Groups and Components

in this video we're going to explore groups and components but first we need to realize the need for groups and components so to do that we're gonna draw a rectangle on our screen at 20 feet by 40 feet so I'll activate my rectangle tool and then I'm just gonna click once to start move my cursor to suggest a direction let go the mouse and type in 2 0 ' , 4 0 ' enter so now I've drawn a rectangle at exactly 20 feet by 40 feet and then I can orbit into 3d and then let's just pull this up with our push-pull tool I'll click once to start move my cursor to suggest a direction let go of the mouse and type in let's say 25 feet so we have this large block set to exact precise dimensions and let's draw another one over here just a smaller block we use our rectangle tool and let's click once to start move our cursor to suggest the direction let go of the mouse and let's type in 10 feet by 10 feet and you notice that I use my I set my dimensions in inches or rather than feet I set them in inches because the default units in this model are inches this eliminates the need to key to keep hitting the apostrophe sign we'll hit enter there and now we have a square 10 feet by 10 feet and let's use our push-pull tool and pull that guy up by 10 feet as well so 1 2 0 enter ok so we have these two large two blocks one large one small and what we want to do is demonstrate the need for groups and components so the basic building blocks of Sketchup are edges and surfaces now these edges and surfaces have a tendency to get stuck together and it can seem confusing and not helpful at all when in actuality the stickiness of geometry in Sketchup is what makes the program work so well and really makes it so fast so we need to learn how to control the stickiness of geometry and to control that we use groups and components groups and components are containers for the geometry within Sketchup so let's take a look at the stickiness of geometry with your selection tool triple click on the small cube and then we're gonna go to our move copy tool and we want to do a precise move from point to point so I'm gonna move from this endpoint I'll click on that to pick up my cube and then I want to position it exactly on this bottom right endpoint so we'll click there now watch what happens when I click again to pick it up and move it away this is the stickiness of geometry and Sketchup it can be a little bit frustrating but we just need to learn how to control it so I'm in the middle of a move command I can always tap escape to cancel that command and then I can tap ctrl Z to undo so now we're kind of back to where we started here so this time let's use our selection tool and triple click and now I've selected all of my connected geometry and I'm going to right click on the selection and choose make group the group is simply a container holding the geometry or the edges and surfaces that compose that that cube so now when I do the same move with my move copy tool from end point to end point and then pull that away you can see that our geometry is no longer stuck together so that's just kind of a very simple way and one of the first steps to learning how to control the stickiness of geometry in Sketchup now let's take a look at another container for geometry called a component so the two containers are groups and components a group has zero intelligence it's simply a container for geometry a component on the other hand has a lot of intelligence it has a lot of connectivity basically if you edit one instance of a component all instances will update at the same time so if you're familiar with AutoCAD it's similar to a block or even an xref and if you're familiar with the Adobe products that's similar to a smart object so to create a component we're gonna say that this is a town house so let's go ahead and draw a rectangle on the front of this town house to create a window so I'll just click once to start on the surface move my cursor to suggest a direction let go of the mouse and let's type in let's say four feet , eight feet enter so a 4 foot by 8 foot window now what we're going to do is use our selection tool and double click right on that rectangle when I double click that selects the surface as well as the bounding edges now I can right-click directly on my selection and choose make component so we'll say make component and let's call this our window and notice that we have some other settings here a description usually not necessary alignment glue to any this means that the component will glue itself to any surface you can choose you know a window would probably only go on a vertical surface but I like to make that distinction while I'm modeling so I just leave that set to any and then cut opening this window is actually going to cut an opening in that surface that it's glued to and that way we'll be able to see inside of our component one last important setting is replace selection with component I can't imagine why you'd ever want to uncheck this but seems like somehow this does get unchecked at time so just make sure that you have that guy checked on what that means is that this selection here is now going to become a component and that is what we want so we'll choose create and now we have our component now when we have a component selected it looks very similar to a group when it's selected but we do get some different behavior out of it so let's now make a copy of our component so we'll go to our move copy tool and they will just make one copy ten feet up I'll click once to pick it up tap control and move my cursor once I find my blue axis and suggest the direction I can let go to Mouse and type in one to zero enter and then maybe let's also make a copy of it to the right and this one I'm just going to kind of eyeball here so we have our our three windows now with my selection tool I'm going to right-click on any one of these three components remember they are all connected together so I can right-click and choose edit component now this is component edit mode notice that the rest of the model is kind of grayed out and also we have this dotted bounding box defining the extents of our component so to add a little bit of detail to this window I'll use my offset tool hover on that surface click once to start move my cursor to suggest the direction and let go the mouse now I can type in how thick do I want that frame to be so let's just say to enter next I can use my push pull tool and I'll just push this guy in by let's say four inches and then now let's assign a material we'll go to our paint bucket tool and I'll go to my metal now here's a little trick if I was to pick this metal rough instead of clicking on every single surface in here what I can do is just hold down shift and notice that I get those three little squares this is kind of like a material swap when I click on this surface I know that it has the default material already applied to it so basically I'm going to swap everything in this component that has a default material with the metal rough material so that just saved me a lot of clicks now I can just go back to my trans Lucent materials and apply glass to the window so again notice that as we edit one instance of that component the other two are updating as well and then I can just right click in the white space and choose closed component now let's just add a little bit more detail to our townhouse here maybe just throw a rectangle on the front here from midpoint to midpoint and then I'll use my push-pull tool and pull this guy out by let's say 12 inches all right now we can also make copies of our windows so we can I like to pre-select the window and then use my move copy tool and I was selected from the bottom right corner click once to pick it up tap control to toggle my copy command and now notice what happens as I turn the corner that window reorients itself and glues to any surface that I put it on so we're just gonna throw that window maybe right up in here that looks pretty good so that's the glue to command or the glue to properties of a component now we also have another feature that's very helpful and that is the make unique feature of components so let's say make unique is similar to save a copy as like say you're working on a word document you just want to kind of save a copy of it that's the similar idea behind make unique you're starting with the same component but you're kind of breaking that connectivity from the others so let's say that these two windows are going to be different than the other components so I can select the first one hold down shift and add the second one to my selection and then right-click on the selection and choose make unique now what that means is that if I go in here and edit this component only these two are being affected now so maybe I'll just kind of make the a sliver of a window so what that means is that when you're working with components you want to look for repeating elements lies of symmetry and similar elements so here we have Windows that are similar so that's an opportunity for make unique we also have repeating elements which are these windows here so that definitely needs to be a component now let's add one more material here we can go to our brick and cladding maybe just throw some siding on here let's throw that on there and maybe this will be brick instead I don't know something like that okay so we just want to add a little bit of details so we can kind of see some changes happening here so as I mentioned you want to look for these repeating elements and lines of symmetry so oftentimes in a townhouse or townhouse development let's say there's six townhomes in a row that's each one of those is a repeating element but then inside we have further repeating elements such as windows like we've drawn here so we can create nested components so you can create these components nested inside of each other I guess on an infinite level typically if you go more than like five levels deep it might get a little extensive but for this example we have our townhouse drawn and the idea is that basically you want to make everything a group just about everything should start as a group and you almost can't make enough groups because the more groups you create the less your geometry is going to be stuck together and the easier it is to get get to it and modify it so first off this whole thing it needs to be a group now as soon as you're about to copy a group typically that's when you say this shouldn't be a group anymore this should be a component so then I'll just right-click on it and choose make component and how easy was that didn't even ask us any questions with a dialog box so now I can use my move copy tool and I'll click once to pick it up tap ctrl or option on the Mac to toggle my copy command and I'm gonna go move it to the end there and click again to place it now without invoking any other commands I can type in 5x enter and that's going to create five copies and in addition to leaving my original behind so now we have five copies of our townhouse now let's take a look at what that means we've created a component so maybe we want to go in and add like a parapet wall here so I can right-click on this component and choose edit component and we can use our offset tool and we can offset this guy by let's say 8 inches and then let's pull that parapet wall up by let's say 3 feet so now you can see that each instance of that townhouse component is updating and at the same time we can also modify our window component so we would need to go in another level so I can right click and choose edit component and now we can maybe make this guy a foot taller and again you can see that all instances of that component are updating at the same time so let's go to our window outliner and take a look at the different levels of this model so the outliner is actually kind of like a file tree that explains our Sketchup model so here we have our our group and within there we have these several window components so and it's called group that's actually a component this is this symbol represents a component whereas this symbol represents a group so we can back out of this by right-click and choose close component right click close component and another tip for you an easy way to navigate within components is with your selection tool you can double-click on a component to go in one level and then we can double click again to go in another level and again you can see those bounding boxes representing the extents of that component with the selection tool active you can just tap escape and that backs me out one level and tap escape again and back out again alright so now we have our our townhouses kind of stacked in a row here and the nice thing about a component is that we have the the geometry within is is what is linked between each instance of the component but the container itself can be modified so it can be scaled or mirrored so we can really create some some very interesting designs that still maintain their efficiency and their linkages so what I could do is just right click on this component and choose flip along our components red and you can see how that flipped over and then right click on this guy and choose flip along our components red and so now we're starting to create a pretty realistic townhouse development ok and once you become familiar with these groups and components and nested components it really becomes very simple you know something like this if this townhouse that this development was repeating then what you would do is take all of these guys and basically make these a component and typically I'll make it a group first and then make it a component that way I don't have to answer any of those questions then I can make a copy and we can flip this guy along our components green and so now they're facing each other so we can start building our neighborhood and we'll go ahead and make a copy of those as well so these are very efficient you can see that if I double click into one any one of these townhomes I can take the end unit and you can see how those changes are affecting each grouping furthermore if I go in one more level and move a window you can see how that's affecting every instance of that townhouse and then if I was to go in and modify the window itself you can see how that shows up as well so very efficient models are are created by using groups but mainly components that's what really saves you a lot of time if you ever find yourself doing the same revision over and over it probably should have been a component so another comment about components I'm going to close my outliner and go to window components and I'll just click on the house icon and what that house icon does is that shows us which components are in our model so makes it really easy to you could add another row of townhomes here and we can start those guys turning but you can also grab other components so you get a component is is a way of organizing your model but there's also pre-built components or these things that you don't want to have to build on your own over and over such as trees cars people even windows and doors there's a lot of that stuff out there too so we can click on this drop down here and take a look at like our architecture components so we have a bunch of doors and windows and cabinets and then here we have our construction components so we have steel cross-sections wood framing roof details just a lot of stuff that you really don't want to have to build on your own so we can grab any of those if we want to throw maybe an AC unit see and you can see there's a lot of different results here here's an AC unit and they will just throw this behind the unit now I've just positioned that that air conditioner behind this unit but notice that I was not inside of that component so it doesn't repeat itself over and over like I really want it to so what I can actually do is just go to edit and choose cut and cut that component and then let's go into the townhouse component I can double click in and double click in now I can see that I'm inside of that townhouse component because the rest of the model is grayed out I can see these bounding boxes and so I can choose edit paste in place this is a great way to move pieces from one group or component to the next so now we have all of our air conditioning units in there now you can also grab you can actually search the 3d warehouse through the component browser so the 3d warehouse is provided by Google it's actually just a collection or a repository for 3d models now beware that anybody can post anything they want to the 3d warehouse so if you're looking for a tree it's hard to say what you're gonna get some of it could be really nice like these guys look pretty nice but some of them can be pretty bad and pretty heavy too so sometimes by heavy I mean sometimes people will build models not in an efficient way so then it can really bog down your model and cause you more headaches so just beware maybe I'll just try this first one click on that and you can see that's downloading its downloaded a little bit slow and it's probably gonna be a fairly heavy tree but we'll use it for this example anyway and it's taken just a moment to load and there it is now you can see that is definitely a pretty heavy tree and I just clicked to place it and then I'm gonna kind of zoom in here and let's look at it but you know what that's just really bogging my model down and look how heavy those the blossoms are they're just a bit much so I'm just gonna delete that and let's go and search for a smart tree so a smart tree now a smart tree is a tree that's built in a way that it see how fast that one downloaded and the smart trees actually it uses 2d face me components in combined with 3d pieces as well and kind of creates the illusion of a full 3d tree let's see I know there's a few good ones here smart tree that one's no good alright so that one looks a little bit better so smart tree - I think that was okay so that one looks pretty good now here's another important point about components so now we've got that guy in there and we're starting to add our detail well every time we download a component from the 3d warehouse it's actually attaching itself to our model so if we click on the house icon you can see that we have our 3d tree even though we deleted it it's still in here now this is the same for Stiles materials layers a lot of different things in Sketchup they will they'll stick around unless we actually delete them or purge them so one easy way to get rid of everything that you don't need is to go to window model info statistics and click on purge unused and that's going to trash anything and everything that is in our model that we're not using so and 90% of the time that's exactly what you wanted to do all right so one more comment about scaling a component is you know we looked at how we can flip or mirror these components and the way that I typically like to do that is by using my scale tool so what I would typically do is let's say we want to add one more row here I think we have space to do that use my move copy tool and let's say I wanted to mirror this component well instead of right-clicking and choosing flip along my components red usually I have a hard time keeping track of where my axes are usually I have those guys turned off so what I can do is use my scale tool so we'll go to our scale tool and then I can scale about the center point of one of these surfaces I'll click once to start and now you can see I'm really only affecting the container this isn't actually affecting the geometry within if I hold down control I can scale about the center point and if i scale to a factor of negative one you can see that's the same thing as Meereen so it's a little trick it makes things a little bit more visual rather than going through a right-click menu I like to use my scale tool and when I'm Mirian things so now we have six houses in a row and let's look at one more example of make unique so if I was to double click into this townhouse really I don't want these blank walls to be here on the sides or on the ends of my townhouse so what I'd really want to do is select these two units and then right click on my selection and choose make unique what that does is it creates basically that save a copy as and now I can go inside of this component and let's just make a copy of this window and we'll just throw a few copies down the way here and look what happens when I orbit around to the other side so now we have that made unique so now all of our changes are updating on all of our our townhouse units on our corner unit so again it's just all about creating the most efficient model possible

Channel: Concept3D

Views: 21,131

Rating: 4.9797978 out of 5

Keywords: Groups, and, Components

Id: FOXQC6S91vc

Length: 27min 1sec (1621 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2012