Modeling a Complete Project in Sketchup for Beginners Pt.1 - Sketchup for Woodworkers

this is part one of a two-part series with the goal of hopefully teaching you how to design and model furniture using sketchup to make a long story short i'm a huge proponent of designing and modeling all of my projects and i'm not saying that sketchup's the only or best place to do that but it's something that i use for every project and i think that some of you might really benefit from it so i just want to get you up to speed as fast as possible so the way that we're going to do that is by modeling a project from start to finish over the course of these next two videos and i don't know if that's the best way to learn but that's just kind of the way that i learn so that's how i'm going to teach so real quick before we dive in just a couple things i want to get out of the way because they might save you some time so who is this video for and maybe more importantly who isn't it for so if you want to learn about every feature in sketchup so that you can become an expert these videos probably aren't for you but if you're a woodworker who wants to learn the 10 of the functionality that's going to get you up to speed and designing within a day then this video is for you so i'm going to keep it all very basic and just try to show you the things that i think are the most important and then from there if you want to dive deeper or you're looking for information about specific things honestly just google it because there's already a ton of information out there and courses being taught by people that are a lot better than me from a technical perspective so with all that out of the way let's go ahead and dive in okay so in this first part we're not going to be concerned about planning out actually building the project and instead we're really just going to cover the beginning stages of modeling and kind of coming up with the aesthetic look of a piece and then playing around with a few iterations of the design then in part two we're going to start getting a little bit more granular with all of the components of the pieces and just troubleshooting problems and basically generating a finished project that we can follow for building the piece in real life and to model everything we're going to be using sketchup make 2017 which is a free version that said any version that you have is going to be fine and probably have all the functionality because we're keeping it very basic so i'm going to recommend watching this video through once and then watching it again and modeling along and to find the software just google something like sketchup make 2017 download and i'm sure you'll find it okay so here we're in sketchup and i'm using a mac so just keep that in mind that for windows things might be a little bit different again just google it if your intuition doesn't work out but anyway it doesn't really matter what your screen looks like but if you want yours to look just like mine go to preferences templates and then choose woodworking inches after you've done that then go into view tool palettes and make sure that you have the large tool set selected so that all of these options appear so at this point you're good to go but your screen might look like this or like this and basically sketchup has a lot of different styles built in and i really prefer to model in a style that i like the looks of and it's simple to digest just makes me the happiest so again if you want yours to look exactly like mine go to windows and styles to bring up this window then i'll go into default styles and choose something like this and then click edit and under the edge settings copy these options then under the faces copy these options and finally under background turn ground and sky off and for the background color choose white then so that all that work is saved in this pull down menu select in model and then click this button to create a style with all of your options now in case you changed anything you can just click on this and all the options will reset again you don't need to do any of this but that's what i like okay so before we do anything you need to learn the absolute most basic functions so hold command and type one to put yourself into a top view or go to camera standard views and select top okay so by far the most common tools that you're going to use to draw are these three tools the line tool the rectangle tool and the push pool tool and you can select them by clicking them or by typing l r and p respectively and to draw for example with a line but this works for any tool there are two ways to do it you can click hold and drag or you can click drag and click and i highly recommend the click drag click method because as we start to build models and you're trying to draw a line from a really specific point to another it's just a lot easier to click once and then navigate through your model and click again to create the line as opposed to having to hold the left mouse button the entire time so just get in the habit early i guess also anytime you start drawing a line by accident and you want to get rid of it before you've committed to it you can just hit the escape key to get rid of it okay so we're in top view and now i want you to click this button right here which is called zoom extents which will kind of center our axis and we're going to talk more about that in a minute but anyway now select the line tool by either clicking this icon or by typing l then click once at the origin and then start dragging to create a line now let's say that we want to create a line along the red axis that's 10 inches long well when you get close to the axis it should snap to it so drag the line to the right and once you see that it's snapping take your hand off of the mouse and type in 10 and enter or return and since the default units are inches right now that's going to make a line that's 10 inches then without clicking the mouse start dragging down which should drag the line on the green axis now type 10 and enter again and there's another 10 inch line then again without clicking drag to the left and type 10 enter and then finally drag back to your starting point and click the mouse once and you've completed a box so you should see something like this but real quick if you don't if you drew the first line and maybe you didn't see anything you're probably just zoomed in too far to see it so don't worry about that just yet just keep following along and we're going to fix it in a second okay back in our model regardless of if you can see anything or not i want you to go ahead and hit command a to select everything and then hit delete because the faster way to build a box is with the rectangle tool which you can click to select or just type r and then with it selected click once at the origin and drag down into the right take your hand off of your mouse and now type 10 comma 10 without any spaces then hit enter and it'll make a 10 inch by 10 inch square and i know you probably are thinking it should be 10 space x space 10 10 by 10 but it's 10 comma 10 for whatever reason i still do that from time to time don't worry about it you'll get used to it okay now so that we can all get to the exact same place because our views might be different at the moment click the zoom extents button the shortcut is shift z by the way and what that's gonna do is make your model fill the screen so basically your square should become really big when you click it okay now let's talk about navigating the workspace so there are three main functions zoom orbit and pan which can be controlled by these three buttons here but if you only learn or use one shortcut or i guess it'd be three shortcuts it's these three so if you're using a three button mouse you'll zoom by scrolling the center wheel in and out then to orbit you'll click on the center wheel and move your mouse around and to pan you'll hold shift while clicking the center wheel and moving your mouse and by the way if you want to use the exact mouse that i'm using i'll throw a link in the description i've had this one for a few years now it's not too expensive and it works perfect for this kind of stuff anyway if you have a two button mouse to zoom you'll need to either click on the magnifying glass button or click z on your keyboard and then drag in and out while holding the left mouse button then to orbit you'll hold control plus command on your keyboard while holding the left mouse button and to pan you'll hold control plus command plus shift on your keyboard while holding the left mouse button and i know that kind of sounds convoluted at first but just watch me here's the workflow you're basically just resting your pointer and ring fingers on command and control and then using your middle finger to add in shift when you need to pan and release it when you don't okay there's a good chance that you're messing around and kind of got lost in space at this point so let's all get back to the same place by typing command plus one that way we're looking from the top down at our model and then click command 7 which will give you an isometric view then click zoom extents or shift x that way we should all have the same view now okay so you know how to draw a line you know how to draw a rectangle now let's make a cube since after all it's supposed to be 3d modeling so to do that we're going to select the push pull tool or just type p on your keyboard now you should notice with the tool selected as you hover over your square the face gets these dots on it that means if you click you'll select that face so let's click once then start moving our mouse up take your hand off the mouse and then type 10 and enter now hit the zoom extents button once more and you should see your cube okay from here i would say get comfortable playing around with what we just learned and you can try drawing the cube again practice zooming in and out on it try orbiting around it panning around just kind of get comfortable navigating the environment and it might feel a little bit weird at first but it's like learning to walk once you get used to it it's just second nature and you can quickly zoom around your objects so go ahead and hit pause do that and then when you're ready to move on un-pause the video okay we're ready to start modeling so let's start by hitting command one to go to the top view and then zoom out on your box so that it's kind of small maybe about like this hit command a to select everything and delete awesome so whenever i'm designing furniture it's usually to fit a specific space or there's specific dimension requirements so i always like to start with those kind of model a box that represents that and then model within those parameters so in my model the first thing i'm going to do is draw the overall dimensions so from the origin with my line tool selected i'll click once start dragging to the right and type 7 and the symbol for feet which is an apostrophe and hit enter from there i'm going to drag down along the green axis and type 20 and hit enter for 20 inches then i'm going to start dragging back to the left and i could do this and type 7 feet again like we did last time but instead i'm just going to hold the shift button once my line has snapped to the red axis and that's gonna sort of freeze it to that axis and from there i'll just hover my mouse over the origin point and click again and that's gonna create a line the exact same length and parallel to my original line then finally i can drag back up to my origin and click again to create my rectangle okay now i'm going to orbit a little bit so that i'm looking at my model in more of a 3d environment and i'm going to grab the push pull tool click on the face and start dragging up and then type in 24 and enter so at this point we have a box that's 7 feet long 20 inches deep and 24 inches high and this represents the overall footprint of the media console that we're designing now i know that i'm going to want to do some kind of base on it so i'm just going to take a guess and move the bottom up by six inches using the push pull tool so now at this point we have a shape that represents the cabinet portion of our console okay let's stop here for a second because this is a really big tip honestly i think this is the biggest factor in determining success or failure when somebody first starts using sketchup and that is using components so think of components as the individual parts of a piece of furniture so using this table as an example within a room i might have this whole table as a component so that i can move it around then within that i might have the top and base as two separate components and within the base the legs and stretchers might be their own separate components and so on and so on now the reason that this is so powerful is because it makes it so much easier to model and iterate on a design whereas if you're not using components the whole model's kind of just one big blob and it just makes it really difficult to use going forward and there are other advantages too which we'll start to show as we get a little bit deeper all right so components are super powerful and extremely helpful and thankfully they're also really easy to create and use so here's how you make them looking at this cube for example first let's use the selection tool which is the pointer icon here and the shortcut for this one is another good one to know just press the spacebar anyway with this selection tool well selected if we click on a face or an edge of a piece it'll select just that one thing if we double click something it will select that thing and everything that it touches so for example double clicking this face will select the face and the four perimeter edges and finally triple clicking will select everything that it's touching and everything that those things are touching in other words the entire cube so we triple click pretty quickly click click click then click on this tool or hit g on the keyboard to create a component then just click create and you can name the components if you're a super organized individual and that probably becomes more important if you're working on a really gigantic model maybe like for architecture or something but for furniture i've never made a model that's so big that it's that important so i usually just kind of skip that okay but anyway jumping back into our model let's go ahead and triple click to select the entire box and hit g to create a component and just to be a good boy one time i'll go ahead and name this one cabinet all right now to continue editing a component you have to double click it and you can't really tell here because there's nothing else in the model but the rest of your model should kind of fade away a little bit when you do that but anyway if you don't open up the component by double clicking it you'll just be modeling on it rather than within it i guess you can think of it like power carving a piece of wood that was sitting on top of a tree stump versus power carving the actual tree stump that's not a very good analogy but whatever anyway now we're going to use a new tool which is the offset tool so what this does is makes a series of lines that are offset by a specific dimension from a perimeter that you choose so in this example with the offset tool selected i'll click once on what would be the front of our console start dragging and so that the lines appear i'll then type one and hit return to make an offset that's to the inside by one inch and this is going to represent the thickness of our top bottom and side panels eventually then i'm going to get the push pull tool click on the inside portion of the box and start dragging it towards the back of the cabinet and since i know that the cabinet's 20 inches deep and i want a back panel that's three quarters of an inch thick i'll just type in 19.25 and hit enter then to get out of the component so that i can stop editing it i'll just get the selection tool and click on any blank space in my window all right so right now we've got a really long box and we're definitely going to need some vertical partitions to keep things from sagging so to model those i'm going to get my rectangle tool and draw a rectangle face that perfectly matches the inside face of my side panel and by far the easiest way to do that is by clicking in one corner then moving my mouse to the diagonally opposite corner and clicking again then i'll get the push pull tool and i'm going to drag it towards the outside and type .75 since i want it to be three quarters of an inch thick and then i'll triple click it and hit g to make it a component now we're going to use another new tool which is the move tool which we can get by clicking this icon here or by typing m on our keyboard now with a bunch of tools in sketchup you can use your arrow keys to lock them to the three different axises axi anyway so here i'm just demonstrating that and honestly i can't recite which is which so i'm not going to teach you something that i don't even know but just click them and find the one that's right and it'll kind of become muscle memory even though you don't consciously know you're doing it like you know making your heart beat or something okay so back to what we're doing let's make sure that our vertical partition is selected and then click m and you'll notice that when we have the move tool selected as we click the option or alt key on a mac it toggles this plus symbol on and off so if it's off and we move something we'll just move that original component and if it's on when we're moving something it will leave the original component where it was and then move a copy of that component so with the partition selected and the move tool in duplicate mode that's with the plus i'm going to click once on the bottom left corner of the component and then move the duplicated component all the way over to the opposite side of the cabinet so that the left side of the component is flush with the left side of the right panel in other words my panels aren't to the inside of the side panels they're actually on the inside of them like a ghost going through them anyway then i'm going to click again to release the object and then without touching anything i'm going to type forward slash and three to divide the cabinet into three perfectly equal spaces and you could type divide by two divide by four divide six divide a million well probably not that and it will make that many components in between the two that you have you can also type times two or times three etc to create duplicates another that far apart so if you dragged it 12 inches the next one would be another 12 inches farther down the line but anyway we just want three and we've got them as soon as we delete the two that are intersecting our side panels and you can see here that now we have three equal sized cubbies in our box okay next i want to add some drawers to the leftmost cubby so i'm going to grab the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle that completely fills that cubby then i'll get the push pull tool and push it into the background direction and type .75 for the thickness and then go ahead and make it a component then i'm going to double click it so that i can edit it and then get my line tool and hover roughly over the center until i see it snap to the center and then draw a line directly across my piece by holding shift as soon as i'm snapped to the red axis and then i'm going to get my push pull tool and push it in by .75 and that'll make it disappear next i'm going to get the move tool and grab our drawer face right here at the top left corner and hit alt so that we're duplicating the piece and then we'll copy a duplicate underneath the original so that we have two equal sized drawer faces filling our cubby now another thing that makes components so useful is that as you can see here if we double click it and start editing one of the drawer faces anything we do to that one component will happen to all the duplicates of that component okay so i'm going to undo all that by hitting command z to undo a few times and i'm also going to show you that if you ever want to make something that's a component not be a component anymore i can right click it and choose explode and then if i alter the original this one isn't going to change anymore but there's actually a better way to do this so let's undo a couple times to get back of them both to being one single component and then instead i'm going to right click and choose make unique and that's going to leave it as a component still but it will be a unique component and so editing it won't cause the other component to change all that said we actually do want these two to be duplicate components for now so let's undo again a few times to get back to where we were okay so things are looking pretty good and next i want to add some sliding doors that'll overlap each other but we've got a problem right now because in order to make them slide we need to recess this vertical partition by a little bit which we'll do right after we think squarespace for sponsoring this video so i've been using squarespace for about four years now and honestly it's been great prior to that i used to code everything on my own which is fine if you like doing that but it's hard and takes time and honestly the outcome wasn't as nice as the templates that i use now with squarespace and the worst part was it was taking me away from doing the things that i really should be focusing on like getting better at sketchup now in addition to squarespace making it super easy to build and maintain your site by domains and all that stuff they also have plenty of e-commerce which has been really helpful since we started selling plans things like inventory management a simple and secure checkout process and unlimited products allow us to easily manage our online transactions so if you're thinking about starting a website or even if you have one already that you think could be better you up to yourself to at least check out squarespace and see if it might be a better option for you just head over to squarespace.com4i's for a free trial then when you're ready to launch use the offer code 4i's to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain all right thanks squarespace now let's get back to recessing that vertical partition so i'm going to right click it and make it a unique component and i'm not sure how recessed i want it just yet so i'm going to use the push pull tool to recess it by just one and a half inches for now next i'm going to grab the line tool and let it snap onto this corner here then i'm going to start drawing a line along the red axis and i'm going to hold shift as i do that so that it's frozen to that axis and i'm going to sort of hover my mouse on this face of this panel here which will make the line exactly long enough to come equal with this plane then i'll click once and start dragging up along the blue line again holding shift to freeze it to that line and then i'll hover my mouse over this corner so that i know that the line is coming up exactly to the underside of the top and then i'll click again and work my way back to complete the rectangle then i'm going to use the push pull tool to make this panel a half of an inch thick and make it into a component okay now i'm going to zoom into this panel and use the move tool to inset it by a half of an inch then i'm going to duplicate it and recess that panel by another three quarters of an inch so that it's a quarter of an inch gap between the two and i can see now that my partition isn't recessed enough so i'm going to double click it to edit it and then use the push pull tool to recess it a little bit more and i can see here that it needs to be at least a quarter of an inch more but we'll just go ahead and do a half of an inch then finally i'm going to grab the move tool again and drag the back panel along the red axis until its left side snaps equal to the inside of the right side of the panel of the carcass so at this point our cabinet's looking pretty good so i guess maybe the next thing that we should do is add some drawer pools and i'm not sure what i want but let's start off with a simple half circle on the top edge so i'm going to double click so that i'm editing the drawer face component and then grab the circle tool and then i'm going to hover on the top edge until that i see it snapping to the midpoint and then i'll click and start dragging out and then i'll type in a dimension and i'm not sure how big i want this so i'll just experiment by typing 0.5 and hitting enter i can hit 2 and enter i can keep hitting numbers and enter to try different sizes and i think that 0.75 is going to be pretty good now i'm going to go ahead and hide my carcass just so that we can get a better view so to do that i'll just right click on the component and then select hide now if i double click my component again i can get the eraser tool and delete the half of the circle that's extending beyond my drawer face then i can use the push pull tool to recess the other half of the circle until it's equal with the back side of the drawer face and that'll make it delete okay i like the look of this handle for now so let's go ahead and do the exact same thing on our two sliding door panels all right now to unhide my carcass unfortunately it's going to be off screen but i'm going to go up to the toolbar and choose edit unhide all all right so i think we're done with the cabinet for now and actually if i use the move tool i can kind of see how the sliding doors are gonna function but anyways let's start working on the base for now so i'm gonna start with a really simple leg so i'll just use the line tool and snap it to the bottom right right corner of the carcass and then draw down along the blue axis and use the origin as the reference point so that my foot's coming down to what would be the ground plane then i'll click and drag to the right along the red axis and type 1.5 so that it's one and a half inches wide and then i'll draw back up and then to the left to complete the rectangle then i'm going to use the push pull tool to make this piece an inch and a half thick and then make it a component next i'm going to get the move tool and duplicate this leg across to the right side of the cabinet and now let's actually pause for a second to learn a little bit more about the select tool so at this point we know that we can get it by pressing the space bar and you can select edges faces components and so forth and to select multiple things you can hold shift and keep clicking to add things to your selection but sometimes the faster way to do that is by dragging a selection box over the objects to select them and you can do this by dragging right to make a box or dragging left to make a box but they do different things basically if you drag to the right it will only select things that you've completely captured in the box so for example here i've just selected the left leg the two drawer faces and the leftmost vertical partition because those were the only things that completely captured in my box now if you make a box by dragging to the left you'll select everything that your box touches so for example here i've selected the left leg and the entire carcass because my box just barely kissed both of those objects so it doesn't make a huge difference at this point but later on it could so i just wanted to make sure that i took a second to explain that but anyway for now i want to select my two legs and the easiest way to do that is by dragging a selection box from right to left that just touches my legs and nothing else so with those selected we can get the move tool and duplicate both of those at the same time to make two more legs on the back side of our cabinet okay next i want to make an apron so i'm going to use my rectangle tool to start drawing on this face and after i've started dragging in the direction that i want it to go i'm going to type 1.5 comma 1.5 to make an inch and a half by an inch and a half square then i can use the push pull tool to extrude that all the way over to my other leg and make it a component okay now i want to make a duplicate on the back side and your tuition is usually going to be to hover your move tool on the object itself but you don't have to and it's often easier to use other objects or faces as reference points so for example here i already have my stretcher selected but i'm actually going to hover the move tool over the front outside bottom of my leg then when i duplicate it and start moving my copy i'll just move my cursor to that same corner on the back leg and i know that that'll move the copy of the stretcher to the exact direction and exact position that i want it and i know that might sound weird for now but the more used you get to using sketchup and using reference points the quicker and more intuitive it'll become now i'm going to use my rectangle tool to make a square from this point to this one and do the same thing for my other two stretchers so we'll extrude it to the proper length make it a component and then duplicate it over to the other side the only difference here is that we're gonna type divided by two to create a center stretcher as well all right so at this point we've got a decent little media console going here but there really isn't any detail yet so let's just make it a little bit more interesting so we'll start by getting our tape measure tool and we'll measure down from the top of the base and type 0.25 to make a guideline that's a quarter of an inch from the top now we'll double click to edit the component and using the line tool we'll make a line across our guideline then we'll use the eraser tool to get rid of the guideline but since we made the guide when we were not editing our component we have to click in empty space with the select tool to get out of editing the component and then we can erase it with the eraser tool and finally we'll edit the component again and using the push pull tool will recess the top by a quarter of an inch now i want to do the same thing on the side face of my leg so i'll just continue that line across the face and again recess it by a quarter of an inch and that's going to leave this extra little line here which we can simply erase okay now i want to make the same detail go around the entire perimeter of our base so i'll start editing the front apron and using the line tool i'll click and then go all the way across the stretcher or the apron and click again and here you can see that we have a problem all of our legs have that same corner recess detail on them but for this leg for example the detail is on the inside of the leg rather than the outside but there's an easy fix but before we get to that let's recess the cut in the top for our stretcher and actually i messed up here and accidentally erased the entire top quarter inch of my apron but i'll fix that later all that you would need to do though is just recess it by a quarter of an inch okay so back to the leg to fix that all we need to do is select it and then right click and choose flip along and the components red and what that's going to do is mirror the piece along the red axis okay so for the back leg on the same side we're gonna need to do the exact same thing flipping the component along the red axis and then finally we'll select both of the legs in the back and again right click and this time choose flip along and green direction to flip both pieces along the green axis at the same time all right next i was gonna flip the back apron along the green axis to fix it and i did but that's when i realized that i had accidentally erased the whole top portion so here i'm just hiding the carcass to get a better look at what's going on and finally i noticed it so i just used the line tool and the push pull tool to get it back to where i wanted it and where you should be right now okay so then i'm going to go ahead and do the same thing to my two side aprons so i'll just draw a line and recess the top by a quarter of an inch and then go over to the apron on the other side and flip it along the red axis and then i'll unhide everything again okay so at this point things are looking good but i want to show you one more thing before we end this and this won't really be a tutorial so much as just kind of illustrating another really powerful feature of working with components and that is iterating so i'm speeding up the video a lot here but the basic idea is let's say that i'm not sold on this drawer pool style and i want to try something else i can just copy my entire model and make the doors unique components and model in a new handle style and then i can compare my model side by side to see what i like better and i could also do this with bases and honestly really anything and this is a super powerful design tool when i'm nailing down a design i often have dozens of variations of a piece that i'll make to just help me get it exactly where i want it all that said we're going to leave this one here and i'll be back with the second part of this tutorial really soon or if you're watching this and it's already later i'll go ahead and put a link to that video in the description or in the screen here all right so i hope you like this video subscribe to check out some others and if you really like it take a look at my patreon page find out how you can support the show get a t-shirt and all that good stuff and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Salomone

Views: 259,796

Keywords: sketchup, sketchup for woodworkers, how to make furniture in sketchup, sketchup furniture, sketchup tutorial, sketch up for woodworkers, modeling furniture in sketchup, drawing furniture, 3D modeling furniture, CAD furniture

Id: AVb8ZBAOD0I

Length: 35min 29sec (2129 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021