Managing Groups and Components in SketchUp with the Outliner - The SketchUp Essentials #18

[Music] what's up guys Justin here with the Sketchup essentials comm back with another Sketchup essentials lesson for you today I've always I've always been a little bit OCD but I always kind of liked keeping my keeping everything in my models organized just makes everything a little bit easier for me to get to especially when I start dealing bigger models and stuff like that now one tool that I always use in order to do this is the outliner so the outliner is a section that's found in the tray on the right hand side of your screen if you don't have the tray you can go up to window and under default tray you can just click show tray just like this and one of the options it's going to be in here is this option that says outliner and basically what the outliner is is it's a section that lists all of your groups and components and the ways that the ways that they're grouped in your model so I'm in a default model for example it always comes in with this default component named Chris in Sketchup 2017 and as you can see since Chris is a group in your model Chris shows up on this list right here and you can come in here and you can edit the various information regarding the Chris model just by right-clicking on this piece right here so you can come in here you can rename it you can come in here and hide unhide so there's there's a fair amount of things you can do in here but let's let's go ahead and get a little bit more in depth with this so so let's say for example that I've got this rectangle here let's say that I extrude it and I make it a group so if I click in here and I make it a group as you can see that shows up in your outliner as group so as soon as you create a group it's going to show up in your outliner so anyway as soon as you create this rectangle and you make it into a group you can see group shows up in your outliner just like this so it starts off very generic when this goes in here and then if I come in here and I create another one of these then that'll also show up as group so then this will happen is many times as you create new objects that come in here so they'll just start off and they'll just come in here as generic groups but what you can do is you can come in here and you can right-click on it and you can rename it so you can call this small rectangle you can click on this one and you can call it big rectangle that way you know what your different items are in your group so and that way you can come in here and if you hide an object in your model you can see that this turns gray so all the items that are hidden in your model are going to be gray in the outliner and you can come in here you can manage that visibility so you can come in here and right click on these and click hide you can click unhide so you can manage that stuff you can also nest groups in here so let's say for example that I made another group in here and I called it medium rectangle just like this so now I've got three rectangles in here you can what you can do is remember that in the past what we've done is we've done a shift-click and we've right clicked and we've put things you know multiple groups in a group so it's called nesting groups so you can do that here so each one of these groups is now in here and which what happens when you do that is all of the items in the group show up with this little file structure underneath your main group so you can call this like group of rectangles and then you can minimize that so that you know that your group of rectangles is here and then you can maximize it when you want to get in here and actually edit the individual pieces so you can use that to keep everything kind of a managed and organized and I've actually done this in the past where I've been pulling quantities out of giant architectural models and I've used this to a group different geometry so that I could more easily quantify stuff so you can definitely use this to manage groups and then if you come in here and you delete all of these then they'll be they'll be removed out of your outliner as well so and you can also click and drag so if I wanted to put you know my big rectangle in my small rectangle in my medium rectangle group you can click and drag those or if you want to get things back out of groups you can just drag them into an upper-level thing so it's a lot like you know dealing file structure in Windows Explorer or anything else like that I mean if you just think of these as like files you kind of manage them the same thing and the other thing about these is if you look up here in the entity info once you name these the instance item in here becomes your group name so if I was to come in here and call this extra big rectangle in the instance box up here then that would change the name of your item down here so the name of each individual instance of an item also shows up in the instance box in the entity info so now that we kind of have an idea of what these things do for groups let's talk a little bit about components I know we've done a whole lot with components in the past so and for those of you that aren't familiar with components components are basically repeating instances of the same group where if you change things in one of them it'll change in all of them so I'll give you a quick example so if I go ahead and create this kind of cylinder looking shape I come in here and make it a component you know then it asks me to name the component and if I don't do that you can see this will just put this in here just as component number one so let's undo that but if I do if I go in here and I click component and I call this cylinder it's going to call this instance of this item cylinder in here so you see that shows up and it's kind of inside these inside these little brackets and so what we can do is if I make a copy of this then another copy of the cylinder shows up and I make like five copies of this so I have five total all of these different instances all show up in the list just as cylinder like this but you can come in here and for each one of these if you want you can go ahead and name each individual ones so like left cylinder you can see what happens even though these are copies of the same thing you can name individual ones in here so you can use that to kind of manage these things so you can come in here and you could call this one right cylinder but as you can see it still keeps the name of the component over here so it's still showing you that these are all instances of the item cylinder right here and like like we talked about these are all the same instance of the same earth they're all the same component so you can come in here and edit one of these and all of them will change so what happens so in the past what we've done is you can shift click and you can make items unique right so if you wanted to take these two and make them different from the other components in here you could select them and you could right click and click make unique and you see what that does is that renames these into cylinder number one so now these four items all say cylinder they're all instances of the same item so now if I come in here and I change these only these four change and if I change this one then the one on the end will change as well so what this does is it gives you an indication every time you've got something with the same name like this so every time you've got cylinder in here you know that it's an instance of the same item and then what you can do is you can come in here and you can group these and you can call this base cylinders and then you can group these two and you can call it and cylinders and so if I move this down you can see that the group called n cylinders contains these two items right here and this gives you a whole lot of flexibility whoops because you can come in here and you can hide individual items if you want you could this is also a great way when you start getting a ton of things in your model to figure out what's hidden and what isn't so you can come in here and if you've organized this well you can come in here and see exactly what you're showing what you're not now if you haven't organized this well I've come in here and I've just had like thousands of groups in here and nothing else so you kind of have to keep up with it as you go otherwise you can kind of get yourself in trouble but it's just a really great way to come in here and just manage a whole bunch of stuff and as you can see if I right-click on one of these items you get the same kind of menu generally speaking as you get if you right-click on the item out here with a couple extra things like renaming and stuff like that so you know if you wanted to come in here and you want to lock a couple of these items so that you couldn't change them you see when I try to edit another instance of this it tells me that I can't do that because some instances some instances the component or locked so you can see in here a whole lot of information about these different items you can also come in here and if you don't like double clicking you can click Edit component and you can get in here and just pick whichever one of these you want to edit just by right clicking and clicking edit component so it's just a real powerful way to kind of manage stuff in your model and I just love using it it just you know especially once you start dealing with really big models it makes your life so much easier to be able to kind of manage where everything is and kind of know where everything is and be able to see all of that it's just a really great way to keep everything organized but also I don't know if you've ever done this once you start like nesting components and stuff like that you start hiding things inside groups and then your outside groups and you click unhide and things won't on hide because you're not inside the group you know that you were in before it's just a much easier way to come in here and manage all of this stuff so anyway this is just a quick overview the outliner you know originally I didn't know how to use but now that I now that I do I love it it really makes my life a whole lot easier but I'd love to hear what you guys think about this are you guys using this tool did you know it was here we've comment below let me know also if you wouldn't mind taking a second clicking that like button I'd really appreciate it that really helped me out and as always if you're new around here make sure you click that subscribe button coming out with new sketchup tutorials and videos all the time and I'd love to have you along for the ride and just wanted to say thank you again for you guys taking the time to watch this video I really appreciate it so in any case thank you very much for watching and I'll catch you in the next video [Music]

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 66,292

Rating: 4.9720836 out of 5

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2016, sketchup 2017, sketchup outliner, sketchup groups, sketchup components, sketchup, outliner, sketchup 2017 outliner, sketchup outliner 2017, outliner sketchup 2017, sketchup outliner tutorial, outliner in sketchup, outliner sketchup, components, outliner in sketchup 2017, how to manage components in sketchup, organizing sketchup

Id: Dp3AAhrYbpw

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2016