3D Basecamp 2014: SketchUp Extensions and Modeling, Daniel Tal

okay so welcome everyone to the first of the official sessions my name is Chris Cronin I work on the Sketch up team I've been working on Sketch up team for a long time or since the at last days but I'm not here to talk about me we're here to talk about Daniel tall who is going to give us a wonderful presentation for those of you who don't know Daniel it's trained as a landscape architect by association he's a longtime friend of the Sketchup team in the Sketchup community and he's an all-around good guy and beyond that he is just about one of the foremost experts on Sketchup in the world yes you are come on so um please give a round of applause and a warm welcome to mr. Daniel tall and I'll let him take it from here welcome everybody thank you for having me again I've been to every Basecamp since I think 2006 so it's an honor to actually come present and thank you Chris for the introduction there are a lot of people now using Sketchup way beyond what I am able to understand how they're doing it a quick show of hands how many people here use Ruby scripts extensions plugins actively suite it's awesome perfect okay so I'm going to run through the first part of my presentation which is PowerPoint I'm going to do a lot of demoing I'm going to show you how I use different extensions to get stuff done and I'm going to sequence extensions in terms of workflow and process I'm part of Brightman Telecom Mike Brightman is my business partner and he has a book on Sketchup and layout it's worth checking out and we have a multi-faceted business we do a lot of different things but again I'm just going to run through this first book I'm working on a second edition I actually got that contract today for Google Sketchup for site design which will just be Sketchup for site design rendering in Sketchup which came out in March of this past year of 2013 and since I am going to run through quickly and go through a lot of stuff we are going to record session which I need to remember to do right now perfect whatever that means we'll let that go but I am going to make the PDF and some extensions and files available for at one of our websites and I am also going to be starting to offer CEU classes hopefully in the summer keep going extensions are essential for modeling in Sketchup I think a lot of people in this room already know that you cannot get away in creating models in Sketchup efficiently the name of the game is about economics efficiency accuracy being able to deliver at this point the extension system in Sketchup is so diverse and so big that there's nothing you really can't do everything has you can find an extension to do something for you regardless of what it might be so what do I mean by that john backus actually nailed it on the head obviously he knows this really well Sketchup is a blank slate it's this tool that doesn't come over loaded like you open up a lot of other products and you're sifting through tons of different menus and things you don't understand on how or what or when to use instead Sketchup like Here I am I keep the large tool set open in Sketchup why because that's my basic system of tools that I might need things I might not have a shortcut to but it's really simple what do extensions allow you to do it makes Sketchup into this chameleon it becomes a program that can do anything I always run into people who say all you can't do that in Sketchup use Rhino or you can't do that in Rev in Sketchup you can use Revit well I'm like well I can do it in Sketchup you just have to find the right tool so it doesn't matter what profession you're in what you're trying to do drawing or modification or rendering a graphics parametric organic modeling you can find the tool for yourself to use it and actually leverage that tool to create things you might normally not have done before and this is just a quick graphic the idea behind it is these tools are crop they they have no limitations and they cross over so you might use a tool for something unrelated and interior does that's someone for organic modeling or terrain modeling or animation might use it's just exploring the tools each Ruby script offers a function or multiple functions the difference is is using that tool for the way you want to use it to get your things done so it's a modular tool system you're not talking about AutoCAD lisps you're not talking about the plug-ins for Photoshop you're talking about a core system that sense has been been developed you can do just about anything this is I reinstalled my Ruby library for 2014 I opened it up this kind of shows me some of the menus and a good part of what Ruby scripts are there o design coders this is an important thing two things I'm a Trekkie and the motto there is infinite diversity in infinite combinations that's my perspective on Sketchup and the other thing is design coders you're starting to seeing a lot of professional offices people that might be designed trained but are also learning to code why because they're creating their own tools for that office to actually be able to do the work that they need to do so if you are not using Sketchup I don't care if you're new you're not using Sketchup correctly go explore what it does these are all the things that will save you money frustration it might crash but you know you might get a bug splat you can always send hate mail but they do read it so don't do that and even the ones that you have to purchase I purchase Ruby scripts left and right you need to purchase them they're worth what they do there wait and go okay so I'm going to go over where to find how to install really quickly notable scripts and authors we're going to spend most of it on a demo and I'm doing a workshop tomorrow I have not done a Ruby script or an extension workshop in a long time because they're hard to pull off but with extension warehouse let's see if we can do it I'd love to go through all of these I know it's ambitious there's a couple of here that are worth noting I have a cut fill extension that I'm going to demo today that I've been working with limitless computing because I do a lot of terrain modeling but I really want to point out I'm not going to go through all of his tools fredo six has a bunch of tools if you haven't checked them out I'll tell you where to find them a Chris Fullmer and TIG also just some notable authors of because I end up going back and forth and being like well I use a lot of their scripts but just there's a whole bunch more to go through here some of the demo files and tomorrow at outer shell that's not misspelled that's named for one of the founders of schedule so the first place to get you know Sketchup extension warehouse if you haven't done it should second place this is really important because there's a lot of plugins here is the sketch ocation plug-in store manager it's free most of all the Ruby scripts there I think are free as well you can donate but it is a must every who has education plug-in store who doesn't raise your hands don't be ashamed some of your not really go get it must have important it has a lot of different things and options that actually help you manage scripts as well semester comm old place to go but one of the first places to deposit Ruby scripts and extensions and plugins I'm going to definitely show you some oldies and goodies that I use from there the other one is Valley architects if you have any year use Chuck valleys yeah and I'm going to demo a new one called instant roof new today hopefully it'll work because we need internet connection but I think I have it so again this guy's amazing and miraculous and what he's doing and for the hardcore how many people have been to the Ruby Depot the Ruby Depot for the hardcore people here if I can get it up again right here these are all extensions some might work for 2014 some might not work for 2014 but if you're really really looking for something go here because you might just find something really odd random amazing who knows that would be using but you could see how many tools have actually been developed for Sketchup it's just phenomenal so I do have videos on how to install because there's at least four or five different ways to install a ruby script and I don't know if this will actually work and I don't want this to actually do this right now but again I can make this PDF available to people if you want it but there are at least four or five different ways to install from the extension warehouse sketch occation plugins door installing through extension preferences you can do a whole class on that I will review that in the workshop tomorrow and one more Ruby script that's worth noting it's actually alec Schreyer who's presenting right now on the other room he has a great plugin on his website called the plugin loader which can help you also load plugins it might seem overwhelming it really is getting a lot easier in terms of installing scripts versus what it was even in 2013 and before that when I'd have to teach classes and be like go to Program Files I'm not going to go there okay this is one thing that a lot of people don't do and bad bad bad you should do this I cannot find a Ruby script that does not have instructions to it there might be some on Ruby Depot but extension warehouse education mustard valley architecture anywhere you're going to go you're going to find tutorials you're going to find people explaining how to actually do it and work the Ruby script install it work it find the menus on how it works and also demonstrate how it's how it actually functions so for example instant road new which is a really complicated script with a lot of functions he has some really good instructions for it again I'm going to mention Freight o6 because I heavily depend on his Ruby scripts and let's go demo because that's what I'd rather do so this is a must-have Ruby script how many people are using selection toys Wow go get it it is phenomenally important it is a must-have Ruby script if you're using Sketchup it lets you do a lot of different things I'm going to open up the menu this is a simple menu that actually has a lot more functionality than it might look like I'm going to give you a really quick understanding of what it can do so I have a layer list here unfortunately I don't have any of these objects on layers so I need to reorganize this model why because everything was modeled it was an imported AutoCAD file someone gave me the file I modeled it it's now a mess I can't organize it so I'm going to select for example this palm tree I'm going to open up entity info I'm going to right-click on it and I have a new submenu at the bottom called instances now the one thing about selection toys depending on what you select the menu options will change if it's a group versus a line versus an edge but I'm just going to say select active selects all versions of that particular tree and then I can move it onto a different layer I selected something that's already open so this would be a quick tutorial and I'm going to go through this tomorrow on how you can actually reorganize really unorganized models using selection toys in your process for me building fairly large models it becomes a really important process why because I can select that component once do instances select all it now select all active versions of those and I can find the appropriate layer for that but it does a little bit more than that and we're going to go onto the next one here show you what I mean so really simple how that all can function so I'm going to close that and I'm only showing you some of the functions that selection toys has and again that's a lot of the things that you'll see with all these Ruby scripts they're multifunctional or they might produce a function that has many effects in this case how many of you download an object and it's filled with edges so you're going to go into the object you're going to take the eraser tool and have fun hiding the edges right instead then a triple click on the object and I'm going to do select over it and notice I have a lot of different options here again I have the instances but I have select only and it lets me select only those things I want selected and Diezel the rest of them or I can deselect the things that are already selected in this case I'm going to do select or select only edges selected all the edges can right click on them and I can hit hide so I can quickly go through here and that saves me a lot of time so again this is a time-saver in what you want to use there's a lot more to what selection toys can actually do so if you have groups but so you have tons of groups you didn't make it a component which is a sin if you're working in Sketchup and you're not organizing correctly this will allow you to hear actually its see if I can demonstrate it real quick I'm going to make this into a group I'm going to copy it around I'm actually going to use another Ruby script actually now we'll come back to that one I'm not going to cheat now I can right-click on that and select group copies and I can say select all now I can go back and do group copies convert into components so now they're all components right let's keep going I have many Ruby scripts I'm not going to get through all this keep coming back to this one when I can do it ah I think this one might be one of my favorite Ruby scripts it's called rotate rectangle again at the top it's on the extension warehouse how many people are using rotate rectangle how you will after today so you want to draw I want to take this master plan and I want to draw rectangles on it but I can isn't that frustrating all right how many so rotate rectangle which I actually have a shortcut for so I don't know where it is oh there it is and that's the other thing I use these Ruby scripts so often extensions plugins whatever you want to call them they're called extensions now I have shortcuts for them because it speeds up my workflow I'm like alright that's perfect now I could just chained the change the access for the model and do this but I'm not going to do that so I'm just going to go and I'm going to use the rotate rectangle tool lets me pick the first point second point and I can start not having to worry about having to draw or change the angle rotate rectangle it's one of my top five to must to have it's on Sketchup it's on the Sketchup warehouse on the extension warehouse something you should consider going to get again how it functions versus the rectangle tool now I'm going to do where was it whoops here I'll use the sorry I'm going to use my shortcut and doesn't matter it'll JA it'll draw everything perpendicularly so it's a true 90 degree angles for everything next one I love this tool this is an oldie but a goodie and how many people know about path copy or copy along path it's got a schizophrenic name because it's path copy Anza mustard but under plugins it's copy along path anybody from semester dear I know you're here don't hide you know you got to change it I'm just kidding you don't have to listen to me what is path copy dude we're going to do a bunch of different path copy stuff so first and foremost I can select this line and I want to create this kind of nice light across a plaza so I'm going to go and select plugins copy along path you can copy the note path nodes or copy to spacing again I have a shortcut there why because I'm always using it so I'm going to select it it's giving me a distance 10 feet I'm going to set it to 2 feet I'm going to select the edge which is actually an arc then I'm going to select the light and don't crash don't crash you laugh it crashed that's okay okay how many people I get questions about how do you do a rock wall yes you can use Valley architecture instant wall instant rail but he doesn't give you this kind of ability you know a nice rock wall how do you do this so I skipped one Ruby script that I'm going to come back to right now because I'm going to show you how it works because I'm determined and it's called weld this is another one from semester what does well do well it welds lines together so I'm going to actually select these lines oh I accidentally unselected how frustrating is that right another Ruby script just a little segue psycho previous selection whoo yay okay I'll come back to it so I'm going to go plugins weld again shift W I didn't set up these shortcuts for the presentation because I'm obviously going through the menus I'm just doing it because well I actually use them all the time so I'm going to string together all those Ruby scripts to create this wall so first was weld next I'm going to select I'm going to do plugins copy along path copy the spacing I think it's two feet I select the line select the edge now I'm going to do selection toys selected instances select all and you can all look at Chris Fullmer at the back of the room just to embarrass um hi Chris how are you doing CLF tools they're amazing this one I've been using for a long time I'm always plugging it I'm going to plug a lot of other tools you can see I have some of Chris's tools already loaded scale and rotate multiple scale and rotate randomly I'm going to set the scale factors to 0.9 and point one point one and then 360 and then hit okay randomized it for me well now it's just a simple matter of taking that using the copy tool and then I'm going to use Chris Palmer's tool again and then I'm going to do watch this again instances select all copy it up again move them back a little and then run the randomize rotation again why am i rendering randomizing it once again so I can create a really varied facade to it but there you go how long did that just take me right to be able to do something like this along really long surfaces and to get to the end result sure I guess I do have it open oh it never crashed ok well let's keep going alright the landscape architect I do a lot of train modeling and part of what I want to do for tomorrow's workshop is both beginner to advanced terrain modeling because it's part of the Ruby script stuff one of there is I know TIG does have a cut fill calculator I'm also working with them Jeffrey Franklin from limitless computing we're working on this particular cut fill calculator because I have clients that I do terrain modeling they're like well how much earth are we moving so let's see if this works I have my terrain my existing terrain on the left to my proposed terrain on the right I'm going to select the terrain right click on it go to cut fill and say set is existing I'm going to go to the next one right click on it cut fill set is proposed right click on it again cut fill and say calculate cut fill don't crash we'll wait for it and we'll see if it decides to function there it goes so what is it showing me the red is showing me the cut areas the blue areas are fill it's giving me a total cut calculation of ten thousand six hundred cubic yards I also have liters and regions to mark each area so I know which area is what and if I reich select and right-click on this again I can actually export this out as a spreadsheet file so I have it listed as well so for me this is very useful especially for landscape architect's anybody moving a lot of Earth around surveyors and hopefully will get it even more refined so we're going to keep going cut fill and go to profile builder who here uses profile builder nice okay this is another oldie and a goodie there's a lot of Ruby scripts that when I went through and started doing this I can go through the extension warehouse and I can find a lot of new scripts they have to earn their way into my workflow and a lot of them already have I'm going to show you repeat copy it also but profile builder has been around for a long time and it's got two versions the pro in the free version it is pretty much follow me on steroids it's absolutely phenomenal you know for example in this particular case I need to create handrails there's a lot of different piping tools you can use to do this but you could see I'm taking the terrain edge copying it up hopefully what should be three feet I'll go to plugins profile builder and profile builder will let me select from a lot of predetermined shapes that I can actually put in here so might be a you know bar rails or Bass shoes whatever it might be but I'm just going to go for imperial sir circles imperial will make this nice and thick and it gives me build a long path follow me I'll click on that it says would you like to reverse directions you can ignore that for now come back and give it a color which I should not try to open all these menus but let's keep going because I keep using profile builder a lot so the other thing that profile builder the pro version does is it allows you to create and do a follow me path along very custom shapes so I'm going to go to plugins profile builder I'm going to select the shape and I'm going to click the plus button I'm going to call it form 2 and hit OK and now it's going to it's giving me that shape now there's a red dot in the center you could see it right here that's where the it's going to connect the profile I'm going to build to the edge I'm actually going to do top left I think that's correct right there I'm going to double click on the top of this roof and then I'm going to select build along path reverse path there we have some building detail if I go through this quickly we'll go through and build more come back to it do the same thing and then last but not least do one more if this time we're going to do bottom-left select the bottom of the building and you can start articulating buildings really quickly now let's keep going because there's more so this is the dart Performing Arts Center in North Carolina and I had to build this for a client and at a pretty complicated glass articulated wall and I was like wow how am I going to model this efficiently so someone suggested well I don't use profile builder so in this case you could see this side of the wall is not complete I have a component here the component is actually nested on that wall I'm just doing this for demonstration purposes so you can see it right so it's a component I'm going to make this another component in here I'm going to make this actually into a group and then copy it over I'm then going to explode this okay now I'm going to do selection toys select only faces and I'm going to delete them right so now I've made that into a hollow shell into the building I'm going to select all these lines go to plugins profile builder and hopefully I can select squares Imperial and I'm looking for 4x4 and I'm going to run build along path and pray there it is then I'm going to take this and move it back and now is became my windows so now I'll go and apply a transparency to them just do it universally in here and there you go so what I thought would take me about five six eight hours to build a really complicated glass wall granted not as accurate as you want for construction but I was able to do in about half an hour let's see should I keep going a selection memory instant roof let's go with instant roof how much time do I have okay should I talk faster think slower you have no idea what my wife goes through she's very methodical so we're waiting for this one let's see if we can double load some stuff okay so Chuck Valley released a new Ruby script and it's called instant roof new clothes okay how many people used instant roof oh this is so much better so what are these tools do anybody not know what instant roof is how many people struggle building groups in Sketchup okay so I'm going to select these two top surfaces I'm going to click on I think that should make make roof and I have some options and it'll construct these for me with rafters without rafters but I'm going to go I can also do it from a pulldown menu so I'm going to select here Prairie I'm going to say make roof pray there you go now that's cool but it's kind of flat and if I can put a texture on it that's great I like to render a lot and that's just going to look okay as a rendering so there's a lot of other tools here as well so I'm going to go into group I'm going to go into the group I triple click the I selected all of it I'm going to click on this button which lets me add detail it's always fun to play with these I feel like I created them even though I have no idea how they make these things so this one allows me to create shingles and a gutter I'm going to click a click on that and say add details it'll process its way out you can see that it's processing on the bottom left but there you go highly useful very quick almost impossible if you're going to do that by hand or in by hand manually in Sketchup so that's instant roof selection memory okay so in this case I'm combining topo a Google Earth Ariel with topo to the this area in here and I do a lot of train modeling this way its profile terrain modeling I'm going to actually turn off the topo if I remember which layer it's on I don't remember just bad bad bad let's go look sweet zero topo so I was showing this before where I have to go in here and select all these little edges when I'm doing my terrain modeling which pretty much will drive you crazy especially if you go through here and you select everything and then you miss click and everything D selects right doesn't matter and this is useful not just for selecting edges but you're selecting a lot of different stuff in sketchup you click away and all of a sudden it's gone this one's called selection memory cycle previous selection I think it's by TomTom again extension warehouse go get it it's worth it it will let you cycle through up to five selections if not more there's a way to actually increase that amount so I'll create a click cycle previous selection it's selected it and now I can go back on my way I'm not cursing it's Sketchup at that point I'm not saying wow I'm not going to make my deadline again now I can use from contour and I can generate my terrain which if you never done terrain modeling tomorrow I'm going to go through that and the workshop what's next let's close some of these so Sketchup actually can breathe okay don't close them let's do instant let's do CLF copy what was the name of your plugin again well it's Ruby sketch too right okay I might have you come up here put you on the spot right how many people are actively using Ruby scripts for everything they do okay does this help okay so this is another Chris Fullmer tool it's called repeat copy its anse mustard it's phenomenal again I have a shortcut for it except I have to select an active command so Chris Fullmer tools repeat copy again I have a shortcut I want to Entourage this site well you can use the move tool everybody loves the move tool right move copy kind of gets hard to do so instead I'm going to select that component going to go to plugins Chris former tools repeat copy and you could see there's scale factors and rotations I'm going to edit them by clicking on the middle mouse button and you can see I have them already set to 100% scale but you can see you can adjust the scale up and down depending on what you're doing I'm going to hit OK and I'll just go in I'm inpatient now you can select multiple groups do the same thing and it will randomly select through them you should see what my employee has to go through I'm like are you using Ruby scripts he's like what's a ruby script you're fired no just kidding but you get the point right that one's actually not free it's on smush turd site again you can go through the extension warehouse to get it to me it's a must-have Ruby script on top of everything else let's see how many people do road striping their projects really frustrating hard to do most people don't even bother doing it so again going back now to Chuck Valley this one's called instant road new now ostensibly what this script is for is for you to grade either centrelines or road surfaces onto terrain well I discovered that it does something else which is phenomenal because I import my CAD files in I use Ruby scripts to build my CAD file and now we're going to come in and I'm actually going to create striping for this so we're going to go to instant Road new now how did I get to this point here's my road all I ended up doing was drawing an arc that's now a group down the centerline of this particular road structure I'm going to select the road I'm going to select the line I'm going to click on Road striping and I can pick from some options I'm going to click that and then click make striping oh I forgot to select the colors but that's okay you can select the colors for what it's going to do but it'll stripe the roads for you again pick something else here make striping how much time Chris and that's road surface must be a group so sorry make that yeah that's right it'll fit it in from the centerline out so it doesn't matter it could be anything it does need to be a group so you're selecting group to group all the edge does is tell you the direction in the length that you're filling in so we'll pick something else see if we can get that one to work again this is going to save me hours my yeah and did there's other aspects to this as well he also has symbols that you can place and then this works on terrain as well so this is for complete you know traffic but here again this is on terrain I'm going to select the group I'm going to select the line I'm going to go to striping and what's really nice about this is how stable it all is I don't know if that's going to we'll see how long this takes to work we'll come back to that one but all right there's another Ruby script I want to show that I saw this morning plus spec and it's by Dwight Andrew Dwight sorry this thing's phenomenal phenomenal I'm just going to run it and hope that this works in essence it's a parametric modeler for building your buildings from everything from just how do you describe this it'll build your walls it'll build your windows you can move everything at around will produce reports for you multi-story he's releasing it today I'm going to get it and hopefully we can even try to demo tomorrow during the workshop but we have time to just quickly go through this and and here's an interesting thing about this plugin like Chuck valleys valley architecture plus spec has nice menus it's easy to use he's been working on it for seven years with a team it's extraordinarily stable from watching it on his laptop and again it's all parametric I know you've seen similar plugins that actually can start building houses in walls like this I've never seen anything like this I was literally sitting there with my jaw dropping this morning with five or six of us saying can we have that again you can produce the reports out of it you can put in your doors you can put whatever objects that you're actually going to do to build a structure with it and then you can move them around as you're moving them around the parametric's change and then you actually have the option to produce a report at the end with all your information that you need for cost estimating quantities by getting that right but I'm going to be playing around with this one and hopefully we can play around with it for tomorrow as well I didn't make it through all my Ruby scripts again I can keep going the bottom line is you know you need to be using Ruby scripts you hear a lot of people talking about Sketchup can't do this and Sketchup can't do that and that gets tiring especially when I have architects challenging me like just go use Revit I'm like those are not modular systems Sketchup is offering you a modular system and there's one thing that Sketchup doesn't emphasize with every release and that's how fast they've improved the ability to crunch model sizes in 2005 I could open up a model with 50,000 faces and barely work on it I can work in models that are ten million faces now and it's really big large models that's what I like to do and I throw in a lot of detail into this all these tools are just going to help you get there faster one of the things I've been doing over the past year at some groups is lecturing about the economics of 3d modeling because everybody wants to get into it but nobody knows how to do it what the costs are and the bottom line is is Sketchup is about the economics of your production process so if you're fitting it into your workflow but you're making it faster and then you're getting the end results a lot of people used to say Sketchup is a dead end that's not the case anymore I'm using Sketchup from front end to back end for presentation and graphics and you have people developing these phenomenal tools and we're only going to see that increase now that Sketchup has been free from Google and back and Trimble as you saw John's presentation we're really coming to the point where we're going to get what we've been wanting for about six or seven years which is this powerful parametric building modeling program that pretty much lets us do anything else I'll open it up we have two minutes I'll open it up for questions questions 390 Bob Bell it goes okay it's worth it what's it called with plus fake city bus when's your presentation tomorrow where exactly the end reschedule my four-year-old daughter uses it in water quality miss tonight you got three all right I think am I done all right thank you very much I've enjoyed base camp [Applause]

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 54,090

Rating: 4.8989172 out of 5

Keywords: sketchup, 3d modeling, Architecture (Professional Field), Landscape Architecture (Industry)

Id: Hp_iTKs7Xcc

Length: 41min 50sec (2510 seconds)

Published: Wed May 07 2014