5 Ways to CUT HOLES AND CREATE OPENINGS in your SketchUp Models

what's up guys Justin here with the sketch of essentials calm back with another sketch up quick tutorial for you so in this video I wanted to go through a couple of the different ways that you can cut holes and openings in your Sketchup model um today's videos brought to you by my patreon supporters so patreon as you know is the website where you can support creators that you like on YouTube so I want to say a big thank you to my two newest supporters Lucan art and Joseph wood so if you like what I'm doing in this channel if you're enjoying what I'm doing with the Sketchup essentials maybe consider supporting the show on patreon you can check that out in the link in the notes down below let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so the first way to cut holes in objects and Sketchup is simply to use the push/pull tool so most you know you can use the push/pull tool to push-pull geometry in your model um what some people don't know though is they don't know that you can actually use this to cut openings and the way that you do this is you take faces and you extrude them so that they're level with the back face of your object so in this case for example if I was to maybe try to cut a window opening in this in this thickened wall here what I would do is I would push-pull this face to the back side of this object and you can see if I push pull this so that it's level with the backside Sketchup will create a hole here so if you push-pull this too far obviously it's gonna create this extra geometry and that's not what you want but if you push-pull this then if you push pull this directly so that it's level with the back wall then you can use it to cut an opening one thing to note about this is it's really best to single click with the push-pull tool active and then move your mouse just up anywhere along to any point that's on the backside of this object so you can see how I can click anywhere because I'm locked to push pulling this way or this way the inferencing will make it so if I click anywhere on a point on the backside of this object a hole will be cut and so the same thing worked with this circle if I was to push pull this back and I was to click on this back line since I'm level with the back side of my object the push-pull tool will cut a hole in this face so you can use this to cut holes very easily so that being said sometimes this doesn't necessary work so like for example you can't push pull on a curved face so I wouldn't be able to come in here and just draw a circle on this curved face and then push a hole through because you're not allowed to push pull curved surfaces in Sketchup but what you can do instead is Sketchup has this handy little function called intersect with model and the way that works is let's say for example that I needed to cut a hole in the middle of this object and I'm gonna make sure that I go ahead and position it correctly before I do this but let's say I wanted to cut a hole just right in the middle of the geometry of this object just like this well what I would do is I would just select this in here so that all my faces were intersecting then I could right click and click the option for intersect faces with model and so when I do this and I can go ahead and delete out all this extra stuff now so now if I was delete it to delete out this face you can see how basically this geometry all intersect it in here so really everywhere that the geometry intersected Sketchup created edges and faces so you can see I was able to cut a hole that way so in the same way I'm gonna make this a little bit smaller if you remember so if you remember before we were able to cut one hole in this object with the push/pull tool but then let's say that we needed to cut another hole in this object going the other direction so you can see how this gets kind of weird because these faces are intersecting on the inside and so you're not getting like the full hole creation process in there but if you select everything right click and you go down to intersect faces with model then you can delete out you can see how this intersected all of your geometry in here so you've got kind of your different faces so you can see how now I can see through this opening and you may have to play around with this to get it to create the geometry that you want but it works really well for intersecting different faces and what I use this for a lot is I actually use this a lot when I'm working with like countertops and that sort of thing like if I'm cutting an opening for a for a sink for example so I've got my countertop in here that I created well what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna select everything that's in here and I'm just gonna right click and I'm gonna click intersect faces with model and that may take a little while just because it's intersecting a whole lot of geometry in here because there's more edges inside the sink all right so you can see how now there's kind of some extra edges in here because Sketchup went through and intersected this face with your component in here but now you can just come in here and you can just delete out these different layers that it created so I'm just clicking and hitting the Delete key so you can see how I was able to use intersect model to kind of cut out the different layers in here and the one thing that I'm not a giant fan of is it did seem to create a little extra geometry inside my sink here but what you could do is you could just come in here and you can select it all and you could just do an edit hide and hide that geometry to make this smooth if it really bothered you so you can see how that's a quick easy way to cut a hole for a sink in a cabinet all right so number three is you can create a cut component to cut a hole in a face if it's a single face so like for example if you had a building here and you didn't care about having walls that had thickness then what you could do is you could come onto this face and you could draw a rectangle and then you could double click on it and you could make it a component and we would call this something like window but you can see how down below this gives you an option to glue to a face and to cut an opening and so what this is gonna do when you select this is this will cut an opening inside any single thickness wall that you put it in and we'll talk about doing this at a double thickness wall in a second but you can see how you can set so that this will glue to any vertical face any horizontal face or any face in here and so once we do all of this we can go ahead and click create so because this is a component what I can do is I can use the move tool and copy mode to create a copy off to the side over here and then I can use this to model out my actual window off to the side so instead of having to deal with it being in the wall and all of that what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna give this a little bit of depth for my frame so maybe like a thickness of two inches or something like that and then I'll delete out this Center part well you can see what that does because this is a cut component inside of an individual wall what it'll do is anywhere you place one of these components it's gonna cut an opening and so the nice thing about this is if you were to go over into the component section of your tray and look for the objects that are in your model you could find this window and you can basically bring this in as many times as you want into any of your single thickness walls so you can see how I can move these around and they're all cutting openings in this face so this is great for working with single thickness faces so the problem with this is if you were to try to do this in a wall like this one where it actually has a thickness so it's basically made up of two faces this would only cut the opening in the front face so you can see how it's not cutting an opening in the back face and so with the wall like this you'd have a couple options so the first option that you'd have is you could just draw a box across the back of this and then just delete out that extra geometry and that would actually work okay because you could also go in here and as long as you had your window in here and you also could select the raw geometry of the opening then you could move this opening around and be fine so you can see how right now I just have this window selected and so that's not really gonna work but if you drag across you're also picking up the lines that make up this opening and so you could move this around in this wall if you wanted to it's a little bit of a workaround and it can get kind of frustrating with a lot of different faces but you could definitely do that so the other way that you could do this is there's actually an extension you can download that allows you to use your cut components to cut through thickened walls and that extension is called double cut and that's some of the guys over at mine site studios those are the same guys that brought you like place maker and profile builder and those extensions and so the way that that extension works is basically if you bring in a new component like this it kind of runs in the background and it figures out where the back side of your wall is and it lets you cut an opening so if I was to go in for example and disable this you can see how it's just kind of the stock cut opening function this doesn't work very well it's not cutting that back hole but if you enable double cut what that's gonna do is that's gonna let you cut an opening in anything with thickness as well and that is a paid extension but it's not super expensive and if you're doing a lot of stuff like this it could probably save you a lot of time so if you're looking from works information on that extension you can check it out at the the sketchup essentials comm slash double cut and that is an affiliate link so if you do end up purchasing through that link I do receive a small commission all right and then the last thing I want to talk about is you can also use the pro version solid tools in order to cut openings in your models as well and so the upside to this is this works really smoothly as long as you're working with manifold solids and if you remember solids are basically groups that don't have any openings in them so if you were to like fill them up with water for example nothing would leak out so this works great if you're able to get two solid groups and so specifically I want to talk about a function in here that's called subtract and so it'll what it'll do the subtract function allows you to remove out the geometry from an original face or an original object and keep only the resulting geometry so like for example if I wanted to use these are two different solid groups and what I can do is I can activate the subtract tool and I could click on the first solid which is what I want to subtract out then I could click on the second solid which is the object that I want to subtract from and you can see how this came in here really quickly and really easily and just erased out the remainder to keep this as a solid group and so another example is if I was to come over here and I was to intersect this cube with this sphere what I could do is I could run subtract and I could click on my cube and then I could click on my sphere and you can see how that would basically erase out everything that happens where those two things intersect so if you have pro version and you're working with solids this can be a really easy way to cut into things and one last trick I want to talk about because I haven't made a video a week or two ago about making retaining walls somebody mentioned that they use subtract tools in order to delete out the earth where the retaining wall would go and so the way that you would do this or the way that I would do this anyways if I have a terrain like this one probably what I would do is I would use joint push-pull so joint push-pull is an extension from Freight o6 and I would use the option for vector push-pull and there's an option in here under vector push-pull if you open up the additional options for project the shape on a plane so what you can do is you could take this whole face and you could just push pull it down like this and you can see how since it's projecting it on a plane it just basically takes the footprint of this area and makes it flat and when this is done if you click out of it then this is now in here as a solid object and so then what I can do is I could create the footprint or whatever I wanted here using a rectangle and then I could just use the subtract function to remove this from my geography down here so you can see how I was able to basically cut this geometry out in order to create kind of a base right here but that's just kind of an overview of a few different ways that you can use to cut openings in your Sketchup models that's where I'm gonna in today's video leave a comment below let me know what you thought is there a way that I forgot to mention in here do you use any of these I just love having that Sketch up conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week if you like what I'm doing in this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month so make sure to check out that link in the notes down below but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 231,957

Rating: 4.9378099 out of 5

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup opening in wall, sketchup door opening, sketchup holes, sketchup hole in wall, sketchup hole in curved surface, sketchup hole in cylinder, sketchup hole in solid, sketchup hole in sphere, sketchup hole punching tool, sketchup hole through object, sketchup cutting holes

Id: yZ5bVL4HNU4

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 05 2018