KBIS 2021 03 - Getting the Most Out of LayOut

all right hey guys we got another minute so we can start but i'm anxious i'm excited so i'm gonna hop on and just say hi to everybody uh quick introduction my name is aaron dietzen they call me the sketchup guy because uh actually i call myself that an email and it kind of stuck that's how that all happened but uh welcome welcome to the sketchup booth welcome to our sketchup demo this is our third demo of the day uh we had eric schimel finney showed us some cabinet demos earlier using uh his his extension sketch this to put in some cabinets and then tammy cody got on and walked us through some very helpful tips in designing a bathroom so it's awesome to see you all here we're gonna just in a minute or so we're gonna start and we're gonna take a look at layout we're gonna hop in and uh i got about 20 minutes or so of some layout tips especially starting layout so if you if you already use layout that's awesome i have some tips that will help you if you haven't gotten all the way into layout uh that's that's kind of the the key for what we're looking at here uh assuming you kind of got some sketchup chops you know what you're doing with sketchup and you're ready to take it to the next level so you want to add layout to your repertoire that's that's what we're shooting for so welcome people are still signing in we will get started just a second here uh i do have a question since k business being a little funny having some issues with our site i'm just wondering how you guys got logged in or signed up for this was this uh through kbiz you you found out if you can throw that in the chat that'd be awesome um so both maya and tamara are asking uh how to get a list of the sessions the best way is to get them through the kbis site where we have all of them listed um i'm not sure if we can get a i'll see if we can find a way to get a direct link if the biz site is still down it should be back up so hopefully cave is by the time we get out of here we'll walk out and the the show floor will all be busy abuzz and running smoothly so that's that's my theory that's what i think is going to happen i hope so all right enough of talking about what could happen let's go do some actual stuff all right so i'm sorry if you did just join my name is aaron and i'm just going to walk you through some some uh layout stuff so we're going to take a look at uh what there we go uh some some tips on how to get the most out of layout so we have some stuff here if you're just starting to use layout we have some stuff there but if you're actually already in there want some ways to tweak your workflow we'll cover some of that too so i'm in layout right now this this slide they're showing was made in layout i'm gonna hop over and we're going to start with a layout document so this is a super simple layout document but it touches all the pieces of layout that i want to look at so it is two pages you can see here on the front i have this kind of three-quarter angled view just just a sketchup model it's not rendered anything like that it's pulled straight out of sketchup and then on the inside i have a page here where i have a you know north wall west wall of a just a simple kitchen layout and an overhead view got some dimensions and some text on there this is the kind of information we're gonna put together with layout so layout's gonna take those existing sketchup files so all these was pulled from a single sketchup file and make that file into these readable three 2d documents um so the first thing i want to touch on and i'm operating from where a lot of people hop into layout so a lot of people get into layout they start by um looking at sorry hold on one second um they started to lay out and they they kind of hit the wall kind of quick because they don't know exactly what they're doing or they go and lay stuff out and they don't dive all the way into it with the workflow or the proper way of of getting these things done so uh we're going to look at some of that one of the first things that i always recommend is get a good template made first so i'm going to do something right now i'm going to actually pull up the template that this layout document was created from so i'm going to go to file and i'm going to hit new and when i choose new it's going to ask me i have to use a template you can't start with nothing in layout you have to choose a template so i have these defaults here and i also have some over here under my templates my templates my templates will be your templates on your computer but they'll still be called my templates uh these are the ones that that i have created and saved so i'm gonna look at this one called kitchen demo template i'm gonna go ahead and open it up and we're just gonna walk through this real quick um the concept of how to create a template the way you wanna go about creating a template is create a document first so actually go in and make you know you'll make a front page make an interior page you're going to make all the pages and a lot of times i'll do it by actually pulling in a demo model and actually go in and put some dimensions on put some text on edit all that stuff because what's going to happen is as you go in and put that information on there you're going to change your presets right so if the first time you go in and draw a dimension line you're going to set what's my text what is the orientation of the the numbers uh what do i have slash marks or dots at the ends of the dimension line you're going to set all that initially when you create the document and then when you save that document as a template it's going to get saved in so next time you open that template that's already set so what a template comes down to is so we're working from big to small first thing we have is pages so in mine i have two pages i have a cover page and then i have an inside page really the big difference between these two is the title block that's on here so i see on my cover page i have this bigger block down here and then on the inside page i have the smaller title block where just a little bit of basic information the front page has things like the location and that kind of stuff whereas the inside page is really just to call it what page is it and then something that tells it it's part of this document so that's a big thing super simple to set up set that up once don't be doing that every single time add it to your template so then when you create a document it's just automatic the other thing is layers layers for whatever reason don't get used as much in a lot of people i see don't use using layers layers as much as they should i would recommend creating a handful of layers right in the template it's going to make it so much easier to work within your your layout document so you see on this one i have i have cover page text so that's just that that information that's just on the cover page and then i have on every inside page so a separate layer for this title block that's gonna go on all the other pages that aren't cover pages separately from that then i have a layer for text dimensions labels masks and models and then as i create those different items i'll set the appropriate layer to active and then drop them on there so by doing that it's going to make a lot easier to organize your model and view your layout document as you start designing it and again if it's saved in the template you don't have to set it up every time you create a new one it's amazing to me how many times and i i say this when i talk about people not using layout correctly i'm probably talking about how i used it before i realized that i was not using it the right way and i for the longest time would recreate layers every time rather than adding them to template the other thing of course is the rest of this stuff dimension style pattern fill shape style this stuff is all saved in the template so whatever you have set up when you save the template is what's going to be used the next time you go and draw in layout so my my dimension styles are the way i want them in this template before i've done any editing again a lot of people go and put their dimensions on then select them all and change them you can do that or you can change it initially in the template so all right that's enough talking about templates let's get in here and actually uh dive into this file so i'm gonna go ahead and close this untitled i just started and we're gonna go back to this one so i created here uh this simple kitchen like i said real simple layout uh so let's look at what this actually consists of because one of the most important things with having a successful layout file is connecting it to a successful sketchup file what do i mean by that let's go ahead and we'll just hop over here go into sketchup so here this is sketchup this is that same view that was already here there it's layouts getting better and better about letting you change your view of a sketchup file but i highly recommend that when you create your sketchup file one of the things you do is you create scenes for any view you're going to actually want in layout so what do i mean by that so here's this is that view from the front i just called it three-quarter i know it's not a true three-quarter view but uh i i positioned my camera here i set my my lighting my shadows the way i wanted them the correct aspect ratio and then i hit save this as a scene so that means when i hop into layout i can just grab that scene put it on there i'm done i don't have to go in and orbit to try to get to the right view one of the reasons that's really important is as you make changes to the model you can jump back to the scenes the same every time if you rely on well i opened it up and i orbited it and then you make a change it's going to be harder to get back to that view potentially so scenes are really nice same thing here i created my north and west wall i created these with parallel projection so i'm looking at just plan view style on these two sides and then for the top down views i created a section plane so i went in and i cut i'm just going to spin this real quick you can see i created a section plane i turned the section plane off so i'm not actually seeing it so if i i can come in here and actually go to outliner would be the easiest way i could turn that section plane back on to see it i turned it off because i don't want to actually see it in my layout file but that was a top view and then i created two top views just because i wanted to have options options are good so i created them uh with two different styles so one was a standard this is the one i was working in this is the normal view and then i created one where i modified the style to monochrome so it's the exact same model nothing's changed about it it's just a different style and then it's saved styles are the one like probably the biggest thing that i always make sure that are set up because you can do stuff like you can change your views uh you can rotate the camera a little bit you can move those kind of things you can turn layers on and off in in layout but you can't change a style in layout unless it's already saved into the model so you can only use your standard styles you can't you don't have the ability to go in and say flip to monochrome or change my profile widths or anything like that that's not available in layout yet so i did this because i wasn't sure what i was going to want to look at when i actually got in there so i actually just saved it as two separate scenes so now when i hop on over to layout i can see that's what i created here is my that three quarter view and on the inside page i have three separate views all keyed to those individual uh views that i created while i was over in sketchup so something else if i look at some of this stuff you'll notice that when i pick on one of these not just the model lights up but the dimensions light up the text the bottom lights up what i did so i talked about this before i created these as part of the template i had these layers turned on so right now i put stuff on the appropriate page so if i turn dimensions off all my dimensions turn off if i turn labels off the labels at the bottom are going to disappear so every item that is in layout is on its own layer but what i did was for each drawing section i grouped everything together so this makes it really easy to come in here and say okay i want to slide this over a little bit i don't have to come in here and do this thing where i go okay select oops selected too much go select be real careful about how much i select i can just pick right here and this whole group is going to move around so even though it's a group stuff can still be on separate layers inside the group if i want to edit it's just an extra step of double clicking and now i'm in that group so now i can actually select the model or the dimension or that that callout at the bottom something else i just want to call attention to is i created this separate layer right above the model layer so model layers is where i actually put my models bring them in right above that called masks one of the things that i run into a lot when i create my models is i create stuff that kind of falls outside of the plane of what i want to actually see when i create my output and that is where masks come into play so my masks are pretty simply i'm going to double click into this group again are just these little white boxes so if i turn masks off you'll see okay there's the geometry of the window that kind of punches out through the the the wall right there um i got the same thing over here on the side view so see this view here's my window geometry coming out so when i look at it from here it's nice because i have a recession where that window is going to go it's pushed back in but when i look at it here i have this little piece popping out so masks if i turn that on is just a white box that i just slid up against the wall and it just covers that and because that layer is above the models layer it covers up that geometry so masking is good people do a lot more with masking where they put frames and all kinds of stuff i like to use it's simple i don't need this geometry hide this geometry from my output um i'm sorry i'm getting excited and starting to talk which is what i tend to do get excited and talk it's kind of my job so what i'm here for but make sure to check my notes i'm not jumping over anything that's important that you guys want to hear which i'm sure you do um all right that's a lot of that is actually i'm doing pretty good uh by the way if questions come up you guys do want to pop it in the questions um oh thank you kathy put a link for the live sessions in there thank you very much kathy uh if you guys do want have specific questions i'm going through or you have questions other questions you want to ask go ahead and throw those into the questions and i'll try to make sure i leave some time at the end to answer those all right so a couple things that i want to point out for if if you you're good you've got this template you've got this but you want some tips for workflows like how do i get the most out of actually working and drawing inside of working inside of layout i'll give you a couple of those one is know about your snaps so object snap and grid snap by default grid snap is turned on so i'm going to turn on grid snap real quick and just show you what this means i'm going to come in here uh what grid snap is going to do is it's going to make you snap to a predefined grid so you can see as i'm moving this around how it's jumping like that that can be okay in large strokes so what i mean by large strokes is like if i have uh i'm just putting in my documents my original layout documents or my sketchup documents i'm dropping them in and i just want to kind of put them on there once any kind of finesse comes along um i'm going to ctrl z a couple times so i put that back where it was so finesse items i mean like this mask right so this this little white box that i want to cover up so i want this to butt up right against the wall of the line and you can see because of my grid snap it won't let me put it right where i want to flush up against the wall so i'm going to come in here and i'm going to turn grid snap off and that's going to give me full motion see i can put this anywhere i want and then that's where i can actually come in here and i can put it right where i need it to be kind of along with that idea is there is a nudge functionality inside of layout something that doesn't exist in sketchup and that's just the arrow keys so if i i'll turn on my key thing and you can see i can actually nudge these things just by hitting the arrow keys just going to scoot it over a couple pixels each time so if you do get into the point where you've got something where almost where it needs to be but you just scoot over a little bit hit those arrow keys and that will help you nudge those things and put them where they need to be all right something else and and you don't have to admit if this is you but i know there's at least some of you out there who draw things in layout over and over and over again and this could be something simple like a box covering up a door because you don't want to see the living room on the other side of the door you just want a solid thing there or maybe you have a a shape you put in something that represents like an over overhead view of a table or electrical call outs or lighting locations where you have 2d representations of things you drop on there and you draw them over and over again or you draw them once and then you open that layout and copy it and then paste it into the other layout i know who you are i've seen you i was you any time you do anything like that anytime you have geometry you want to take and put in and then you want to put it into another model later that's what scrapbooks are so scrapbooks of course are they come automatically installed and there's all kinds of good stuff in here uh title blocks but there's also geometry arrows tons of good stuff they're also completely editable so you can add anything you want into a scrapbook all a scrapbook actually is is an inside secret a scrapbook is just a layout file that's it so like a template a template's also just a layout file it's just set aside is called a template because put in a special folder same thing for scrapbooks so what you can do is you can come into layout grab an empty layout document draw the stuff that you want to keep and then just save that document into your scrapbook it's really that simple when it's in there then what you'll be able to do is anything that's that you created in that document you'll be able to grab and drag on just like you can with the default scrapbooks so any geometry you do over and over again if you have dwg files or detail files you pull in constantly and you're always importing import them once save it as a scrapbook and that geometry can just be dragged and dropped just like that so scrapbooks are awesome it's it's really an underused i think functionality a lot of people don't know how to get the most out of there so check that out if you don't already use that um and then uh here's okay this is probably the biggest one this is the spot people struggle with the most and that is around quality uh so one of the things we hear about sketchup or layout a lot is well it's slow it's clunky it doesn't work fast enough it takes forever to update that's huge and a lot of people say it and a lot of people don't use it correctly because it really all comes down to how you have it set up now i mean that offensive way i'm not trying to pick a fight i'm trying to teach so roll with me so right here i'm gonna look at this document maybe we'll look down here so if i pick a sketchup model so this is my modeling window this is if i zoom out this is my view that i show that that that scene i called to record review if i look at it and i click on it up here in my sketchup model window i'll close these other windows so under sketchup model the most one of the most important things in here is right here this is my render type so in here i have three options i have raster vector and hybrid so if i flip to raster raster is basically a bitmap right so this is a screenshot of what my model looks like in sketchup put on the screen and it's not an attractive thing you can see here i have all these jagged edges around curves it's blurry if i zoom in it doesn't look good but it's fast re-rendering or updating a raster image takes a couple or a fraction of a second so if i do anything to this so if i come in here and i just read change the edges of my model look how quick it redraws that screen so it's about half a second right to update that if i change from raster to vector so i'm going to go ahead and click that and you can already see oh i got the beach ball so i know something's happening uh raster is going to or vector is going to look a lot nicer because what it does is it actually draws vector-based lines over my sketchup lines one of the downsides of course is if i go with straight vector i don't get any of my image files so this tile this tile backsplash i had in here was all an image but since i turned on vector it went away um the downside you just saw is that the the redraw takes a few seconds because it's not just updating an image it's actually going through and recalcing where every line is supposed to be and redrawing it on the screen so it takes a few seconds uh to go through and redraw this image the last one is hybrid hybrid is kind of the as you you all probably guessed it from the name already you'll see my bitmap is going to or my images are going to come back and on top of the images i still have the lines so this is kind of the best of both because i can keep my textured images that i put on there but it also creates those lines it is just as it does take time to redraw because it is still recalculating the line so if i do this it is going to take a couple seconds to redraw but it is probably the best looking one so here's the big thing with those so a lot of times some people will go and they'll switch their images to raster to work and they'll just go do all their work and then manually go through and update everything to hybrid or vector for output that's fine if that's what you want to do the bigger thing is this little check mark right here auto if auto is turned on that tells me anytime i do any change to this box right here re-render it that is what's the time consuming part by turning auto off now if i come in here and i go okay i need to make this a little bit smaller even though i still have it set to hybrid see how it's not it's not redrawing it it's not giving me the best image it's it's kind of shrinking it rather than cropping it kinda but i have representation of what's there and as soon as i make a change i get this little warning sign this is an out of date data and i have to manually come in and say okay go ahead and render it now so if i want to do something like i just did i want to edit the multiple sides if auto is turned on every time i move aside it's going to re-render move the next side re-render move the next side re-render so if i was pulling in the four sides it would take four renders by manually telling it when to render i only have to do that once and it's when i say so so this is when i get to be the big smart pushy human user and not let the computer do what it wants because i'm going to tell it well you're just going to render when i say you render that is a huge huge saver so right there see how i pulled it out and now my lines are hanging over now i hit render it's going to go through take a couple seconds now just once rather than as i moved each corner and then give me my final drawing that's huge the other piece is if i come over here to document setup and here under paper at the very bottom i have this rendering resolution so what resolution is it going to display on the screen and then what resolution is it going to use for output for output i mean generating a file like a pdf or printing your output this output resolution should always be set to high you get the best possible resolution when you output i can't think of a logical reason you would want to not set that to high display resolution depending on your computer how high end your computer is you may want to actually set this lower lower is going to be quicker it's going to be lighter you're going to get less detail in your screen but it's going to be less demand on your computer to generate that so a lot of times you'll see this is the default setup display resolution set to low output resolution set to high auto render turned off on models that's the optimal way to run layout it's a couple extra clicks here and there but it's going to save you a lot of time because you're not going to be constantly waiting for it to reprocess your data all right those are the big things that i wanted to cover we do have a couple of questions so i want to jump over to that um don is asking when do you group the drawings individually so the way that i went through my workflow with this particular document was to bring in my three images then i dropped on my title block for each one then i went in and did my dimensions each of those i was changing the active layer as i did it and then after they were all drawn then i did my grouping select all that here well this is what it looked like then i come in here select all this and then right click and make it a group at that point so i actually went in and drew it first you don't have to you could actually i think you can make a group of one thing so if i have just this drawing um no so i have to have at least two things so i would have to come in here and maybe draw at least one dimension or maybe just when i put my title blocks on there that's enough to actually create that group and then like i said from there on just make sure you double click to enter the group if you want to work in that geometry at all all right uh i'm gonna murder this name it's got little dots above it but i think it's punt uh theo is asking how can we set the exact format of the layout image for example 10 by 15. i'm not a hundred percent sure what you're talking about if you're talking about scale drawings that is a separate thing so i come down here to scale drawing and make a scale drawing and i set the scale i don't think that's what you're asking though if that wasn't the right answer if i'm not answering that right follow up with us either through the forum or reach out through the booth and we can get a better answer for you um i can't be on live can you send me a recording these are being recorded as far as i know i'm not sure how they'll be made available afterwards but uh we are recording them sorry you're not here to hear this answer but everybody who is still here yeah we're recording these so um okay cool uh yeah any other questions that was that was the main things i wanted to get out there uh i think that was just about everything yeah that looks like that's the layouts there's our events um yeah aubry i'm not sure if you're still on or not but uh where do we find the recordings of this or are we making the recordings available i guess you can answer that in the chat that would be awesome uh sure i can actually jump on here real quick so we are recording these and they will need to be processed and then we will probably upload them to youtube or send them out directly through zoom so stay tuned and we'll get them to you in a day or two awesome so yeah sounds like if you're registered you'll find them one way or another which is good because it's hard to do stuff like this where we've got about 20 minutes go ahead and give a whole bunch of tips i know it's like drinking from the fire hose but yeah with that video you'll be able to go through and hopefully step by step with that all right well we're coming up right on one o'clock so i think that's everything i got to say i do want to say thank you guys for hanging out with us thank you for coming by uh hopefully this whole the whole kbiz thing gets sorted and we have an awesome fun virtual show that'd be a lot more fun if we could hang out face-to-face and talk but uh we we do what we can with what we got here so uh if you don't already know about it we do have a handful of demos going on over at the ge booth throughout the day so if you are enjoying sketchup you want some more of it head by the ge booth and i can see they're doing those once an hour for the rest of the afternoon so that'll be fun uh and like i said hopefully it gets working and you can come by swing by the sketchup booth say hi uh let us know if you have more questions but that's it for now thank you guys very much for hanging out and we'll be talking to you soon hopefully [Music] you

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 8,688

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling

Id: DB0_jTW9NGw

Length: 30min 6sec (1806 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021