Extension Madness – Justin Geis | 3D Basecamp 2018

registered and following this but they're completely safe to use on your computer so what I tell people is just use a little bit of common sense like I keep this set to unrestricted but if you're on some obscure page and you download a ruby script file and you try to install it you're probably asking for trouble so see if you can find it from a reputable source instead so just use some common sense there and you should be fine so turning on toolbars for extensions all right so once you enable extensions within Sketchup a lot of them come with different toolbars so you can see how if I right-click up here I see I get a list of all the different extensions that are installed you can enable those on a PC by right-clicking on this bar up above and selecting these or by going to view toolbars and I always have to help or ask for a little help from my Mac people in here because I don't have a Mac I think you got a view tool palettes or I think you can right click up above and still turn those on and off is that right view customize toolbar okay so another thing about loading extensions in Sketchup so whenever you enable a lot of different extensions it's gonna slow down your load time so when you first open up Sketchup if you've ever had a ton of extensions on your computer and you're like man why does Sketchup take so long to load the reason why is it's going through and it's loading every one of those script files and it just takes a while so what I try to do is I try to keep loaded only the extensions that I'm gonna need and I disable the other ones until I'm gonna need them and please do not do this that stresses me out just looking at it so I I watch videos online sometimes and there's like 14 rows of extensions and I'm like how you don't even have a workspace anymore you just have extensions so just just keep everything organized it's a lot easier to work with alright so that's kind of an overview of the what and why and where of extensions now I want to talk about what kind of engines are out there and I am actually really interested to see how this goes because they counted the number of extensions I covered on Monday and it became a little bit of a competition to see if I could beat it plus Dave covered a lot in his presentation yesterday and I got to make sure I talked about more than him so we're gonna see how this goes it's either gonna be really cool or it's gonna fail miserably so let's have fun with this so there are a lot of different extension files for adding simple functions to Sketchup so everything from spacing to aligning and I'm just gonna walk you through some examples of what some of these can do again remember these are all linked on my website and this presentation is also downloadable so you can go find them all so don't freak out when I just jump between a whole bunch of them really fast all right so there are a lot of extensions that are just for general functions within Sketchup like let's say for example that I had all of these different objects and I wanted to put them all in a line so I wanted to flatten him out and I wanted to put them all in a line so what I could do is I could come in here with the move tool and start trying to inference things and place things and move things around and you spend a lot of time doing that there's an extension called kirik align then what curricle line does is it allows you to select a series of objects and it gives you a whole number of different things that you can click on in order to align them so instead of me having to go through and move each one of these along this red line I can just click on these axes and you can see how these get perfectly centered just by using that you can also you can also align them with the top or the bottom of the box that's created and don't do that so in the same way Sharik space is an extension that allows you to set the spacing of different objects so if I was to take these objects I was to activate Carrick's space I would tell it to space these along a certain axis or axis and you can see I'll in the lower right hand corner it asked me to set a spacing so if I was to type in 10 feet and hit the enter key I could space these at 10 feet intervals if I wanted them at 4 foot I could type in 4 foot so that's great if you do a lot of like aligning things on shelves and models or stuff like that okay awesome someone's happy this is great this is great go ahead I believe it is I'm not a hundred percent sure but I think it is so I mean just a simple thing like that can save you so much time what I don't know if you can do angles or not I'm not sure all right so well so well does an extension whoops well there's an extension that allows you to take a series of segments and well the line together so a lot of the time for different extensions you need things to be like full polylines so you need like multiple curves to be together or let's say for example you have this double curve where everything's been broken up into individual segments so you see how up here if I select all of these that says 24 edges well if I was to extrude this to follow me tool because that's broken up into your different edges it starts anew it starts a new segment every time there's a break in that line and you can see how everything comes in really clunky well if we were to use the weld extension and now if I click on this it says that this is a curve it comes in smooth so what this allows you to do is this allows you to take those those different curves and weld them into a single curve yes that I don't know because I haven't done much with CNC Eric from sketch this is floating around he'd probably be a better resource for that okay perfect probably okay so another use for that is let's say you have something like this hexagon and your lines have all been exploded into individual segments well if you push pull this see how all these edges are in here they're not unhidden or anything like that or they're not hidden well if you were to weld these and then extrude that your edges are smooth because that's a considered a smooth curve by Sketchup so and we'll talk about another use for that in just a second by the way if someone can count the extensions for me I'd appreciate it someone besides him thank you alright so path copy path copy is an extension that allows you to copy things along a path which I know confusing with the name and basically what it allows you to do is it allows you to select a group or component to copy and it'll let you set the number of objects that go along a path and then if you look in the lower right hand corner I can set the spacing by typing in a value and the inner key so I can type in two foot one foot six feet you can see how those are moving around and that's actually a great use for that's actually a great use for weld because if you have a curve here you have a curve here and you try to do that it's only gonna go along one of your curves because it can only do a single curve but if you were to take these two weld them together then this will do this along this whole curve so this is also great for doing things like spacing out lights so you might have to move that around a little bit or erase one of these but you could set these at every three feet something like that so when I stole that use from Daniel tall so thanks Daniel all right so a 3d text editor how many of you have made 3d text and Sketchup made a mistake and you couldn't go back and change it it's painful right like really annoying because you have to basically remake the whole thing so 3d text editor is an extension from TomTom that allows you to create true live editable text as you go and then if you need to make a change you can just right-click you can just go down to edit edit text and you can make that edit yep cool shape bender so sometimes you have a curve kind of like this one and you want to bend a shape along that curve so shape bender is a great extension for that so the way that that one works and this is kind of finicky so you have to have a straight line and a curved line and the straight line has to be along the red axis for some reason I'm not really sure why but if you don't draw it along the red axis it's not gonna work right so basically what you can do though is when you have this curve you can activate shape bender which i think is under Chris Fullmer tool and you need to activate it with the object selected but then it asks you to select your single line on the red axis and then your curve and you can switch which side of the line it's on and I can hit the enter key you'll notice some of this gets a little bit funky right here with the geometry that's created you could also try an extension called troub in that we'll talk about later if that's really a big deal or you could just come in here and you could soften this using the soften edges tool no idea yeah yeah all right so selection toys I love selection toys everyone should have selection toys it basically expands the Select tools functionality within Sketchup so let's say for example that I had this sphere and I was to triple click on it that allows me to select all the faces as well as the hidden edges in here well what selection toys does is it allows you to select different things within your selection so let's say in this case I had this whole thing selected but I only wanted the faces nope nope only my edges sorry I'm out order so select only edges and then you could unsoftened and unsmooth these and then a little trick is if you hold the shift key and click and drag across this you would deselect all the edges and select all the faces and you could delete those out so it makes things like that really easy it also allows you within a group so I have a group of objects here some of them are groups some of them are components so I could select this group right click and I could do select only components and I would find just the components in here or if you're looking for something in your model that hasn't been made into a component you could do it the other way you could select a bunch of stuff and do select only groups and you can find that it also allows you to select things like borders so in this case I could select all of this and then I could do select only border edges so then you could come in here and you could start making edits like this you can also do select own lame believe or maybe it's select selection border and I'm not sure if that works for things that aren't quads I haven't really tested that on that that much but you can see how that makes what you can select really easy all right so in our visual emerge so this is an extension from Christina in our office and it performs a very simple function what it does is let's say you have this house and you have your slab modeled your walls and your roof and you wanted to just make this look smooth so you could come in here and double click and right-click and start hiding edges and trying to make things not show up kind of painful so with this extension you just select it and you just pick that first option and you do visually merge selection and that'll hide all of those now the geometry hasn't changed so you didn't lose any edges those are just hidden and you can actually take it back by picking the second option so super simple but if you're doing a lot of hiding edges that's a great one for that now this is the one I always like to talk about to start talking about free and paid extensions so extensions are both free and paid and that's all up to the developer so some of them have a cost associated with them a lot of them like Fredo's stuff are fantastic extensions that are completely free so this one in particular I think is $15 you would not believe the amount of pushback I got on my youtube channel for covering a fifteen dollar extension that hides lines so much and my favorite thing that I heard from somebody was I really really really really needed this extension but not for $15 I was like then you didn't really need it so when you're looking at extensions think about how much your time is worth so if you're spending hours and hours and hiding edges to try to make things look smooth consider buying a 15 color extension that makes it fast or don't but just don't come on my youtube channel and complain about there he is alright we found him okay so drop GC drop GC is an extension that allows you to drop different objects on faces directly down below and all it does is you to select objects you pick drop GC and it's gonna drop them down below and someone's gonna ask me what happens if they're not over that face so what it does is it checks to see which ones are actually gonna run into something and the ones that don't have anything underneath them it just doesn't push them down so you don't have to be super precise about where you place these selection memory I made a tutorial on this this morning and I don't know how I lived without it so how many of you have gone through and you've done some kind of like precise selection you're trying to get a whole bunch of different edges and you're moving around here and then all of a sudden ah you lost the whole thing you got to go back and you got to reselect all of those right so with this extension and this one's from TomTom what it does is it gives you this option over in your edit to cycle your previous selections so it stores the last five selections that you had in Sketchup so that you can just cycle back to them without having to go through and select those individually yes for it to show up but that one and selection toys those are pretty lightweight so I haven't really seen a huge performance decrease by keeping those loaded up alright memory copy this is a fun one so a lot of the time in sketchup what you need to do is you need to repeat the same movement over and over again and so if you just need to move something you've got the move tool right and you can create arrays so you can use the move tool in copy mode type in times ten and create a copy what happens if you need these to rotate 15 degrees every time you do this you can't do it you have to go in you have to do all manually well with this extension does and it only works with components is it takes a component and you can do that rotation so let's say this was five degrees you can click on your original component right click on this one and there's an option for play it again and then you just click on this object and it doesn't work oh you know what that may not be a component we're gonna try that again we're gonna go the other way but what that does is that allows you to automate that process so you don't have to come in there and do it over and over and over again so this is another example where if I was to rotate this and then move it up so and all it does is it just checks to see relative to the first one what changes have been made and then just repeats that over and over again all right solid inspector I wanted to mention so I don't know how many people are doing like 3d printing or anything that requires use of solids so one of the most painful things in the world is trying to create a solid so that you can export it and it's got a whole bunch of different holes in it so it's very difficult to go find those and this is a very simple example but if I was to run solid inspector with this object selected it's gonna go through and it's gonna check for different errors and it'll tell you things like where your where your borders aren't closed in and it'll actually highlight them redden so that you can find them and you can try to fix them so this is another TomTom extension and it's a huge deal especially if you do anything with solids you've got to have it all right so those are the general function extensions within Sketchup there's also plugins and extensions yeah we'll go ahead and save the changes that allow you to do more complex things yes yes that's why we read the instructions and and that's why we visit a YouTube channel called the Sketchup essentials and watch the tutorial videos I mean seriously a lot of that is just the developer putting those in a certain place and depending on the way the developer does things it's just gonna be there there's not a whole lot you can do about it it just kind of is what it is don't all right so let's keep rolling so sometimes have you ever tried to draw on a curved surface and Sketch up or have you ever needed to not easy right so I don't know if everyone in here knows who Fredo Sixx is but he's like the most amazing developer in the world he has a ton of extensions that are super helpful we're going to talk about a bunch of them but this one right here tools on surface I think I need to load it or it may be down below there's so what tools on surface allows you to do is it actually allows you to draw shapes and lines on different surfaces and one of the cool functions for that is let's say you need to model like a turtle for a resort for example just as an example this allows you to do that and then there's another extension we'll talk about in just a second but there's also a tool in here that allows you to offset I love I love hearing that in the room oh that makes me happy so you can delete that out if you want to if you need to do like different materials you can definitely do that so another Fredo six extension that I absolutely love yes [Music] standby let's see I can't remember if there's a pulls on surface I don't believe there's a text so you'd have to find something else we may have one a little bit later so all right so curve aloft is an extension from fredo six that's more of an organic modeling extension and what it allows you to do is it allows you to both loft shapes which means create shapes between different objects so you can either create a curve that follows all the way along here or you can create skins so let's say I had a frame like this one I can select the edges and I can use it to generate a skin across those different edges so great for tensile structures or different things like that this is a very complex extension I mean it's simple but it's also complex and literally one of the one of the presentations that I offered up as an option for Basecamp was doing a whole presentation just on what you can do with curve aloft because it's so powerful so super powerful and then you can use it for things like this where let's say you wanted to create a skin along that face you could do something like that all right joint push-pull yes so soap skin bubble is another extension that also allows you to create faces across frames they create slightly different faces because the way that they calculate it soaps skin and bubble almost like it's hard to describe and I don't have it up here but it almost like does math to figure out if you were to inflate a shape what it would look like so it just has kind of a different algorithm for the way that it creates faces they're both worth checking out joint push-pull so how many of you have tried to push pull a curved surface and Sketch up how'd that go for you so Sketchup can't do that right as a part of its base functionality the reason for that is because if you unhide the geometry on all of these faces they're made up of individual faces right there's no actual curved faces in Sketchup they're all flat faces on a different curve well the reason the push-pull tool doesn't work on those curved faces is because they actually have to push pull multiple faces at once and then heal between them so this extension that's what that does so you can push pull different curved surfaces in Sketchup and there's some kind of fun things you can do too like there's a normal push-pull in here they would put that that's basically what it would look like if the Sketchup tool was to do push-pull because it wouldn't heal between those faces so and we'll talk about another fun application for that now so we talked about slicer right which was the the one that I used to slice up all that terrain so basically what I did is I cuz slicer goes through and creates slices of objects in your model but it only works on solids so what I was able to do is I was able to use joint push-pull and there's a tool over here I don't remember what the name of it is but it flattens faces so you can see how that took that and it basically made it flat well if I click on this it's a solid group and so then I can use the extension slicer make sure I don't make a million of these okay 24 I can set the spacing for my different slices so let's say 2 feet and also set my thickness to 2 feet so what this extension does is it actually slices this up there's two options down here where you can actually flatten those and it creates all those flat pieces off to the side and you can export those to a CNC router I don't want to do that cuz that'll take a little while longer but basically what that'll do it's always a good idea to save your model before you use this one actually I think it requires it you can't run the extension unless it saves the model there we go so you can see how that broke this up and it created two foot slices based on my terrain and you can use this for a lot of organic modeling applications and creating cool shapes say what I think it may be I think it may hide it I'm not 100 I usually make a copy off to the side of it before I do this just so I have it I'm not sure if it's destructive or not right so rounding edges so Fredo six has another great extension called round corner what round corner does is it gives you three different options for being able to round off and bevel off different edges it's really easy to use you just click on one of these options the first one is simple round corner you can click on a face or multiple faces and this will show you where that rounding is gonna happen and if I click off to the side you can see how it rounds those off so the second one creates more it rounds the corners but the way the corner geometry is created is a little bit different and then the third one is a bevel option so if you just wanted to come in and add a quick bevel just on these edges for example it lets you do that and then also it's great for if you're trying to merge different shapes together so like let's say for example that I wanted like a smooth curve all the way across this you can see how you can kind of merge those different objects together and I'll turn hidden geometry off so this is a lot smoother really easy so the problem whoops the problem with round corner is it only works on raw geometry well for 8:06 being the good guy that he is just released a brand new extension called Fredo corner what Fredo corner does is it actually allows you to round off groups and components so if I was to group this geometry and I was try to run round corner it doesn't work but if I use Fredo corner which is his new one I can click on this group from outside the group and you can round these edges off and it also works on components so you can go in and you can round off one component and all the other instances the components or round off as well all right Fredo scale let's turn around corner all another Fredo extension he has so many so Fredo scale contains a suite of tools designed to basically expand the way that you can scale things at Sketchup so my favorite tool and this one is called radial Bend that allows you to come in and bend objects you can also twist objects however it's a little bit limited because you can only bend things 180 degrees well lucky for us TomTom just came out with an extension called true Bend I don't know if anybody's used it before what true Bend allows you to do is it allows you to bend things 360 degrees and I believe the geometry that's created is also cleaner yeah you can bend at 90 yes mm-hmm yeah you can set the number of degrees you can bend things you're not just limited to 360 or 90 mm maybe with the scale tool not a hundred percent sure all right so it's amazing to me the number of times that I need to create some kind of helical shape that spins around a curve there's an extension called helix along curve that allows you to create a helix within Sketchup so let's say you wanted this to spiral from one foot to 20 feet you can set the number of laps that this takes around a certain shape so let's say I wanted to do four laps you can set the number of sections per lap and you can create a helix not only does that work along straight shapes you can also do it along curve shapes or I don't know how this is gonna work but I should have messed with my radius a little more but you can also do it along the actual helix that you created so who asked if you could bend an object or put text along a curved face was that you okay so flow if I flow if I is one of the more complex extensions that I talked about part of the reason for that is because the way the grouping is required I have a ton of tutorials on that you can check that out on my website it's in the links but just be aware there's some grouping things that are required what flow fi does is it lets you take a shape and bend it along another shape and then you can see how your geometry is a little bit ugly so we're gonna soften smooth it you can curve these along different shapes and the one limitation of this extension is it has to be a four-cornered shape to a four-cornered shape so you can see how this one for example I can bend this along these corners so if I wanted to bend something like text along the face of a sphere you could do that and then smooth that so that allows you to create a lot of non-standard shapes so vertex tools an extension from TomTom that a Tyson talked about in the quad modeling what that one allows you to do is instead of editing lines it lets you edit vertices and that is a great extension for like site modeling or if you do any kind of like sculpting or anything like that so artisan I don't have an example for that artisan and sub D are both subdivision extensions what those allow you to do is take shapes and subdivide them and smooth them which lets you do things like this so if you have more questions about artisan that's another mine site studios extension those guys are here so you can go talk to those guys I really got to pick this up we're gonna skip quad face tools we talked about selection memory who threw paint I promise you guys are gonna like through paint so how many times have you had a shape like this and you try to apply a material to it like let's say I was to dive into my tile kind of looks like this right like not great even if you were to edit the size of the tile it doesn't really matter it's just kind of ugly the reason for that is this is trying to map this along a face and it doesn't really work that well well fredo has a suite of tools called fredo six tools and within that there's a tool called through paint what through paint does is that allows you to select a material from within your model and map it to a curved face not only it has three different kinds of UV mapping but one of the things I really like about it is you can adjust and rotate on those faces so again something that you would spend hours trying to figure out without extensions all right what else do we got I can go all day all right place maker so I showed you the city earlier right that I created so place maker is the extension that I use to do that and so remember how I said Sketchup takes longer to load if you have a lot of extensions I have a lot of them enabled for this presentation alright so what place Maker does is that allows you to bring in map data so very similar to the Sketchup location tool bring that into your model so so far not that big of a deal right like yeah I can do that in Sketchup well there's a button right here called make place what that's going to do and again a little bit of it it's reaching out to OpenStreetMap to get the data what that's going to do is that's going to build all of the roads all of the paths the buildings that OpenStreetMap has data for and the water that OpenStreetMap has data for so it's still working on the water we're gonna try this again there we go so this has a lot more data in like downtown areas but it's really easy to use one of the other things about that one in addition to being able to create cities like this in a single click is it also has the ability to bring in high resolution images so and sorry I was clicking pretty fast but you might have noticed that this model that I'm bringing in right now is 73 megabytes that's because I brought in a lot of high resolution imagery and it makes your file size a lot bigger so when you are bringing in high resolution images and I think I locked it up maybe I just have too many Sketchup windows open don't do that by the way it's a horrible practice we're just gonna start all over again all right I don't think it's gonna do it so we'll do nothing apparently sorry sure it does there we go all right we're in all right so I got to go fast so if you zoom in see the level of detail that you can get with the high-resolution imagery so one of the things you're gonna notice is if you compare that to the standard imagery significantly better seem so topo shaper you know we're gonna skip ahead to inscape because i'm running out of time and rendering alright so there are a lot of different rendering extensions available for sketchup so you've probably seen some of them here Sophie raised here I believe podiums here in scape is here lumion is here there are a ton of different extensions that you can use in order to show 3d renderings one thing I do need to point out in scape is a PC only there's also a Mac version there's a light up is basically the equivalent of this but what inscape allows you to do is it's like a one-click real time rendering extension so this is a model that I downloaded from the 3d warehouse and basically you just click the play button sorry I was playing around the settings earlier and I shouldn't done that so what inscape does is it creates a real-time 3d rendering using the materials already in your model so I haven't gone through an adjusted these or anything and so you can see how it's generating the glut the grass wherever there's a material with the word grass in it but you can in real time adjust things like where the lighting is so time at day there's other settings that you can adjust as well so it's a really quick way to create 3d renderings you can export these all as stills it also has a render elements so render elements for things like Photoshop so if you need the selections for like the backgrounds to swap that out really easy it has that ability as well see so there's also extensions available like sketch FX which basically allow you to combine different styles so let's say for example I think this is a good one you wanted to combine kind of a pencil drawn style with a watercolor style or something like that this allows you to stack those within Sketchup so if you're not like a if you're not a Photoshop user and you want to create those effects you can do that and then I have about one minute left so I'm going to show you two fun ones all right so cloth works cloth works is an extension that just came out for Sketchup fairly recently it actually allows for the simulation of cloth within Sketchup and you can move these around in real-time so and I mean all joking aside I mean that's it that's a fun demonstration but I've also used it to drape tablecloths or things over spheres or create like like window treatments stuff like that and then the last one that I want to show you real quick is just another fun one so there is an extension that allows you to turn the sketch up into a physics simulator and it is called MS physics and I have way too many videos sorry every folder is a video all right there we go I'm muted so you don't have to listen to me oops there we go so what this allows you to do is set up different objects and actually simulate physics within Sketchup so it's more fun than anything else but you can do a lot of interesting things like with it so like dominoes or if you're looking to have a good time with friends you can play some Ginga in sketchup so as you guys can see there are so many different applications for extensions within sketchup I'm a huge advocate of why you should get out there and just start trying them and seeing what you can do with them if you have any questions send me an email and again all of this information is available at this link on my site so thanks a lot Oh how many did I get

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 3,540

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling, 3D Basecamp

Id: TjbNRXqpNfE

Length: 43min 29sec (2609 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 19 2019