GETTING STARTED with SketchUp Free - Lesson 3 - Components, Copies, and Curves

what's up guys Justin here with the sketch of essentials calm back with another Sketchup free tutorial for you so this week we're gonna continue our series on getting started with the free for the free online version of Sketchup so last week we created a house using some smart modeling practices this week I wanted to focus on some other things it can really make modeling and Sketchup easier so let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so last week I introduced you to the concept of grouping geometry inside of Sketchup and so the way that that works is if you remember when you first draw shapes and Sketchup like this rectangle and then you take faces and push them together they merge so if I was to take this square right here move it against this face and then move it away you can see how this kind of Auto folds that face in between them because they've stuck together to avoid that what we did is we came in here and we right clicked on one one of these objects and made it a group and then we took the other one and we made it a group as well and so what that does is that makes it so you can push these objects together or pull them apart without the geometry merging so that's kind of the basis for grouping things inside of Sketchup is to keep these things organized and also to keep them from merging however there's an important function that I wasn't able to talk about last week just due to time and that's the ability to use components in order to create repeating geometry that's easy to edit and so basically the way that this works is let's say I have a two foot by two foot square then we push pull it up two feet high well let's say that for whatever reason we need to make multiple copies of this square inside of our model so we could take this and we could right click on it and we could group it so we could take this and we could use the Move tool and copy mode to create a number of different copies on this and I'll talk about using the move tool in copy mode in a minute but first I want to go ahead and work through this example with components well the thing is if you had multiple copies of this square inside of Sketchup like this and let's say that you wanted to go back and edit one of them or edit all of them so that a change is incorporated across all of these that could get really time-consuming so for example if I wanted to take this one and make it two feet taller I could come in here and I could use the push/pull tool to make this one taller but the other ones wouldn't change along with it so imagine if we had like multiple pieces of furniture like copies of the same piece of furniture or copies of the same fixture or something like that and we wanted to edit them with a different material or something like that well that could get really time-consuming trying to do that in our models and so what we do instead is we create what's known as a component and so what a component is is a component is like a group inside of Sketchup only now the group geometry is linked together and so what happens is now every copy that we make could be an instance of a component and so I'll show you what that means so if we were to take this square for example and right click on it you can see that there's an option here for make component well what that's gonna do is that's going to take your group and that's gonna allow you to name that as well as adding a description and there's some other options in here that we're not really going to get into in this video but for now let's just say that we're gonna make this a component so I'm just going to rename this box and you can see how in this space right here the name of a component is called the definition and so what that means is we're creating a component that's defined as having the name box and so now if I click OK and then I make a copy of this well now every copy of this box is an instance of that box component and so what that means is now if I was to double-click inside of this box to edit it you can see how whenever I click on one of the faces the other faces and the other corresponding objects highlight as well and so what that means is now if I make a change to one of these then changes are going to be reflected across the others as well because they're linked they're all instances of this same component and so this works for any kind of shape so like for example if I was to come in here and draw a cylinder and then push pull that up to the same height I could triple click on this right click and I could just make this a component we could just call this cylinder and when we create our cylinder we could do the same thing where we could make copies of it and since they're all instances of the same cylinder component they're all going to adjust at the same time and so one of the things that's interesting about this is sometimes what you want to do is you want to make different components unique so like once you've created these for example let's say that I wanted this box and this box to now be a separate component from these two well what you can do is you can come in here and you can select these by right-clicking and you could go down and you can click on the button for make unique and so what that's going to do is that's gonna take these components these two that I had selected and make them unique copies of the same component so now if I come in here and edit one of these you can see how only the one that was made unique with it changes alongside it and so you can see information about the components that you've created by clicking in the entity info pane when you have these selected so you can see how when I click on these the component definition is listed inside of this definition box and so you can see how both of these when I click on them have the definition of box and then the ones that I came in here and I named or I made unique you can see how they have that original name but they got a number one placed behind them so now this one and this one are instances of the Box component this one and this one are instances of the box number one component and then these are all instances of the cylinder component and so once you have an idea of the way this works it gets really easy to create these copies or create these different components inside of your model and keep them kind of linked together and so one of the questions I get a lot is when to use groups and when to use components because a lot of the functionality is kind of the same except for the fact that they're linked together and as a general rule you should use components anytime there's a chance you're gonna be making a copy of something so if you're gonna have more than one of it in your model you should make it a component on the other hand if you're coming in here and you're modeling out like a floor plan and you have walls like this and you've pushed pulled them up and you want to put those in a group you would put this in a group not a component because you don't really need this to have that smart functionality in here cuz you're not gonna make multiple copies of your walls at least in this situation so in this case a group would be fine in this case using components is a good idea so components are going to be an important part of your workflow now I wanted to show you another trick that make that makes creating copies of objects inside of Sketchup a lot easier so probably the first way that you tried making copies of objects was just to do a copy paste right so you could right-click in here and you could click on the button for copy then you can right-click again and you could click in here to paste and that would allow you to place an object inside of your model that's a perfectly valid way to make a copy but what happens is it gets really hard to make sure that you're creating a copy in a straight line and that you can place this wherever you want it to be it's just kind of cumbersome to create copies that way and so usually what we do instead is we use the move tool inside of copy mode in order to create copies and so the move tool can be found over here in the left hand side and you can just click on this to activate the move tool there's also a rotate tool in here or you can just tap the M key and so usually the way that I do this is I like to select the object that I want to move and then I tap the M key to activate that move tool inside of Sketchup and so what we're going to do with this is right now the way the move tool works when it's active is if you find a point which is going to be your base point and you click and then move your mouse you can see how the object that you've selected moves along with your mouse that's what we've told it to do we've told it to move this object well if you look down in the lower left hand corner there's an option in here that says control equals toggle copy and so what that means is if I move my mouse out here with this tool active I tap the control key what this is going to do is this is gonna create a copy of this cylinder out here so instead of moving the original it's gonna create a new copy and if you look in the lower right hand corner you can see how inside of the measurements bar there's a value in there for a distance well if you wanted to you could move your mouse in a direction and you could type in a distance like let's say 10 feet and hit the enter key and this would move this 10 feet this would move this 10 feet along whatever direction you moved your mouse when you hit the inner key so that's an easy way to create a copy of an object that can be really kind of precise in its location but the other thing that this tool can do that you're gonna use a lot of is it can also create what's known as an array and so an array is multiple different copies at once so let's go ahead and let's activate the move tool and copy mode again so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna select this cylinder tap the M key and then click on a base point so I'm just gonna click right here and then I'm gonna do the same thing I did before where I tap the control key to turn on copy mode and so now let's say we wanted to make a copy 3 feet in this direction well what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna move my mouse along the green axis and I'm gonna type in a value of 3 feet and hit the enter key and so now you don't want to touch anything else inside of your model so don't click off of this or anything like this after you hit the enter key if you type in x and then a number of copies so in this case let's say we said 5 and hit the enter key what that's going to do is that's gonna create 5 copies in whatever direction you you copied your original object so these are all spaced at 3 feet and notice that I haven't clicked off of this or turned off the tool because what I can do is I can actually adjust the number of copies by typing that in again so if I typed in x + 10 or X 10 and hit the enter key that's gonna create 10 copies if I wanted less I could type in x 3 and hit the enter key or something like that so you can use this to quickly create arrays in a certain direction by making copies and so one thing that can be super cool about this is not only can you do this in a multiply multiplying based on a distance you can also do this between two points the way that that works is you can just do the same thing we did before so select an object tap the M key click on your base point and tap the control key so what that does is that puts us in copy mode and that lets us move an object in this direction and we'll go ahead and we'll say that this is going to be 30 feet so we'll just type in 30 feet and hit the enter key well now instead of typing in x you're gonna type in divide it so you're gonna type in a slash and then a number of copies so in this case if I type in 5 and hit the enter key that's gonna create five evenly spaced copies between this point and this point so 1 2 3 4 5 and notice that I still haven't clicked off of this or anything like that so I can adjust the number of copies I make between those points so if I wanted more copies I could do like a / 8 and hit the enter key divided by 10 you can really make as many copies as you want or you could do divided by 2 divided by 3 and hit the enter key and you can see how you can adjust that number of copies that you're making basically as many times as you want as long as you don't click out of this tool and you can if you click and hold the center mouse button you can orbit around while this is still active and you can still type in different values so you can see how I'm able to orbit while this is active without losing that tool but as soon as I click off of it then it doesn't work anymore so now if I type in / 6 it doesn't do anything so you're gonna use the move tool in copy mode basically to create all of your copies inside of Sketchup and so the last concept I wanted to talk about in this video is the concept of curves and the number of segments inside of curves and so Sketchup when you create a curve inside of Sketchup they aren't true curves and what that means is let's go ahead and drop an arc in here so I'm just going to tap the a key and then single click single click single click to create an arc well if you zoom in on this you're gonna notice this isn't actually a smooth curve inside of Sketchup what it is instead is it's a number of individual segments making up this curve so you can see how as you move along this this has something like twelve segments in it well if you select a curve like this one and you go up into the entity info you can see how the number of segments shows up inside of this arc well let's say I was to come in here select this and type in a value of 24 and hit the enter key you can see how what this curve does is this curve adjusts so that instead of having twelve segments in here it now has 24 segments and so the reason that this does this the way that it does this is it's actually a way to improve performance inside of your Sketchup models so what that means is let's say for example we'll go ahead and take our twenty four sided arc and we'll close it off and we'll push pull this up so we can look at the faces on it we're going to do the same thing by tapping by creating an arc over here that has 12 sides and note that when you first turn on the arc tool by tapping the a key you can type in a number of sides that you want this to have so if I wanted this to have like ten sides I could just type in ten and hit enter and so we're gonna create a ten sided arc here and then we're also going to tap the a key and we're gonna create a four-sided arc whoops also gonna create a four-sided arc over here so you can see how this arc only has four sides on them and we're gonna draw a line across this we're gonna push pull each one of these up so I'm going to draw a line right here and I push pull this up and so then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go into our display function which you can find by clicking in little glasses we're gonna click on the button for hidden objects and so that's gonna allow us to look at the hidden geometry inside of these objects and so if you look at this each one of these is made up of a number of flat faces to make up our curved face that's how Sketchup creates curved faces is it hides the geometry between the curved faces and these are between the flat faces that make up each one of these and then this looks curved well the more segments that you have in the arc that you initially create the more faces get created when you push pull things up like this and things like that so like for example if I was to select this this would tell me I have a hundred and two entities selected inside of this object well this one if I select it I only have 46 entities because I had half the number of segments in here when I created this extruded face and this one is going to have like 22 entities and so the point of talking about this is for you to recognize that you could come in here with every one of these and make this 128 segments and make it look really smooth but the problem is at a certain point you can't tell the difference anymore and all that it is is just more geometry the sketchup has to render without you actually getting an increase in the way things look inside of sketchup so what we try to do is we try to minimize the number of segments in here so that we get something like this face which has half the geometry of this face but still look smooth you can't really tell the difference when you zoom out and so you can do the same thing with the circle tool so if you tap the C key to activate the circle tool you're gonna notice that there's a number of different sides and here and you can make the number of segments in a circle whatever you want so like for example I could type in a value of six and hit the enter key and my circle is gonna have six sides if I activate this again by tapping the C key then I type in twelve my circle is gonna have twelve sides and just like the arc tool as long as you don't explode these so as long as you don't right-click on this and click on the button for explode curve you can actually come in here and adjust the number of segments in a circle so like for example I could come in here and I could adjust this to 24 segments or forty-eight segments or something like that to adjust how smooth this circle is you can go down to I think three segments if you want to so you there's a lot of adjustment you can do you can also use this to create these different geometric shapes so if you want to create like a Pentagon for example you would change the number of segments to six and so the last thing I want to talk about is the softened and smooth geometry inside of these faces so right now if I click on this face you're gonna notice that the whole thing selects right if I don't have my hidden geometry on I select this whole face because all of these edges have been what's called softened which means that they've been hidden and Sketchup treats the two faces on either side of this as an individual face well if you were to come in here in your view under display and you were to click on the button for hidden objects you can see each one of these faces individually you can also see the edges between these faces well what you can do is let's say for example that you wanted to split this object on either side of this edge what you could do is you could select this edge and you could come up here and you can see how in the entity info right now there's an option in here for soften off so if you take this edge you select it and then you click on it like this you can see how this edge is now no longer soft and what that means is if I turn my hidden objects back off inside of display this face is now split between these two different sides and so this can get really important if you're trying to apply like differe materials to this so if you were to use the materials editor you could now apply one material over here and one material over here by splitting that face up by softening that geometry so or unsoftened that geometry so let's say I wanted to do it again I could just go back and turn on my hidden objects I could click on this edge and then in the entity info I could turn soften off and then I would turn hidden objects off well now this is split up into three faces and I could apply a different color over here so the other thing is this this is also smooth which is different than softened meaning what Sketchup is doing is it's applying kind of an algorithm to this face to make it look smoother because the edges between these are softened well if you select these and then you scroll down inside of your display options there's an option in here to take all of the edges and you can unsmooth them really quickly what you're gonna notice is if you turn off smooth edges so if I triple click in here to select all of this geometry and I select smooth edges and I select soften coplanar you can see how this face is gonna look really smooth along here but if I was to triple click in here and I was to keep soften on but I was to leave smooth edges off and you can see how now you can see these into individual faces a lot more clearly so Sketchup isn't smoothing them out with its algorithm the way that it usually would so you can use the function in here for smooth edges by triple clicking and turning that on along a softened coplanar to make curved faces look smoother so that's where I mean in this video leave a comment below let me know what you thought was this helpful to you did you know about some of this stuff I just love having that 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 you 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 that will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

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Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup tutorial for beginners, sketchup for beginners, sketchup free tutorial, sketchup online tutorial, sketchup free online version tutorial, sketchup online version lessons, sketchup online tutorial for beginners, sketchup online basics

Id: fKOIObcAY2A

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019