and flip it along the green. So you can use m as a keyboard shortcut to quickly go back to move. And once you're done moving, hit the spacebar. The spacebar is a great way to get out of the move tool. Otherwise, it's very likely that you can just kind of click on an object. Forget that you had it selected, and then you're over here kinda clicking it by accident. So feel free to hit the space bar to bring back to the Select tool. And I'm going to hold down Shift actually, I'm going to select our chairs and I'm also going to select our table because I want that to move all as one piece to similar to the stair example in a previous video, I can right-click here and contain this into one larger group, because as you can see, I'm not really centered here. So I'm gonna take the Move tool now and we're going to move it just to kind of I it up and center it. In the next video, let's take a look at how we can use the component library or component palette within SketchUp to actually change or just the components and drag and drop them into the model.
17. Using the Component Tool Palette / Window: Another way that we can place furniture that's already in the model is actually using the component palette or the component toolbar over in the default tray. So on a PC, you wanna make sure the default trays open and then you're gonna open up the component tray here. Now if it doesn't show your two current components here, just click on the little house, and the house will show the models currently in the file. Now, over on a Mac, you wanna go up to a window and click on components. And that's going to bring up the component palette. Same idea here. I'm just going to drag the toolbar up and over. And I'm going to click on the home button just to show the components in the model. So once you bring a component into the SketchUp file from the 3D warehouse, it's going to show here. It will also show if you create any of your own components. For example, if I take the island here and convert it to a component using the Select tool and right-clicking on it, you can see after I click Create that it shows up in our library over here. Now this only shows up in this file. So if you were to go to File New, these will not show up here. Do you ever wanna save out a component so that it's part of a larger library. That's something I'll show in a future video. But quickly you can always right-click and Save As so that you can save it out as its own SketchUp file. Or right now, let's focus on what we have in the model. So I'm going to orbit and I'm gonna get out of this parallel projection view. So I'm gonna go up to camera and click on perspective. So let's say I had that chair in the library over here. I can now click and release the thumbnail image over here on the right. And as I move my cursor into the model, you're gonna see it appear again. I can click and release and then drop it to the model and click and release the table. Certainly drop that in as well. Just going to delete that. Keep the two chairs here. Because what we wanna do is we want to replace these chairs with bar stool chairs. So let's say maybe at first we wanted it to be a little bit lower or maybe we had an idea to do sort of a regular chair size here, but it just didn't work out. So now, if I go up to a window, click on 3D warehouse, I'm gonna do a search for bar stool, and I'm going to find one that I like. This one looks pretty good. So I'm going to download this. I'm going to load it directly into the model and we're gonna place it just kinda over here to the side. I'm not going to place it in the correct location. I'm just going to kind of place it here. So what happens here is let's say you have a new product that you like and you want to swap it with these two existing ones. I'm gonna take the Select tool and I'm going to pre-select the two existing components. And then over in your component library, you can right-click on the component that you want it to be replaced with, and you can click replace selected. So that's going to swap out these two components with our new component. Now you will see it shift slightly. And the reason for that little shift there is because these components, you can see the origin point is in the middle, or the axis origin of that component is in the middle. Whereas when we replace it, see how for the object within it, it's just kind of off a little bit. So there's really no way of knowing that right away unless you actually go into that component and kind of make the change in, sort of re-center it. But don't waste your time doing that. It, it's just unless you're using this object a lot. It's really not worth the time really to, to adjust all that. What I'll do instead is I'll delete the copy that we have there, because now we have these two in the model and I'll select these and now just kind of move them out. And also looks that I need to rotate this. So I'll rotate, select just this one, and rotate this one, this one. Another important thing to know is not every user on the 3D warehouse creates components the same way. So one thing that I always like to do is I like to take the Select tool and I like to double-click inside the object to kind of see how they organize this. So you can see it's actually, it's actually a component, and inside of that component is a subcomponent and then another subcomponent. So it looks like they actually have a couple issues here. One other way to visualize that is what the outliner. So on a PC, if I go to window, I can go to default tray and bring up the outliner over on a Mac. If I go to window, I can then just click on outliner. So the outliner is the hierarchy of an object, the hierarchy of your model to over here you'll see the filename here I have, and then the components in groups within it. So components show up as a four dot, groups show up as just a one sort of square dot. So we can see this little drop-down arrow, that stacking arrow means that it's a component and inside it are sub objects. So it looks like they have a group within a group, within a group. And then these component number ones, these I would say are likely be individual legs. Yep. Leg, leg, leg. The group here, this might be the Bar or sort of a subobject within there. Oh, it's the the support there. So what you can see here, and honestly you don't even have to change this. But what I can see here is this grouping and this grouping is unnecessary. What happened is they probably downloaded it, grouped it together, grouped it together and then named it. So I can clean some of this up. I can take this group here and explode it. And then I can take this and up here and right-click and explode that. And then I can take this group here and right-click and explode that that way. In the stool component, there's just the four legs, the two underneath sort of parts that we're not seeing right now because they're underneath and then the top. So that just kind of organizes it. It doesn't really matter in the long-term. It just makes it a little bit cleaner and easier to work with. You can also see after I did that exploding, see how that wireframe around the object is much more narrow. So that group within a group created sort of that extra sort of boundary area. So now it's a much cleaner sort of object. And because it's a component also does it over here to this copy. So again, the outliner over here is here, as well as the component library. Those are two ways to help you organize your objects within that model. Personally, I do not use the outliner all that. Often. I use it just as a quick visual check, but I likely just kinda go in and double-click around just to see. So I suggest once you're done with the outliner, you can close it that way. It doesn't sort of refresh every time you're clicking on something. In the next video, let's take a look at a new feature in SketchUp 20-20 one called Live components.
18. Intro to Live Components: A new feature in Sketch Up 2021 is the ability now to use what's called Live components. These are configurable components that allow you to change and adjust the properties within them. If we take a look at an existing SketchUp model from the 3D warehouse, you can see that this component, there are no configurations, right? I can't scale it. I can't stretch it. I can't change the material without altering and changing the model properties associated with it. So SketchUp came out with a feature in 2021 called Live components. So I'm gonna delete right now just our double-click on our rectangle that we added here. And actually I can double-click and sort of delete just kind of the rest of the furniture that we have here because we don't need it. So to find a live component, we first need to go on the 3D warehouse. So we're gonna go up to window and we're going to click on 3D warehouse. I'm going to click back on the home button or the 3D warehouse button. And you can see right away in the top here that there are some models from SketchUp labs. The SketchUp labs is that designation for this new development, which is the which are these live components. So I'm gonna go to this furniture, live components, and I'm going to click on this modular furniture here. So one thing to understand that the, this is new, so there aren't a lot of options as far as designed on a lot of these, this will change. Sketchup, adds more to these. And as live components become more of a part and integrated into everyone's everyday workflow. So without it being configurable, you would just download this and if you needed to change it, you would have to figure out how to stretch it and move it. But now you can click configure here and you can actually kind of preview how you want to configure and adjust the component. For example, if I don't want a L sectional, if I just want a street three seater, you're gonna see it change an update based off of the parameters that you put. Now I'm going to close out of this preview because I'm doing this configuration on the 3D warehouse. But you can also do this in SketchUp, Which I think that I find a little bit easier. So just download it as it is. So I'll click Load, I'll click yes. And I'm going to place it in the model and I'm just going to orbit around as well. Maybe pan this kinda get a better look at the model here. Now previously in SketchUp, what users might have a tendency to do is they would try to click the scale tool that try and stretch this. You see as I click the scale tool on this component, can't do that. Like I can hear. I can't I can stretch or irregular component but it can't stretch a live component because I need to right-click on it and go to Configure live component. However, before I do that, let's actually take the Move tool and let's hover over the top and let's rotate it. And then now we'll right-click and configure the live component. You will see the properties of it up here. And now similar to what we had when we were on the 3D warehouse, we can configure this. So because the model was done in millimeters, that's going to keep the units that it had. So I'm just going to kind of expand this, might move it a little bit too, and I might change the base color, just keep it white for right now. And I might change it to a large sectional with an Ottoman. Maybe I'd be a little too big for this area here. I think we'll just actually end up with the three cedar here. This works, but you can see how you can further kind of go in and customize this. And then I can still use the Move tool. It's still kind of adjust this around. Now I sort of have a position for it with how I like it. I'm gonna go back up to the 3D warehouse and Azure searching for objects. Be aware that over in the right, excuse me, over on the left, under Advanced here, you can actually enable the search so that you're only searching for live components to maybe an Ottoman. There's just not any Ottoman jets. So maybe living room didn't work either. Every I gotta go to models. So they're not showing up first under Products, but under models. If I type in living, you can see some stuff there. But because this is still kind of in its infancy here, I would definitely just go to the furniture live components in the curated collection here. And again, this is a new feature, so expect this to expand and maybe I'll bring in this coffee table. So again, same idea. You're gonna right-click configure live component. And you can see we can change the style of it. And maybe I want to rectangular one oval-shaped, I'll actually go oval shaped. I think this works pretty well for this current design and make this much bigger. This one, we can even add a shelf underneath and we can change the material top or we gave in change a custom color. So again, there's a lot we can do with this. And again, this is really just kind of the beginning of life components. But you can see it does make it a little bit easier to kind of stretch and movies compared to maybe a table that we found just off of the warehouse that wasn't a live component to finish off the living room furniture here, let's go ahead and just add two more chairs. And again, you can choose any kind of chair that you want here. I'm gonna go back into the furniture and maybe I'll just grab one of their sofa ones for now. So I'll click on the corner here and just maybe rotated a bit and sort of place it with whatever looks good there. So finding stuff on the 3D warehouse definitely makes it a much easier to fill up the space with furniture. But there are times where you're obviously going to have to create your own custom furniture, or in our case, mill work from scratch. So in the next video is take a look at how we can create the set of bookshelves that are gonna run along the wall here.
19. Creating a Bookcase Component from 2D: A way in which we can understand components better is by creating a series of bookshelves and understand how to create components within components and how they act and react within the model space. So our end goal is to try to do something like this. We want a series bookshelves that go along that space there. And if we jump back into our model, we can see we have this whole wall here to work with. So the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm going to take the rotated rectangle tool and I'm going to start somewhere here. And I'm just going to create a base shape. So I'm going to click and release to start my rectangle gonna move out because I want the depth of this to be 12 inches. So type in 12 and then hit return. I'll then move to the right. And I want each row to be no wider than three feet. So I'm gonna type in 36 and hit Enter. So with my bass shelf, I can take the Select tool, double-click on it, right-click on it, and then select may component. And I'm gonna call this a twelv by 36 bookshelf and then click Create. So again, I always find it easier to move and copy stuff when they're 2D. So let's take the Move tool, let's press Control, and let's click and release. Click and release to set it will type in, see how good my math is. We'll type in 5X and press Enter. I'll try 4X and press enter. So it looks pretty good. So you can always change that value so long as you don't click on another tool. Now from here, I really just want to kind of focus on what the size of this is going to be and how it's going to look before I add too much detail. So let's just take the Select tool. Let's double-click inside of one of these, and let's push this up. And we're pushing this up really just to kind of get a sense of height. So I certainly don't need it to be ten feet. May actually put a soffit above it so we can get some lighting in there. So I would probably say the tallest wood that we should go here is going to be eight feet. So I'll type in eight feet and press return. And again, the beauty of the component here is once we model one that affects all of them.
20. Creating Cabinet Sub-Component: The basic framework of the cabinet components set, we can now go inside and create some sub-components of individual parts within the bookcase itself. So let's jump in and we can see now here, if I take the Select tool, I'm going to double-click inside of the first component here. And what I wanna do here is I just want to copy or separate the vertical piece. So let's take the Select tool, let's double-click on it. And then we're going to right-click and make it a component. And the component for this is going to be, we can call it component two. I'm just gonna call it V bookshelf. So v, meaning the vertical part of the bookshelf or bookcase. It doesn't really matter what you name these. These are just for your own internal nomenclature and, uh, go ahead and click Create. Now what I also want to do is the existing geometry. We're going to take the eraser, or actually it's a little bit easier
Daniel Brown, Leading SketchUp Trainer | Designer | 3D
