Getting Started with SKETCHUP PRO in 2024 Part 1 - BEGINNERS START HERE!

oh what's up guys Justin here with the SketchUp essentials.com so in today's video we're going to kick off our series on getting started with SketchUp Pro so this series is designed to take you start to finish on learning how to model in SketchUp let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so to start off you're going to want to go to sketchup's website sketchup.com and notice how they have multiple different products available in here specifically we're going to be talking about SketchUp Pro in this video I will link to a series about SketchUp free which I'm going to have to refilm based on the new version but I'll link to that series if you are trying to use the web version of SketchUp specifically we are using SketchUp Pro so if you are confused about all of the different offerings in here you can go to this option right here which is a compare plans page and really for a good comparison I would scroll down and click on the option for compare all features this is going to tell you exactly what these versions contain the free version is the online web- based version The Go version is the online web-based version plus SketchUp for iPad this has some additional tools like the outliner inside of the web-based version of SketchUp so the pro version is what most people are going to go with um so that's going to contain all of this including the iPad version the pro version and layout which you can use for documentation and then if you get the studio version you get all of that and it also comes with the scan Essentials which is SketchUp um Point Cloud viewing software and a license for vray which is a 3D rendering software um if you don't know anything about 3D rendering or Point clouds you might want to skip on this one until you learn a little bit more um this does also have the ability to import Revit models so that's kind of a quick overview of the different versions but let's jump over into SketchUp and take a look and how we can use the program all right and so when you first open up SketchUp you're going to get a page that looks a little bit like this this allows you to select the template file that you're going to use um in this case as a new beginner um you're probably mostly going to want to focus on the units that are in here we can change all of these things later on um so you can kind of pick whichever one you want you can click on the more templates in order to get other templates in here but if you're just starting out just start with the simple or the architectural and then the units that you want to use um so you will also see some of your recent files that you've worked with down below right here as well as a learn tab where you can go to sketchup's um campus in order to learn different things about how to use SketchUp and then if you do want to manage your license information you can do that using the licensing function but I'm going to go ahead and just create a new model and we'll jump into SketchUp and take a look so when you first open up SketchUp it's going to look something like this and so you're going to have a toolbar at the very top of the page page um it's got access to different tools notice that you can rightclick in this space and then open up other tool sets so if you add extensions you're going to have more options in here than if you don't but don't worry about that for right now um so you're going to have toolbars up here and then there's other tools that we can pop up around the side of SketchUp so at the top of your page you've got your file bar which is going to give you access to things like file save as um you know the typical stuff that you would expect in here you're going to manage um all of your different tools your extensions from this top bar so this bar is going to be more your tool bars um and you can use these to do different things like for example you've got a view toolbar in here that's going to allow you to set different views inside of the SketchUp space notice that these are adjustable meaning that you can click and drag on the little dotted lines in here and you can use this in order to move things around so notice how I can move this to the left side or the right hand side like this and dock it it just by dragging it to the side now one thing that you should go ahead and do um and this will look mildly different if you're on a Mac but not very different one thing you should go ahead and do is you should rightclick in here and you should open up the large tool set that's going to pop up a tool set on the Le hand side of your page that gives you access to some additional tools that we're going to use a little bit later and again you can click and drag this you could even keep this on a different monitor if you wanted to um so I'm dragging this to my left monitor right here but go ahead and open up that large tool set because we're probably going to use it now one other thing that I do because I really value my screen real estate in here is I rightclick and I go to my toolbars options right here you can also go to uh I believe it is View toolbars and I want to go ahead and I want to uncheck the box for large icons um I don't like the really big icons I like them a little bit smaller just so they're not taking up as much room on your screen you don't have to to do that but that's something that I do and then I might just click and drag these and just kind of like clean them up a little bit now one thing that we're not seeing that we're going to want to use a lot is there is also a bar that pops up on the right hand side of the page and this is a PC thing by the way if you have a Mac these are windows but on the PC you have the option to turn on a tray so if you go to window default tray and you toggle the option for show tray what that's going to do is that's going to pop out a little window on the right hand side of the page that's going to do things like giving giving you control of your shadows it's going to give you information about things that are selected inside your 3D workspace it's also going to give you control over your materials um the outliner which is going to set the way that your model is organized lots of different things so usually I go ahead and I toggle that default tray on right here now note that you do have the option to add or remove different things from your tray just by checking them I go ahead and I turn all of these on um because I'm going to use them all and they don't take up a whole lot of additional space notice how I can kind of expand and minimize those just by clicking these little arrows right here and so one other area that you're actually going to look at a lot as a beginner is this little bar at the bottom of the page this is basically your status bar and what it does is it gives you information about your currently active tools now there are options over here where you can manage the geolocation of your model as well as seeing credits for models that have been downloaded and placed in your SketchUp model don't worry too much about that for right now what you want to focus on is notice how whatever tool you have active this is actually going to give you instructions on what to do with it so for example I currently have the select tool and this is telling me that I can click and drag to select objects and also what different modifiers do so if you're ever trying to use a tool and figure out how it works there's usually going to be some information down here giving you instructions on how to use that and then over here on the right hand side of your page there's an option here for measurements and so what that measurements is going to do is it's going to display things um about your currently active tool so like for example if I was to draw a line and I'll show you how to do this in a second but notice how when I draw this line that box is filling in with numbers and it's basically showing me information about how far this line is going so notice how I can see how long this line is by looking in that little box on the lower right hand corner and it'll also show me depending on the tool it'll show me different things so in this case if I draw a square or a rectangle notice how this is showing me multiple Dimensions it's showing me both the length and the width like this so you can uh use this little measurements bar over here to see your currently active measurements and other things like that okay so now that you're familiar with the SketchUp workspace the next thing that we want to do is we want to navigate around in 3D and so to navigate around in 3D there's various different tools and ways of doing this so for example at the top of the page notice how there are tools up here to do different things so like for example if you click on the orbit function that's going to change your mouse cursor to a little little orbit cursor in your 3D space and if I click and drag notice how that's going to orbit around in the 3D space it's going to move and rotate your camera view based done wherever you move this and I'm just clicking and holding this down now one concept that I want you to go ahead and get familiar with is I want you to get familiar with using both keyboard shortcuts and mouse shortcuts instead of these tools so um it is very inconvenient to be clicking up here and then trying to move around in your 3D space instead what you want to do is you want to do this using your mouse and so I highly recommend that you use a mouse that has has three buttons so it's going to have a left click a right click and a scroll wheel and the reason why is because that scroll wheel is massively helpful in the way that we orbit around in our space to orbit around instead of clicking on this button right here what I can do instead is I can click and hold that middle Mouse button down so that scroll wheel not only Scrolls it also clicks if you press it down like a button well if you click and hold that like this what's going to happen is you're going to be locked into orbit mode until you let up on that button so I can click and drag then let up and notice how that tool goes away now you can also modify that so if I click and hold the middle Mouse button and I hold the shift key like this what that's going to do is that's going to move me into pan mode that's going to allow me to pan around so I would orbit and then hold shift and click and drag in order to pan orbit hold shift click and drag in order order to pan and so again using clicking and dragging the middle Mouse button so um another thing that you can do with that tool is instead of clicking on the zoom tool which you can do you can activate that tool and then click and drag up and down in order to zoom a better way to do that is to scroll the mouse wheel up and down and so by scrolling the mouse wheel up and down what that's going to do is that's going to zoom in and out based on your cursor location and the fact that it's your cursor location is important so notice how this navigates differently if I move my mouse up here and I scroll my mouse versus if I move my mouse here and I scroll my mouse so basically wherever your mouse is is going to set where your Zoom is going to happen and so what happens is you start kind of combining these things together so say that I wanted to zoom in on this character right here I would Mouse over him scroll in say I wanted to orbit I would click and hold the middle mouse buttton say I wanted to pan in order to fine-tune that I would hold shift click and drag the middle Mouse button so using those shortcuts makes navigating in SketchUp very fast all right and so now let's talk about how we can draw and work in the 3D workspace and one thing I want you to get familiar with again is using keyboard shortcuts as opposed to clicking on the different tools so we can activate different drawing Tools in SketchUp by clicking on them um up in our menu so for example if I wanted to make a line I could just activate the line tool right here click in my space and then draw a line like this but it's much faster to tap the L key on your keyboard and so the sooner you can start learning these keyboard shortcuts the better now one thing I have done is I have put together a free keyboard shortcuts guide that you can download in order to have something that you can kind of print off and put next to your keyboard um so that you can see what some of those various shortcuts are so I will link to that in the notes down below but now let's just start drawing and SK sketch up and so the first thing I want to do is I want to draw a line using the line tool so to do that I'm going to tap the L key on my keyboard or you could click on this option right here and so let's just go ahead and let's set something and let's Draw Something in the 3D space so I'm going to Mouse over the space and I'm going to single click in order to set a base point now this is something that's going to be very important you can click and drag in sketch up so if you single click and then drag and then let up you can do that but I do not recommend it I highly recommend when you're working in SketchUp that you single click and then move your mouse and then click again in order to set a final point or to finalize whatever shape you're working with um because that gives you a lot more options when it comes to navigation and also setting values for things in SketchUp and so notice how when I activate this tool so I tap the L key and then I single click notice how that sets kind of a base point in the 3D space that just means that I've set the point from which my line is going to be drawn well notice how when I move my mouse in different directions sometimes I get these colors in here and so what these colors are is these are from sketchup's inferencing engine and so what that means is that means that in a 3D space sometimes it can be kind of hard to tell like what direction you're going and so what SketchUp does is it gives gives you kind of these colors to show like okay if if I move my mouse right here I'm drawing a straight line along the green axis direction if I move my mouse over here and I click I'm drawing a line along the red axis Direction and so we're going to use that inferencing a lot in order to make sure that we're drawing on flat surfaces and other things like that now note that you can lock those inferences so if I single click move my mouse and then I hold down the shift key after I move move my mouse in the green Direction notice that's going to lock my line to that green Direction so you can lock directional inferences either by holding the shift key or you can also and again this is with your first point set you can tap the left right or up arrow keys in order to lock your tool to a direction like this um so you can use this in order to force this to go along the green Direction which is what we do a lot of the time now notice that we're also getting a lot of points flashing in here so what those points are is those are other inferences so again this is SketchUp just trying to help you figure out where you want to draw your line too so say that I wanted to draw a line from this base point to this point right here this is going to allow me to really quickly find that end point so I could use this to draw lines between this point and this point like this and so one other thing about this tool is you can also typee in values so say that I wanted to draw a line and notice how I can Mouse over a point and then move my mouse off of it in order to create an inference and so that just means that I'm going to be able to draw a point that's in a straight line along the red axis from this point right here but say that I wanted to draw a line that's 20 ft long well what I can do is notice I've single clicked now I want to type in a value of 20 ft and I'm going to hit the inner key so with that's done is that's drawn a line that's 20 ft long and if I activate the tape measure tool I can actually measure this and I can see that this line is 20 ft and so sketch up models in real world Dimensions meaning that that line is to scale and so your measurements are going to be accurate and so let's say I wanted to draw another line I could activate the line tool by tapping L single click right here and in this case say I wanted to draw a 5ot line in the red Direction well I would just move my my mouse in this red Direction without clicking and I would type in a value of 5T and hit the entner key like this so that's how you can draw lines and edges to a certain length okay and so now let's talk about how we can draw faces in SketchUp and we've done this a little bit but basically if I tap the L key and I Mouse over a point and I click and then I click notice what happens is SketchUp fills in a face in this location and so what it's done is it's always looking for with three or more co-planner edges and so co-planar edges are edges that are basically all on the same plane so they're flat so in this case if I was to draw a line a line a line and then a line like this notice how this drew a face in here um because I had four c-pl planer edges which is more than three co-planar edges that are closed and so this can be this is one of the things where inferencing is important because if you accidentally Draw Something in here um and we're just going to draw an example really quick so I'm going to draw a line that's up like this I'm going to erase out this Edge so notice how in this case I have four closed edges but they're not co- planer right these two are on this flat plane right here this one is on this flat plane right here but nothing is closing them in and so if I activate the line tool by tapping the L key and I draw between these notice how this is going to draw two faces cuz now these edges are co-planner and these edges are co- planer and so that's going to fill this in like this and so real quick let's talk about what happens if your faces get deleted out because a face is basically an object in SketchUp that's a part of the mesh and so meshes in general are made up of edges and faces so notice how this has three edges and a face if I was to click and drag a selection box around this right here and we're going to go up into our entity info notice how this tells me I have four entities selected so I have three edges and a face if I just click on that face notice how I'm going to see information about the face over here including the area and so I can delete out those faces as well so I can just click on them to select them and I can hit the delete key like this now one thing to note about this is notice how these co- planer edges are still in here well what that means is that means that all I would have to do is just retrace over one of these edges and sketchup's going to go back in and heal these faces in like this not only can you click on an object and hit the delete key in order to delete it you can also activate a tool called the Eraser tool and so what the Eraser tool is going to do is it's going to erase specifically edges so notice how I can activate the Eraser tool by tapping the E key or by clicking on this icon right here in order to try to erase out different things but notice how this only works on edges so and I can click on an edge like this to erase it but I can also click and drag across different edges so notice how I'm clicking and holding this down um and it's highlighting different edges in here like this so everything that I drag across once I let up on my mouse is going to be erased and I'm going to do a contrl z to undo that but you can use this in order to add or erase faces inside of SketchUp and so you do also have tools in sketch up that allow you to draw not only edges but also different shapes so for example um this is why we wanted the large tool set opened up um but you can also access these by clicking and holding the little uh Arrow right here but notice how we've got tools in here to do things like adding rectangles or circles or arcs and so say I wanted to add a rectangle what I would do is I would single click move my mouse and then I would click again in order to draw a rectangle and notice what this is is doing is this is kind of inferencing to different directions depending on where my mouse goes well one thing that you can do with this tool active when I've set a single point is you can tap the left right or up arrow keys in order to lock a Direction so if I wanted to draw a rectangle standing up I would do an R click and then before I click again I would tap the left Arrow key and so what I can do is I can come in here and I can rightclick in order to kind of close this in and set that rectangle so I could also do it before I click so I could just tap the left Arrow key so that I know I'm drawing a rectangle that's standing up notice how with this kind of object though you can actually set multiple different dimensions and so one thing actually is there is a shape inference in here so if I move my mouse like this notice how at a certain point this kind of like locks to a shape like this and so there's two things you can set a golden section rectangle which I've never actually used for anything but you can also also set a square and so if I hold the shift key what that's going to do is that's going to lock that inference to be a square right here we're going to talk more about inferencing in the next video but notice how you can either inference that or I could type in a value so I could type in 4 foot and then a comma and then a 4 foot and hit the inner key and what that's going to do is that's going to draw a rectangle with the dimensions of 4T by 4T so we've also got tools in here to draw things like circles so if I was to act at the Circle tool and that's going to be the c key on your keyboard or you can click on this button right here but I can single click and I can set the radius so notice how I can move this in order to set the radius right here and once you've kind of set that base point on a circle you can't use the uh arrow keys anymore so in this case before you set your first point you would want to tap the left right or up arrow keys in order to lock this but I'm going to go ahead and single click if I click notice what that's doing is that that's creating a circle with a radius of whatever value I put in here so I'm going to tap C single click say I wanted this to have a radius of say uh 24 in I would just type in a value of 24 hit the inner key and that's going to draw a circle with a diameter of 48 in or a radius of 24 in all right so in the next video we're going to talk about how to take things to 3D which gets really interesting if you do want to learn more about SketchUp make sure you check out my course I will link to that on this page where I get way more in-depth on a lot of this stuff and I have a community forum and live calls where you can actually get help that's kind of tailored to you I will link to this full getting started playlist on this page as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 62,034

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup 2021, sketchup 2020, sketchup pro, sketchup 2023, sketchup 2024, sketchup desktop tutorial, sketchup 2024 tutorial, sketchup 2023 tutorial

Id: AB6UN-DrR1c

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024