Modeling a Complete Project in Sketchup for Beginners Pt.2 - Sketchup for Woodworkers

all right welcome back to part two of the sketchup video series so in part one we covered how to make basic shapes and how to navigate your workspace in sketchup and then we went through step by step and modeled this console that you see here in this part we're going to take this model and essentially turn it into a virtual piece of furniture that we can use to build this piece in real life and by the end we're going to know any potential problems that we might run into and we're going to know how much material that we're going to need to buy and i'm going to show you a way to make a nicer export or kind of a more artistic version of your models all that said the biggest benefit for me in doing this is that it really lets me wrap my head around a piece better before i start building and it just helps me to be more confident going into a project now for a lot of people this just might be a lot of extra work that they don't need to do but everybody's brain works a little differently and this is legitimately something that i do for every piece that i build and i guess at the very least by the time you've done part one and now part two of this series you're going to be more than proficient to model your own ideas in sketchup all right so if you have not watched part one you definitely want to go and do that now before you start in on part two and if you're modeling along things are going to move quite a bit more quickly because i'm just going to assume that you've watched part one and that you understand what's going on so i'm not going to be re-explaining the tools every time that i use them and if you are modeling along also be prepared to use the pause button a lot all right let's hop in so our model is exactly where we left off in part one and the first thing that i'm going to do just to make things a little bit easier to see on your end is first i'm going to go to window shadows and turn those on and then we can close that box and then i'm going to go to window and styles and then under the edit tab and the background options i'm going to change the background color to a sort of dark gray and then in the face options i'll choose this option so that the piece is white and i think that this contrast should just make it a little bit easier to see what's going on on your youtube screen you don't need to do any of this in your sketchup model if you don't want to but you can if you like anyway then i'm just going to save this as my style again in my in model options so that i can quickly jump between these two styles if i want to okay so when we initially modeled our carcass i made the top bottom and side pieces all an inch thick and it was also basically just a big monolithic box that included the back panel but maybe i've decided that i want to use three quarter inch plywood so the first thing i'm going to do is change that so i'll use the ruler tool to mark a line three quarters of an inch in from my top panel and then i'm going to use the protractor to make a guideline at a 45 degree angle and the reason that i'm doing this is because we're going to be using plywood and a miter joint is going to hide the plywood edges on the sides but anyway the way that you're going to do this is we'll click once here where we want the outside of our bevel to be then i'm going to drag straight down and click again and then i'm going to start angling it and if you're in the circle it'll snap to 15 degree increments but the easiest way to be really specific is after you've started moving it along the degrees in the direction that you want just take your hand off the mouse and type in 45 and hit enter so we're going to go ahead and do that on both sides and then i'm going to use the line tool to trace out the shape of our top panel and then we'll use the push pull tool to make it the proper width and then we can delete our original box and make the top a component okay next i'm going to copy our top panel using the move tool remember we'll do that by making sure that we have this little plus toggled on by hitting our option key and then i'm going to flip it along the component's blue axis and then use the move tool to put it in the position where our bottom panel should go and you might have a little trouble positioning it so what i like to do is get it roughly in place and then i'll kind of hover my move tool over the bottom face of the component not an edge and freeze it to the blue axis and try to reference the top edge of my base and that should snap things together all right next we're going to make our two side panels and we can kind of just fill in the negative space to do this so i'll grab the line tool and trace that out then extrude it to the proper width make it a component and flip and duplicate it along the red axis and put it in position all right things are looking good but now we have to make our back panel so the easiest way to recess a back panel in a mitered case is with a simple rabbet along the back edge so to do that let's start editing the top panel by double clicking it and then i'm going to use the line tool and i'll just hover it over the bevel edge and it should snap to the midpoint and then i'm going to draw a line all the way across the piece and then use the push pull tool to recess it in by a half of an inch which is going to be the thickness of our back panel then we can just do the same thing on our side panel and as you get to the bottom you'll notice that the bottom panel already has the rabbet and that's because it's a duplicate of the top panel so with that all four rabbets are cut now all right next i'm going to get the rectangle tool and make a rectangle from the inside corner to the other inside corner which is going to represent the inside face of our back panel and then we can extrude that to a half of an inch thick and make it a component and there's our back okay here i'm hitting command 3 to jump into a front view of my piece and now i can see that even though our case is looking good our drawers are too small now and that's because the interior of our cabinet just grew by a quarter of an inch in each direction now for that same reason i know that our doors are going to be too small as well so i'm just gonna go ahead and delete all of them and remodel technically we could just edit them but this is gonna be almost as fast and probably easier to explain so the first thing that we need to do is resize our two vertical partitions so we'll just edit them and then use the push pull tool to drag them to our new inside faces and then let's go ahead and hide our back panel for a minute now when we made our first version of this we never modeled in any joinery for our partitions it was just a butt joint but let's say that we want to use the stopped dado for this joint which is probably what i would use most frequently so to do that the first thing that i'm going to do is make a guideline that represents where i want the dado in my cabinet to stop so i'm going to choose 16 and a half inches from the back inside corner so i'll just drag along that direction and type 16.5 and hit enter now if i orbit around the backside actually first i'm noticing that our partitions aren't long enough so i'm going to edit those and bring those equal to the back edge of the inside corner of our rabbit and then we can start drawing in our dados okay so there's a lot of ways that we can do dados i personally prefer a tenon and a thinner dado versus a full width dado where the entire panel sits in it so to draw that i'm going to make a pair of guidelines that are inset from each face on the panel by a quarter of an inch which is going to leave a quarter of an inch wide tenon then to model it in i'm going to make sure that i'm editing my bottom panel and not the partition and i'll draw lines along those guidelines that come down even with the depth of the rabbit that we had just modeled in and then i'm going to use the push pull tool to make that dado even with the guidelines that we drew towards the front of the cabinet then we'll do the same thing for our second partition okay so no need to do this but just to show you here you can see that we've got our dados cut into our top panel as well since it's a duplicate all right now i just decided that i want my left partition to also be a little bit inset so i'm gonna circle around and recess that by a half of an inch and then we'll go back to the back side to create our tenons so i'm actually going to make a duplicate of my top panel just because it's going to be a little bit easier to see what i'm doing and honestly it's going to be kind of helpful for modeling as well but anyway to make the actual tenon i'm going to make sure that i'm editing my vertical partition and use the line tool to draw it to fit the dado then i'll use the push pull tool to extrude it and hover it over the front of my dado and if i look at the bottom right of my screen here i can see that it's telling me that my tenon would be 16 and a half inches long which was how long we made our dado but i know that in real life because i'm going to cut this with a router it's going to leave a round tip unless i chisel it but i don't want to do that so the much easier solution is to make my tenon just a little bit short so rather than 16 and a half inches i'm just going to type 16 hit enter and that's going to leave a half inch gap at the front and then i will delete this line okay now i'm going to duplicate my partition over here just because sometimes it's easier to model without seeing everything else and it'll definitely be easier to watch but anyway next we'll basically just do the same thing again to create our tenon on the bottom of our partition and to extrude it i'll just match what we did on the top then i'm going to do the exact same thing for my other partition and then i'm going to delete all of my extra components and i'll unhide my back panel okay next i want to make an inside chamfer on my exterior panels so the top bottom and the two sides so i'm going to make a guideline a quarter of an inch up from the inside draw a line all the way across and then use the move tool to recess the bottom edge by a quarter of an inch and that's going to create a 45 degree chamfer then i'm just going to do the same thing on the side panels as well all right now let's make our drawer faces so what i'm going to do is get the line tool and let it snap to the inside edge of my vertical partition and then i'm going to draw a rectangle all the way around this cubby and then i'll make that a component and actually looking at it i think i want this partition to come forward a bit so i'm going to use the push pull tool to bring it up flush with my chamfer okay now let's go back to editing this panel and i'm going to get my line tool and let it snap to the midpoint and then draw a line all the way across and delete the bottom half of the panel so this is going to be a drawer face and i want it to be three quarters of an inch thick so we'll go ahead and use the push pull tool to make that happen and now at the moment this drawer face is the same size as the opening which obviously wouldn't work so i'm gonna have to make myself some eighth inch gaps so with the push pull tool selected you can kind of see how this face gets these dots whenever i'm hovering over it so i wanna move above it to just where it stops being highlighted and even though i can't see it i'll know that my top edge is selected so i'm just going to click and then drag it down and type 1 forward slash 8 to move it the appropriate amount which is 1 8 of an inch then i'm going to do the same thing on the left and right sides of the drawer face but not on the bottom and then i'm going to copy a duplicate all the way down to the bottom and then move it up by an eighth of an inch so at this point everything should be looking pretty good except that there's no gap between the two drawer faces so what i'm going to do is select the top drawer face and move the bottom edge up by 1 16 of an inch which is going to do the same thing on the bottom of my drawer face since they're duplicates then i can move the bottom drawer face down by a sixteenth of an inch and then that should leave eighth inch gaps everywhere all perimeters and between the two drawers and by the way if you're wondering how i got into this sort of flattened view go to camera and change from perspective to parallel projection but in any case i'm going to go back into perspective view now all right next i want to put that half circle drawer pull detail back onto our drawer face but before we do that i actually want to put a similar chamfer detail around the perimeter of the dry face and we're going to use a new tool to get that done called the follow me tool so we're starting here with another duplicate of our drawer copied up above into free space and i'm going to make myself a pair of guide lines spaced a quarter of an inch in from each edge of any front corner then i'll edit the component and draw a diagonal line next i want to select the four perimeter edges along the front of my drawer face and the easiest way to do that is by double clicking the front face and then holding option and shift on your keyboard and clicking the face once to deselect it which will leave the perimeter edges selected and by the way when you hold option and shift you should see this little subtract icon appear but anyway with those still highlighted get the follow me tool and click on your little diagonal face and that's going to make that detail follow all the way along whatever path you had selected okay with that done now we can cut our finger pull back in and here we're gonna have to kind of emulate a forstner bit so what we're gonna do is get the circle tool and hover it over the midpoint of the top edge on the back side of our face and then we'll start drawing and type 0.75 and hit enter then i'm going to use the push pull tool to extrude a cylinder that goes all the way through the drawer face then i'll select the drawer face and triple click it to make sure that all of the faces and edges are selected and then right click and choose intersect faces and with model then i can delete my cylinder and it'll leave these lines where things had intersected and then i can just delete what i want to get rid of now unfortunately this is gonna delete some of the faces that i needed as well so i'm just going to quickly draw those back in with a series of straight lines and there are ways that you can do this without losing the faces but it requires plugins and a bunch of stuff that's just kind of beyond the scope of this tutorial so this is just kind of a minor annoyance that we're gonna have to deal with for this specific occasion okay but anyway i guess one good byproduct of that is i can show you how to delete unwanted lines without losing faces so if you were to just erase these lines right now you would basically do what we just did in reverse but if you get the eraser tool and hold option while you erase you're basically just making the lines invisible rather than actually deleting them so the faces will stay anyway with that done we'll move on to the sliding doors so let's quickly model those back in i just need to make sure that i'm drawing it long enough so that it's actually going across the thickness of my vertical partition to the face on the opposite side and then i'm going to make it a half of an inch thick and duplicate it so that i'm leaving a quarter of an inch between the two doors and then i'll just recess both a little bit more so that the front door is recessed by a quarter of an inch from the front inside edge of the chamfer okay now i'm going to hide the front doors for a minute so that we can model in the grooves that the doors will need to slide in so here i'm drawing in a few guidelines i'm making this first a quarter of an inch in from the front edge then i'll make another half of an inch away then another a quarter inch away and then one more add another half inch so these are where the doors are located from there i'm going to get the rectangle tool and draw a long rectangle that's half of an inch wide and the entire length of the two cubbies then i'm going to duplicate that and move the copy to where the second groove was going to need to be then i'm going to get the push pull tool and recess that in by an eighth of an inch okay now i'm going to duplicate the bottom panel and move it off to the right here so that you can see the problem that this is going to cause which is that the groove is gonna end a little bit shy of the bevel where in actuality it would extend all the way to the end so there's a few different ways that we can model the sin but the easiest in my opinion is to just draw the lines in really quickly with the line tool so i'm going to snap a line that's running along the same path as the line on the bottom of the groove and then i'll just extend it so that it goes out to the bevel's edge and i'll do the same thing on the other side and you can see these little dots where it's intersecting with the bevel's face so just connect those dots and then erase the lines that you don't need and we'll quickly do the same thing on the back groove okay then if we go over to the other side we'll want to extend these grooves under the vertical partition by another eighth of an inch and that's because we're going to model these same grooves into the partition which is just a matter of making a pair of rectangles and then recessing them in by an eighth of an inch all right so i'm just checking out my model here real quick and it's looking good so now we can move on all right so next we're going to model these grooves into the side panel and we're going to run into that same issue that we did with the bottom panel on the bevel side and typically i would just do the exact same thing that we did on the bottom panel but just to show you something different but kind of equally annoying i could create two i guess you'd say positive molds of the negative spots that i want to create and then i just need to make sure that they were protruding an eighth of an inch into my panel and i could do that whole intersect with model trick and then add back in the lines that i need to fill the hollow spots something different again but equally annoying all right well let's unhide our doors back into the model and then i'm actually going to hide everything in our model other than the doors and the panels that the doors are going to interact with just to make it easier to explain this next part and actually i guess i'm going to hide this panel too and here you can see how the doors will go into our grooves a little bit better so obviously these doors are going to be affected by gravity and thus they're going to need to rest on something so i'm going to extend the bottom down so that it's hitting the bottom of the groove then if we move up to the top we can do the same thing extending it by another eighth of an inch so that it's touching the top of the groove okay now i'm going to duplicate my top panel up here and you can see that right now it's also a flipped duplicate of my bottom panel so i'm going to select the two top panels right click and select make unique so that these aren't the same as the bottom panel anymore then i'm going to edit my top panel by recessing the groove a little bit more now i can see here that there's 5 8 of an inch of thickness left so i'm just going to recess it by another quarter inch then i'm going to extend the grooves through the bevel's face just like we did a few minutes ago and just in case you're wondering why i'm doing this it's because if the top groove is the same as the bottom it would be impossible to take the doors in and out after the cabinet's assembled basically you'd have to put it in mid assembly and then it would be trapped there forever but if we leave some free space on top of the door that allows us to lift it up high enough that the bottom will clear the bottom panel and we could take it in and out okay now let's unhide everything so at this point we know exactly how big our doors need to be so we can quickly model in the finger pool again and things are looking pretty good okay so you might remember in the first video we talked a little bit about iterating on a design but i'm going to do that again just to show you how to quickly model a different style of bass since you might want to play with these kinds of designs 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 look 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 so to do that i'm going to make a duplicate of my entire model and then erase the base then i'm going to draw a 2d rectangle that runs the entire length of the cabinet and from its underside to the ground and then i'm going to bring in each edge by an inch and make it a component okay next i'm going to get the protractor tool and make myself a line at 30 degrees so i'll click the bottom corner drag up click again then start dragging the way that i want the protractor to go and type 30 and hit enter from there i'm going to get the line tool and draw on a line that follows that guideline and this would represent the outside edge of a splayed tapered leg then i'm going to go five inches in to the right from the top and then i'll make another line about an inch and a half in to the right from the bottom and then i can connect both of those and i'm really just guessing here but anyway for this purpose i think this looks good enough so i'm going to make that a component and duplicate it and flip it over to the other side next i'm going to mark a guideline three inches down from the top of my base and then move the bottom line of this rectangle up to that and this is going to become a stretcher and i think it's looking pretty good so with all three of these pieces highlighted i'm just going to right click and hit explode and then with them all still selected i'll remake it into one component all right now i'm going to get the eraser tool and just get rid of all these extra lines that are extending too far and at this point we basically have one monolithic shape then i'm going to get the arc tool and connect these two points and start dragging up and type 1 and enter so that the arc is 1 inch high in the center from there i'm going to get the eraser tool and erase the straight line and then i'm going to get some guide lines again and mark some lines that are one inch away and parallel to each of these lines and then i'll use the arc tool to create a transition between those points okay then i'll do the same thing on the other side and give this thing some thickness by using the push pull tool to drag it towards the background by one and a quarter inches okay so now i'm going to just quickly go through the rest of this i'm basically just deleting some of the extra lines and drawing in some minors but the whole goal here is just to look at the two side by side to see which i prefer and i actually think that i like this version on the left a little bit more for this design so i'm gonna go with that one and i'm just gonna get rid of this tapered leg base okay so at this point we have a full model and we could go out and actually build this piece we have all the information well other than drawer boxes we never made those but just for example you could make yourself detailed drawings of specific pieces or whatever you need to help yourself get the job done and we've also encountered and solved a lot of the issues that we might have run into while we were building so the next thing that i'm going to show you is how we can use our model to figure out how much wood we're going to need to buy so to do that i'm going to duplicate my entire model and then i'm going to draw a 4x8 rectangle that represents a sheet of plywood then i'm going to nest all of the plywood panels within those and then i'm going to group together my hardwood pieces of similar thicknesses thickness and based on that i can see that i'd want three pieces of four quarter hardwood material that's at least six inches wide and eight feet long and i need one piece of eight quarter hardwood that's six inches wide and eight feet long and then for the plywood i would buy two sheets of three quarter inch material and i would end up with a huge chunk left over for another project and then i'd buy one sheet of half inch material which i'd use for my back panel and i'd be able to get my drawer box material from this as well okay so there's just one last thing that i want to show you and this was something that i used a lot whenever i was doing commissioned builds and i wanted to show a client what the piece might potentially look like in a more artistic representation but not really a full-blown render so let's start by getting rid of everything other than our model and then we're just going to orbit around until we find an angle that we want to use and once i have it i'm going to go up to view and pick animation and add scene so once you do that this little scene button is going to show up at the top of your workspace and if we accidentally orbit or zoom or whatever we can click this button and it'll always put us back in this exact view okay next i'm going to bring up my styles window and essentially what i'm going to do is composite a few styles over one another to make something more artistic looking so in my opinion the best styles come from the sketchy edges and the straight line tabs and you can just click around on them and see what appeals to you but i'm just gonna kind of randomly pick two and then export those so once you find one that you like you can refine it a little bit in the styles window by messing around with these options here and then i'm going to go to file export and 2d graphic and save it to my desktop or a folder wherever you want then i'm going to quickly select a different style and do the same thing and then i'm going to export one more graphic by making sure that the edges box is unchecked so that it looks like this and this is just going to be a shadow layer oh and by the way i had made sure that shadows were off in the first two that i exported okay so from here you're going to need some sort of photo editing software i'm using photoshop but there are free pieces of software that you can use that'll do the same thing and essentially what you want to do is open all three photos in one project but in different layers then you're just going to change the blend mode to multiply and mess around with the opacity then once you like the looks of it you can save it and it'll just give you a more unique artistic look so if i'm being honest this one isn't great but you can mess with it and you can get some pretty cool effects alright well i'm going to leave this one here for now so hopefully you enjoyed this series and if you didn't catch everything don't worry i just recommend watching it again model along and just use the pause button a lot and honestly if you got hung up in any spots like i said before in the first video just google it anything you can think to search has almost certainly been asked in a form or on reddit or honestly there's probably a specific youtube video about it so don't be worried if you didn't catch everything but now you should have a pretty solid foundation to build off of and continue to improve so happy modeling and if you like this video and you want to support the show check out my patreon page you can get a t-shirt and access to a bunch of my old sketchup models and it's a great place to interact with me ask questions and all that good stuff all right i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 240,295

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: pqcEyXs0v4c

Length: 32min 21sec (1941 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021