Getting Started with SketchUp in 2021 - Part 1 - BEGINNERS START HERE! (Desktop Version Tutorial)

what's up guys justin here with the sketch essentials.com back with another sketchup beginner tutorial for you so in today's video i'm going to teach you how to get started with the desktop version of sketchup sketchup pro so there are multiple different versions of sketchup there's a free online version there's a paid online version and there's a paid desktop version called sketchup pro so we are going to focus in this tutorial on sketchup pro if you're looking for tutorials for the free online version i will link to a playlist of those in the notes down below in addition if you're having any trouble picking between the different versions i will also link to a video down below giving you more information on how you can choose between the different ones you can figure out what's going to be the best fit for you but for now let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so when you first open up sketchup 2021 you're going to get a window that looks something like this this is basically your welcome page where you can select different things like the template that you're going to use in your model you can see some recent files and you can also manage your license information on this page for now you don't need to worry too much about this probably the only thing you need to worry about is the template file that you pick all of these are adjustable once you get into sketchup so i would say for now just pick one that has the units that you want whether it's imperial or metric and we can talk more about these in a future video for now i'm just going to open up a uh i'm going to open up a template with inches as my units so when you first open up sketchup pro 2021 your page is going to look something like this it might be a little different because i have a different default model in here but generally it should look something like this and so real quick i just wanted to run you through the workspace give you kind of an idea of where everything is located so first off the file bar at the top of the page that's going to be where you manage basically everything so this is going to be where you can open and save your files you can import and export and print different things other things like that there's also tabs in here where you can access like camera information or your different drawing tools so you can access a lot of different things from this file menu up at the top down below you're going to have your toolbars section so this is where you're going to have various different toolbars with different tools that you can use to do things in 3d one thing to note about this is if you right click in the open space in here you should get a drop down with additional toolbars notice i have a few more than you probably do because i have some third-party extensions installed don't worry too much about that for right now for right now we're going to focus on the native tools one thing i do recommend for people though is i do recommend that they right click in this space and they go down and they turn on the large tool set that's going to give you some additional tools on the left hand side of the page that we're going to use for different modeling things the other thing you can do if you want to is you can right click in here and under the toolbars function i usually uncheck the box for large icons because i like the smaller icons you don't have to do that but you can do that so we're going to go ahead and hit close and keep moving so one other thing to note about that is those toolbars can be moved around on your page by clicking and dragging them so i can click and drag these to place them in my window i can click them back up to dock them or i can click the x in here to close them if you ever close a toolbar and you want to get it back you can just right click in this space and go down and just find that and that'll bring it back so these can move around on your page so on the right hand side of your page this is a little different for mac users and pc users for pc users you're going to have a tray over here it's basically a docked window on the right hand side that you can minimize and maximize these in order to see different things about your model so this is where you're going to manage things like your materials or your tags which turn things on and off so that you can see them as well as your outliner which is where you're going to organize things so you can manage that for my pc users by going to window default tray and you can hide or show your tray and you can also check boxes in here to have more things show up on the right hand side of the page now for my mac users these are called windows and they don't dock to the right-hand side of your page they just kind of like float around like windows this is a windows versus mac operating system thing which is why they're different so you can just kind of stick those together and move them off to the side of your page or if you have a second monitor you can drag them off on that monitor as well so one other thing to note about this is you can click and drag this and move it around in the pc version so notice how you can dock this to different sides of your page just by clicking and dragging it over these little boxes so if you do want to dock that to a different location you can do that so down at the bottom of the page you have your status bar so your status bar is going to give you information about your active tool so you can see how this gives me instructions on what to do with the tool that i have active as well as a measurements bar on the lower right hand side of your page that's going to show you information about the tool that you have active so notice that you don't click in this box even with tools active it's more just an indicator of different things so there's also some other things over here as well like geolocation information and model credits that i'm not going to get too far into in this video and then finally we have our workspace so our workspace is going to be where we're actually going to do our 3d work inside of sketchup so this is where you're going to draw this is where you're going to orbit and fly around different things things like that so now let's talk a little bit about how to navigate in the sketchup workspace so um if you pick these things up now you're going to save yourself a lot of time in the future so the first thing is this space is a 3d space right meaning you can fly around different things it has three different dimensions in here so you're going to be navigating around in here a lot and so one of the things that's going to be really important is having a three button mouse with a scroll wheel and i'll show you why so generally speaking if you want to just very simply fly around in sketchup you can click on the orbit tool what that's going to do is that's going to activate this tool and you can left click and drag inside of your model in order to orbit so you've also got other tools in here like panning which is going to allow you to move left right up down and the zoom tool which is going to let you click and drag to move in and out inside of your model however all of those extra clicks really add up and so what i recommend instead is if you use a three button mouse with a scroll wheel what that's going to do is that's going to allow you to navigate much more quickly so on the scroll wheel itself you can actually click and hold that scroll wheel down so that's going to be your middle mouse button and you can drag your mouse while you're holding that scroll wheel down what that's going to do is that's going to allow you to orbit inside of sketchup without having to click up and activate a tool so in addition you can also zoom in and out by scrolling your mouse wheel up and down so instead of having to click on the zoom tool right here you can scroll your mouse up and down notice how when i do this the view is zooming in based on where my cursor is so if i put my mouse over here and i scroll out you can see how it's going to scroll out based on that cursor location if i move my mouse over here scroll up you can see how it's going to zoom in based on where my mouse is so you can use your mouse location to really accurately zoom in and out inside of sketchup and then the last thing is while you can hold the middle mouse button down and drag to orbit if you hold the middle mouse button down and hold the shift key on your keyboard you can pan so you can use this to really quickly navigate around inside of your model so now that we have a general idea of how that navigation works what we're going to do is we're going to talk about some of the tools that we can use in order to draw inside of sketchup and so in its simplest way the way that you can draw things inside of sketchup is by activating a tool like let's say for example that we wanted to draw a line you click on the tool to activate it and then you do something inside of your viewport in order to draw in the viewport so first thing and i want to start off with this because it's very very important not only are there icons that you can click but there are also keyboard shortcuts that you can type on your keyboard to activate different tools you want to start learning the keyboard shortcuts as soon as possible because those are really going to affect how fast you're going to be when working in sketchup so for example when you activate the line tool you don't want to click up here you want to tap the l key on your keyboard so notice how when i tap the l key my cursor turns into a pencil and i can come in here and i can draw a line so by tapping keyboard shortcuts you can activate the different tools inside of sketchup that you want to use really quickly so one thing i have done is i've put together a free keyboard shortcut guide that you can download and you can actually print it off if you want to keep it next to your keyboard while you're trying to learn this it's going to show you some of the keyboard shortcuts that you're going to use a lot of so i will be uploading that at the sketchup essentials dot com slash beginner so if you want to download that keyboard shortcut guide you can do that at the sketchup essentials dot com slash beginner and so now let's talk a little bit about the way the tools work in sketchup so let's start with the line tool so if i was to activate the line tool by tapping the l key on the keyboard i want to take a look at what happens down here so if you look in the lower left hand corner as soon as you activate a tool it's going to give you an instruction right so what it tells you to do is it tells you to select a start point so with the line tool you're basically telling it where to start right and then if you move your mouse notice how the instruction has changed and now it tells you to select the end point or enter value so what that means is that means that now i'm going to tell it where i want this to draw a line tool too either by clicking or by typing in a value and so one thing that's really really important when you're working in sketchup is you don't want to click and drag when you're drawing with tools right so when i activate the line tool don't click and drag and then let up what you want to do instead is you want to click and move your mouse so notice how i've single clicked and now i can move my mouse around and so the thing about that is now what i can do is i can move my mouse in a direction and i can type in a value so let's say i wanted to draw a seven foot line well notice how i can move my mouse in any direction and this little length value is changing based on where my mouse goes well if i move my mouse in the direction of this little green line right here and i type in a value of 7 foot and hit the enter key what this is going to do is this is going to draw a seven foot line in the direction that you had moved your mouse so because you didn't click and drag it allows you to do that however if you click and drag right like let's say i want to draw a seven foot line and i clicked and dragged and i let up so that i could type that value on my keyboard notice how it's already drawn the line so it doesn't make this active so that you can actually type a value and again because a lot of people get confused about this you're not actually typing a value in the box the box is just an indicator of what is active and then you can type in whatever you want but notice how i didn't click in the box before typing in this value and so we'll talk in a little bit about drawing in a certain direction but now that we've drawn a couple edges let's talk a little bit about faces so let's draw a line from here to here and then another line from here to here like this and notice how all i'm doing is i'm just moving my mouse and clicking well right now what i have in here is i have two edges so if i select these two edges or if i click on these you can see how each one of them gets selected individually notice how you can see more information about this in the entity info box in the upper right hand corner so for example if i click on this it's going to show me the length of this edge if i click on this it's going to show me the length of this edge well what happens if we draw another line from this point to this point well notice what happens is sketchup draws a face in between those lines and so the reason for that is because sketchup draws faces based on their edges meaning if you have three or more coplanar edges it's going to create a face so let's say for example if we were to draw a line here and then up let's say we were to draw a line here and then we were to draw a line here right well if i orbit around notice how what i have is i have two lines going up and two lines going across but there's no face in here because these edges aren't on the same plane and so because they're not on the same plane sketchup doesn't draw a face in there however if i was to draw a line from this corner to this corner notice how sketchup fills in a face here and it fills in a face here and the reason for that is because as soon as i drew this line i had three coplanar edges along this face and i had three coplanar edges along this face that means that sketchup knew to draw a face in here and so let's say something was deleted so let's say for example that i was to click on this edge and hit the delete key notice how my face goes away right well all i need to do if i want that face to come back is just redraw the line across the edge that works the same way over here so let's say this face got deleted right let's say i clicked on it i hit the delete key and now i have no more face in here well all i have to do is just retrace over one of these edges and then click in order to fill that back in so if you ever lose that or if you ever lose an edge like this all you have to do is just redraw one of those lines in order to get your face back and so real quick i don't want to get too far into this right now but erasing things inside of sketchup is really easy so let's say i drew a rectangle with the rectangle tool which we'll talk about in a second you can either select something and hit the delete key to delete it or there's also a tool in here called the erase tool which erases edges or entities inside of the model and so that's one thing that's important to note is the eraser tool which i'm going to tap the e key to activate doesn't erase faces what it does instead is it erases edges so if i was to click and drag across an edge notice how as soon as i do this this turns blue and if i let my mouse up it goes away so the eraser tool can be used to erase out edges inside of your model really quickly if you want to delete out faces then you're going to have to select them and hit the delete key on your keyboard and so notice how if i select a face inside of sketchup i get information about that face over in the entity info so if you ever want to see like the area of a face you can do that just by clicking on it inside of sketchup in addition you can also select multiple objects by doing a shift click and clicking on multiple objects and notice how this is additive meaning that i'm seeing the overall length of all of those edges placed together so by selecting different things or multiple things you can see information about those things so let's talk just a little bit about inferencing because what you might have noticed is you might have noticed that when we draw we get a bunch of colors in here right so like if i move my mouse around with the line tool active you might have noticed that if i move my mouse in this direction it turns green if i move it in this direction it turns blue if i move it in this direction that turns red that's what's known as axis inferencing and what this is doing is this is indicating to us when you're drawing something along an axis and that's really important because everything in sketchup needs to be coplanar meaning on the same plane in order for your faces to be selected let's say i draw a line right here and i move my mouse in the green direction notice how this kind of snaps to the green axis that's sketchup trying to figure out if you want to draw along that axis well one thing you can do is you can hold the shift key to lock an inference inside of sketchup alternatively you can also with the tool active you can tap the left right or up arrow keys to lock to these different axes so that's going to be really important because if you don't do this so if you don't draw along the axis so let's say i'm going to draw a box and i'm going to mess it up so i'm going to hold the shift key to lock this to the green axis then i'm just going to draw this across let's say instead of doing that let's say that we accidentally drew our line a little bit off axis right so let's say we drew it up just a little bit and then we drew this in here so if you didn't use the axis inferencing and you drew a line that wasn't along the axis well notice what's happening you're not getting the face in here because your edges are no longer coplanar and so what that means is that means that you're no longer going to have an edge or you're no longer going to have a face that draws inside of sketchup when you do this so it's really important that when you draw like let's say again that i was to use the line tool to draw a line so you want to try to draw along the axes as much as possible to make sure that things are coplanar so that you don't run into this issue where things are up a little bit and your faces won't draw inside of your model so one other thing you might have noticed is not only do you get linear inferences meaning lines turning colors but when you have a tool active like the line tool so i'm going to tap the l key you might have noticed that you also get little points like this so those little points mean things too so for example if i mouse over this point right here notice how i get a little green dot and it tells me that if i was to draw right now i would be drawing based on this end point i could also mouse over this edge right here in order to get the midpoint or if i mouse over here this is going to tell me that anything i draw is going to be on this face so this is sketchup basically visually indicating to you where you're drawing so that you don't accidentally draw something off axis and so now let's talk just a little bit about going to 3d and we could talk more about this in a future tutorial but i want to talk about it just a little bit so let's say for example that we were to draw a rectangle so i'm going to tap the r key to activate the rectangle tool so and notice how there are tools in sketchup that create multiple that create shapes like this so there's a rectangle tool you can tap the c key to activate the circle tool so there are tools in here that draw shapes in addition to just edges but let's say we wanted this rectangle to go to 3d right so what we could do is we could come in here and draw along the blue axis some faces right and notice how i'm using inferencing to make sure everything lines up but if i wanted this to be a box like this i could do that just by manually drawing everything in but the problem with that is drawing a shape like that is really time consuming right like it's super time consuming it's going to take a lot of extra time to do things that way and there's a much faster way to do this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to move this over we can talk more about those tools another time but i'm just going to pick up the bottom this object make a copy and so let's say i wanted to create another box like this one well instead of drawing everything up like this there's a tool called the push pull tool and what it does is it extrudes objects so it basically takes a profile like this one and it takes it into 3d so the way that it works and you can find it over here or by tapping the p key on your keyboard the way it works is you can tap p with a face selected single click move your mouse and then single click again well notice what that did is that created a 3d shape based on that profile right here really quickly one of the cool things about that is you can also type in values to extrude to a certain distance so let's say i selected this face i tap the p key and then i single click i move my mouse up well let's say i wanted to extrude this 5 feet well all i have to do is type in a value of 5 feet and hit the enter key so that extrudes this 5 theme into 3d we can talk more about this in a future video if you would like but the one other thing about this and i'm going to make a copy over here i'm going to rotate this using the rotate tool don't worry too much about that for right now we'll talk about that in the future not only can you use this to add material you can also use this to subtract material so let's say for example i wanted to cut a door opening like tap the r key single click and draw on this face you'll notice how these are two different faces i can actually use the push pull tool by tapping the p key single click move my mouse and move this all the way to the back and then click again well notice what that did is that actually removed material from my object so i can do the same thing by drawing an arc so i'm going to tap the a key single click single click and then click again to draw an arc well i can use the push pull tool in order to extrude this back to remove material as well so you can use this to cut holes or remove things other things like that inside of sketchup so it's really easy so i'm just going to move my mouse back here i'm going to click again and notice how that cut a hole now one thing to note about this is if you tap the p key and try to select this face notice how you're going to get an error message so the reason we're going to get an error message here is because this is a curved surface meaning sketchup can't push pull it so you can't push pull curved surfaces with the native tools inside of sketchup now we can talk in the future about some extensions that do that but for right now just know that you're going to have a lot more success if you're pushing and pulling flat faces inside of sketchup all right so this video is getting a little bit long so i'm going to go ahead and shut this one down and we will continue in the next video if you have any questions feel free to leave them below the video i'd love to try to answer them if you want to download my free keyboard shortcuts guide you can do that at the sketchupessentials.com beginner so if you want to download that so that you can kind of follow along and see where those different tools go on your keyboard that's a great resource finally if you want some additional sketchup training you really want to go in depth and take learning sketchup seriously you can check out my course at the sketchupessentials.com slash course that's my comprehensive guide where i go start to finish all the way through sketchup so that's where you can really become a sketchup master so if you're interested in that again that's the sketchup essentials dot com slash course but as always 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: 140,540

Rating: 4.9541159 out of 5

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup

Id: UEcyuvQyVm0

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021