GROUPS VS COMPONENTS in SketchUp - When to Use Each!

what's up guys Justin here with the sketch essentials calm back with another Sketchup quick tip for you so I get asked this question a lot so I thought I'd make a quick video about it talking about when you should use groups and when you should use components so I will know today's video is brought to you by the Sketchup essentials course Sketchup essentials courses of course I created to give start-to-finish instruction on things like this for Sketchup so if you're looking for more Sketchup instruction registration for the course is closing tomorrow night at 11:59 p.m. so if that's something you want to check out make sure you check out that link at the Sketchup essentials comm slash course now let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so I get asked the question a lot when do I use groups and when do I use components and there's a fairly simple answer to this but I wanted to walk through some kind of examples of when this can be important so basically my rule is anytime there's a chance that I'm going to be creating a copy of something I create a component otherwise I create things as a group so for example one of the things that you do a lot of is when you extrude walls inside of Sketchup so let's say to extrude this to 10 feet I would probably create this as a group so you always want to group your geometry to keep things from merging together and creating a big mess so for example like I don't want these things connected because the faces stick together so what I would do for my walls is I would select them right click and I would make them a group and the whole reason for that is to keep these from merging together so that you don't have that sticky geometry sticking things together and any time you make changes it kind of turns into a nightmare but there's really no reason in this situation unless I'm gonna be creating a copy of these walls to make this into a component so if you remember one of the things about components and we'll jump over here for a second is this is a row of groups this is a row of components well if you make a change to a component all of the other instances of that object inside of Sketchup are linked together so you can see how if I make one change to this object all of the other objects change as well however if I was to do the same thing over here you can see how if I make a change to one group the other groups are not linked to this original group so you don't have that where things are changing inside of your model other than the thing that you're changing so this can be really really useful for things that repeat inside of your models talk more about that in a second but so for example these walls I would make as a group so if I was to extrude my roof like this and I've already got the whole profile modeled in here all the way across the way that it needs to be then I would create my roof as a group because there's not a copy of it anywhere and I'm not gonna need to make adjustments however let's say that we were to only model half of this and use symmetry to model the other half well then I would want to make this a component so I would want to make this half I'll call this a roof half you need to make sure this box is checked then if I was to make a copy of this and flip it with the scale tool and then move it back well now you can see how that component is changing at the same time as this component so you could use this to use symmetry to only have to model half of your roof instead of your whole roof so if there was something in here like this roof copy I would want to use a component because whenever I changed this one I'm gonna want this one to change as well so another example of this is if I was modeling out a table so let's say we had a very simple table like this and let's say I was to model out the apron well if I was just going to model the apron like this I would make it a group so I would say this would be three and a half inches thick I would select all of it and I would make it a group because there's no copies of it anywhere that are going to need to change however if I was to model this out as if I was creating a cut list what I would do instead is I would make this a component and I would call this apron piece and we could go ahead and say it's 38 inches long and then I would just make multiple copies of it in order to make my apron so I would use the rotate tool in copy mode and then these four copies would be instances of that same part so if I ever needed to make a change like let's say I wanted to shave off something on the bottom or let's say I was to like round off one of the edges the others would change as well so in this situation a component would make more sense for each one of these where this a group would make more sense and so I would do the same thing for the legs in a situation like this I always make the legs a component call this table leg in case I ever decided I needed to make changes I would take this do the same thing I would make copies of these and then the legs are all instances of the same component and that means if I ever decided to make it change to one of them so let's say I wanted this to taper inward or something like that you can see how because these are linked that means I wouldn't have to go back and do the same work for different times anytime I make a change so it really kind of depends on the way that you're building things but as a general rule when things repeat you want to use components and then the last example I have of this is let's say we were modeling at a house like this one and we had a light fixture it was gonna be on the outside of the wall and I'm gonna go ahead and make a copy of this so we'll have two of them but let's say we modeled these all out as groups whoops so let's say I took this object and I had a bunch of them running along the face of my house like this and we're assuming they're all gonna be the same fixture well what if something changed in one of these so for example let's say the outside of this housing was a red color or let's say I wanted to change this to a red color well you can see how even though I added a red color over here I still have to manually add that red color to each one of these so it's a really time-consuming process however and we'll go ahead and delete these guys out let's say I was to do the same thing but with a component so light fixture and we were to make five copies of this fixture well now if I decide that I want this piece to be red I only have to go in here and change it once and all the other instances of the component change as well if I decide I want to go back to the white color I just have to change one and the others change as well so this can be a huge time-saver whenever things repeat in your model so the groups are good for separating non-repeating geometry from each other inside of Sketchup components are really good for things that have multiple different instances insider Sketchup so that's Herrmann in this video leave a comment below and let me know what you thought was this helpful to you do you get the difference between groups and components now I just love having that conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week 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

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Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup 2020, sketchup groups vs components, groups vs components, sketchup groups, sketchup components, sketchup components when to use, sketchup when to use components

Id: 02UB70CgT10

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020