Getting Started with SketchUp in 2021 Part 3 - GROUPS, COMPONENTS, and COPIES!

what's up guys justin here with the sketchup essentials.com back with another sketchup pro desktop version tutorial for you so in today's video we're going to continue our series on getting started with sketchup by talking about some really important things having to do with grouping and making copies these are the things that are really going to make sketchup start working a lot better for you so if you do want some more in-depth coaching on sketchup make sure you check out my course at the sketchup essentials dot com slash course that's my comprehensive course where i really dive deep into these uh i really dive deep into the different features contained inside of the program as well as answering questions um really designed to help you learn sketchup fast so if that's something you're interested in checking out you can check that out at the sketchup essentials dot com slash course now let's go ahead and just jump into it so up to this point we've really dealt with just dealing with raw geometry and when i say raw geometry what i mean is if i draw a rectangle like this right now and i'm going to go ahead and reverse this face but if i draw a rectangle like this right now and i click on the different parts and pieces you can see how i can select each one of those individually right that also means i can come in here and i can delete each one of them individually so i could delete out the face believe the edges i do a lot of different things like that however the problem with that is that starts getting tricky and you may have already experienced this so let's say and i'm going to activate the push pull tool by tapping the p key on my keyboard let's say that i was to extrude this box up and notice how i can select all of the different faces right and i'm just going to make a copy real quick we will talk about creating copies in a second so don't worry about that for right now for now i'm just going to create a copy and scale it down just so you can see this and so let's say that we were to take one of these boxes right so either this box or this box and let's say we were to move these together so if i was to select this box activate the move tool by tapping the m key and then click and click right so that the faces on these boxes occupy the same space and then i click off of this if i was to select this again and then use the move tool to move these apart what you might have noticed is you might have noticed this geometry sticks together let's say i was to take this nose to move it out this way and so notice how these faces merge together and the reason they merge together is because they occupied the same space in 3d and so this can be helpful you can use this for modeling different things but it can also be incredibly frustrating because what happens is it makes it really hard to make changes to things inside of sketchup so what we want to do instead is let's say we're to draw another rectangle so r click click again and then we'll use the push pull tool in order to extrude this up so you can use the p key in order to do that remember you can get that free keyboard shortcut guide that you can download and put next to your keyboard at the sketchupess.com beginner but what we're going to do is let's say now we wanted to move two boxes against each other but we didn't want them to merge what we can do is we can do what's called grouping that geometry and so the way that works is let's say we took this box right here and selected it well you can right click on it and there's going to be an option in here for make group and so as soon as you click on make group what that's going to do is that's going to take all of the geometry that you had selected and it's almost going to put it in like a package right so notice how now when i select this and i click on these individual faces or edges i don't actually get those selected where for this one i do well the reason for that is because this geometry is grouped well what that does is that makes it so that now if i was to move this box against this box like this notice how the faces aren't going to merge together anymore so what that does is that allows us to set up our geometry in groups in a way that um things don't merge together which makes them easier to change later so i pretty much recommend i'm trying to group individual entities as much as you can because what that means is that means the geometry is not going to merge together and you can actually edit it right because you don't have all these faces that turn into other faces and make everything really complicated and so let's say that you wanted to adjust this geometry though right like let's say i was to tap the p key and try to push pull these faces you'll notice how it gives me the little circle right well what the little circle means is little circle means there's something with this geometry that means we can't push pull it in this case it's because this geometry is in a group and so you can edit a group either by double clicking on it like this or by right clicking on it and clicking edit group notice how i get the little bounding box in here and everything else is faded out a little bit the reason for that is because this is visually indicating to me that i am inside of this group well now i can come in here and i can make changes as much as i want i can edit that individual geometry and then if you ever have geometry that you want out of a group so if you have it in the group you don't want it in there you can right click and you can click on the button for explode in order to remove that group inside of sketchup and so real quick like super high level i don't want to get too far into it right now there's a tool in your tray called the outliner that's going to show the different groups in your model so let's say i was to right click on this and click make group notice how now that group is going to show up inside of my outliner over here and you can select objects inside of sketchup by clicking on them in the outliner we'll talk more about that in the future but i wanted you to know that it's there and so now what i want to do is i want to talk a little bit about components so a group is just a set of geometry that's grouped together right and side note you can also nest groups inside of groups so for example see how i was to group this box in this box and then i put both of those in a group what that means is that means that those groups live inside of the other group but so and then if i wanted to ungroup that i could just right click on it and click explode in order to explode everything that was in that group and into their own individual groups that are in here practice it a little bit it's not as complicated as it sounds but now let's say we have something in our model that's going to repeat so i'm going to type the c key single click move my mouse then i'm going to tap p single click and move this up to extrude it and now what i want to do is i want to select it right click on it and make it a group and then for now i'm just going to create some copies i'm going to use the move tool in copy mode we will talk about this in a moment um you should be able to find it in the little bookmarks on the timeline of this page but i'm just going to create a couple copies so let's say we have four of them so right now those have all been created as groups right well what that means is that means that they're not connected they're just basically like putting geometry in a box so if i was to come in here and i was to make a change to one of them right like this the others are unchanged well the problem with that in a 3d model is a lot of the time you can have multiple copies of the same thing right so you could have like light fixtures that all need to look a certain way or pieces of furniture other things like that that are basically going to be copies of the same thing and if you have to go back and change one of them and the others aren't linked in any way then it can be really time consuming well what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a copy of this using the move tool and when we do this when we select this and then right click on it notice how there's also an option in here for making a component and so a component is like a smart version of a group so i'm going to go ahead and click on component what that's going to do is that's going to pop up this little window that allows me to name this so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to name this cylinder so notice how that shows up in my outliner as cylinder and notice how it has brackets around it and these four little boxes instead of the one what that means is that means that this is a component rather than a group and so what's the value of a component well if you were to create four copies again or three copies again now because these are all copies of the same component if i was to change one of them the others change as well so what this does is this allows you to set up your model geometry so that if you change one version of something the others change and it can save you a ton of time in the future so let's say now that we want to make a couple of these unique so let's say that we want these two cylinders to be different from these two cylinders well what you could do is you could single click and then shift click to select this one and then if you right click on these and click make unique basically what you're going to do is you're going to take all of the instances or copies of that component and it's going to make them into a different component so now what that allows me to do is that means that these two are linked and then these two are also linked right so notice how these don't have anything to do with each other anymore and you can use this to kind of save time when you're modeling and working in the future and so i always get this question why or when do you use a group and when do you use a component and so it's a good question and for me the reason that i use components over groups is if there's ever a chance that i'm going to use more than one of something so if i'm ever going to use something more than once i put it in as a component i can always break that link later but it's a lot harder to add it in i use groups when it's something that i'm not going to create copies of so let's say for example i'm going to tap the r key on my keyboard single click move my mouse and then click again and then we're going to tap the offset key the f key and click and just create a six inch offset right here and then we'll use the push pull tool to push it up right so let's say for example that i had a floor plan like this and i wanted to organize this so that changes would be easy in the future well for the floor plan i would create a group because i'm never going to create a copy of my floor plan right i mean there's probably some situations where you would but in general when you're modeling a floor plan like this what you want to do is you just want to take your walls and you just want to group them so you want to select them and make them a group just so that that geometry doesn't merge with everything else and then you would just double click in here you would model out your doors so three foot comma seven foot then you would push pull them through like this but i would always group this geometry in here i wouldn't create a component with this because it wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense so if you're ever going to have more than one of something use a component if it's just something that you want to keep it from merging with everything else then just use a group and so we will talk in the future i will create a video talking about how to create a floor plan inside of sketchup in more detail that's actually like organized so the changes are easy we will get to that in a future video but for now just know that we're going to use this in order to make our adjustments easy and so what i want to talk about now is moving and copying objects inside of sketchup because we haven't really talked about that very much and so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to create a simple shape inside of sketchup so we'll just create we'll call it a box for right now so we'll just use the rectangle tool and then we'll push pull this up like this so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to group this geometry so i'm just going to select it right click and make it group and so now i want to talk a little bit about the move and rotate tools and how you can use them to move things around inside of sketchup so you can find those over here in your large tool set or up above you can also tap the m key on your keyboard for the move tool or the q key for the rotate tool and so let's say i wanted to move this box 5 feet this way so what i would do is i always start by selecting the object i want to move and then i activate the move tool by tapping the m key so i'm going to tap m on my keyboard notice how this turns into the little four arrow mouse pointer right here and if i mouse over this notice how i'm getting these little inference points well what i can do is i can single click on an inference point that is going to be the base point from which i'm going to move my object and so then i can move my mouse in a direction say that it's going to be this direction and i can click again in order to place this so you can move things really easily just by single clicking moving your mouse and then clicking again remember that we don't really click and drag inside of sketchup and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to undo that well let's say i wanted to be a little more precise right let's say i want to move this 5 feet along the green axis well what i would do is i would just click on this tap m click again to set my base point and then i would type in a value of 5 feet and hit the enter key what that's going to do is that's going to move this five feet from this point to this point so you can type in values to more precisely place objects inside of sketchup another thing i do sometimes is i'll draw like a little guide or an inference so let's say i was to draw a guide here and let's say i wanted this to be 10 feet this way well then you could just use the inferencing so you would just click tap m click notice how i can hold the shift key to lock this to an inference point and i can click again one thing to note about the move tool is your base point does not have to be on your object so for example let's say i wanted to align this object with this corner of the building well i could click here then move my mouse over and try to find a point along this edge look for an inference point all of that trying to get everything to inference over but you don't really need to do that because you could just tap the m key you could click on this wall right here and notice how my object is moving based on where i move this final point to so i could click again in order to align this right here the other thing you might have noticed is if you tap the m key with this active there's also some little crosses in here that you can click on in order to rotate your object and so notice how i single clicked that way i could type in a value if i wanted to rotate this like 45 degrees or something like that and i could hit the enter key on my keyboard so you can also use this to rotate objects really quickly inside of sketchup alright so now let's talk about a cool function of the move tool which allows you to make copies so one thing that you might think about when you're creating copies inside of sketchup is you might think about doing a copy paste right like a ctrl c ctrl v then you can move your mouse and click that's definitely a valid way to create copies but the problem is it's lacking some basic functions that you're usually going to use inside of a software like sketchup so for example let's say that we have this cone which i've modeled as a component and let's say we wanted to create a copy of it that aligns with this corner right here so what you could do is you could do a control c a control v then you could click and then you could find an inference point click hold the shift key and align with this corner right you could definitely do that but there's a faster way and so the way that we do this is we use the move tool to create the copy and so the way that that works is say that you've got an object like this one you just activate the move tool and then you set a base point so remember move tool is the m key then i'm going to single click and move my mouse well right now you can see that this object is moving around right that's not what we want notice that i have only single clicked i didn't click and drag what we don't want is to move this object what we want to do is we want to create a copy well if you look down below there's a section in here or a little note that says control equals toggle copy what that means is that means if i hit the control key or the option key on a mac and then i move my mouse notice how that's creating a copy of the object that i had selected and so now i can just hold the shift key and i can align this copy with this corner right here so that is a much easier way to create copies in sketchup so let's say for example that i wanted a few copies of this cone so i could just tap the m key single click and tap the control key then i can do it again tap control then click select both of these single click tap control so notice how i can create multiple copies really easily by doing this and so another function that's really cool inside of sketchup is the ability to create multiple copies with the move tool so let's say that i wanted to create like six copies or seven copies of this object right here in this direction with a set spacing well you can do that by tapping the m key and going into copy mode tapping control and then clicking you can move your mouse and click again that's setting your spacing of your object well without clicking on anything else and this is where people always get kind of lost is they click off or they tap something else on their keyboard and this doesn't work anymore you don't want to do anything after you click to set this point right here then you just want to type in star or x and a number of copies so if i type in a value of times and then 5 and hit the enter key what that's going to do is that's going to create four more copies of this object with that spacing that i set so what's cool is if i type in a value of times four and hit enter or times two and hit enter as long as i don't click somewhere else this tool remains active and so because this tool remains active it's very easy for me to create however many copies that i want inside of sketchup now one thing i will note and i don't know why this is and maybe something gets fixed it might not even be a bug notice how this cone is a component which we talked about before well this cone is a group so if i make a copy over here and then i do the same thing so i tap control i type in times like seven hit the enter key and then i type in times five and hit the enter key for some reason it's only allowing me to add to this so i could type in times 10 or times 15 but i can't type values of times 10 on groups only in sketchup 2021 at the moment i have no idea if this is something that's just on my installation if it's a sketchup 2021 thing i have no idea if i was to move this over and i was to explode it then everything works just fine so times 10 times 5 times 2 times 10. it works just fine if i was to take this make a copy and make it a component new times 10 times 5 times 2. it's working just fine so just be aware that there is something in sketchup 2021 at least on my computer that's acting a little weird about that if this becomes a problem for you just make all of your stuff components and it's going to work fine but this is a great tool for creating multiple different copies of something at once and so one other thing about this is not only can you create a copy between or based on spacing you can also use the divided key in the same way so if i tap the ctrl key single click move my mouse over here and then i type in the divided by or the forward slash and the number of copies it'll create a number of equally spaced copies between those two points so you can adjust this to set the number of copies that are in here by typing in divided by and then another value but notice how you can use this to create equally spaced copies between two points as well and so i don't want to get too far in depth on the rotate tool right now so that may get its own video but the rotate tool works in the same way so if you want to rotate something you tap the q key to activate that tool you set a base point and then you can rotate something along an arc so you could use that to rotate this around a point you could also use this to rotate along the face and so notice how if i tap the q key and tap the left right or up arrow keys that's going to lock this to various axes that can make rotating things really easy but you can also use that in copy mode so if i tap q click to set a point click again and tap control notice how i can create one copy or i can do the same thing where i can set spacing type in a value of times five and hit enter times ten and hit enter really whatever i want that also works between the two points along an angle so select this object tap control click and type in divided by and a number of copies and it'll create equally spaced copies along an arc as well so the rotate tool works a lot the same way as the move tool does inside of sketchup so that's from an in this video if you're looking for more in-depth instruction on sketchup i highly recommend you check out my course at the sketchupessentials.com course if you're stuck on anything leave a comment down below and let me know a lot of people get stuck on the sequencing when they're first learning how to do the arrays inside of sketchup the multiple copies so if you have any questions about that go back and double check your sequence to make sure that you're not accidentally clicking or hitting other keys or something like that but if you have any questions leave them in the comments down below 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 as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this i really appreciate it i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 31,275

Rating: 4.9633026 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, sketchup 2021, sketchup 2021 beginners, sketchup 2021 beginner tutorial, sketchup essentials 3, sketchup essentials #3, sketchup essentials desktop version

Id: vLM6oKPODSI

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021