Modeling Complex Structures in SketchUp with Extrude Tools and Flowify!

what's up guys Justin here with the sketch of essentials comp back with another sketch up extension tutorial for you so in this video we're going to talk about how to use the extensions extrude tools and lo-fi to create kind of a flowing organic structure and there's a few applications for this that we'll talk about in a minute so before we get started I do want to take a second and thank my newest supporters on patreon so thank you very much to Kenneth Smith Callum Cameron Smith and Nicholas batting so you guys are what make this channel possible I really appreciate that you uh you guys want to support the show on patreon as most you know is the website where you can support creators that you like on YouTube so if you like what I'm doing in this channel please consider supporting me at the link down below now let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so if you remember a while ago I made a video about how to create kind of a bent arch structure with multiple offset and a few other things to create kind of a bent structure that goes about 180 degrees and that works fine if you just want to create kind of a long tube with things bent along it but if you have a more organic or more complex shape then you're gonna have to do things a little bit different and use some different extensions and so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna come in here and we're going to use the extension extrusion tools to create a more complex kind of interesting shape and so in this case what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna come in here and I'm just gonna draw an arc and it you don't it doesn't really matter what this looks like at the moment we're basically just creating a kind of flowing organic shape and so what I'm gonna do in this case is I'm gonna take this arc that I drew and I'm gonna make a copy of it with the move tool in copy mode so select this click on it tap the M key click and then tap the ctrl key in order to make a copy and what we're gonna do is we're gonna draw basically some rails so the way that extrusion tool tools works is it takes a line and it extrudes along a path or a pair of paths a middle extrude your shape in order to create more of a complex 3d shape and so I'll show you what I mean so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna draw a couple arcs between these two lines you'll note that I'm going to make these symmetrical I feel like this works a little bit better when you're working with symmetrical shapes though it definitely does work with other complex shapes as well and so the other thing we're gonna do is we're gonna use the extension weld to make this a single line because what extrude tools is gonna ask for is it's gonna ask for a profile and then it's gonna ask for a pair of rails and the rails need to be one line and so in this case I'm just gonna click and drag and select all of these and I'll go to extensions weld and you need to install the weld extension in order for this to work but you can see how now if I click on this no matter where I click on it the whole thing is selected because that extension made this into a single line and so then I'm just gonna take this and I'm gonna make another copy of it or I'm gonna make a copy of it off to the side and then I'm gonna flip it in place and I use the scale tool a lot of people use the mirror tool in order to do this but once you've flipped it in place you can take it and you can move it back and so now what we have is we have a profile and then we have two lines here and then I actually made my second profile over here you really don't need to in this case because I'll explain that in a second so what we're gonna do is we're gonna use the extension extrusion tools and we're gonna use the option for extrude edges by rails and so the way that that works is you can click on this option and it's gonna start by asking you for the profile curve the profile curve is the curve it's going to extrude along the rails and then it's gonna ask for the first rail curve and the second rail curve and so basically what it's looking for is it's looking for the paths along which it should create this face so in this case I'm going to click on this I'm going to click on this for my two rails so you're telling it to use these two rails to create your extruded shape and then what it asks for is it asks for the melding profile curve that's the third thing that it asks for and so that means if you wanted to you could have a different shape on the other side so you could have this be taller or something like that and then you could have this basically what the extension will do is it'll average the faces together to create a face that turns from this into this along your rails in this case though all we need is just original face so if you don't need a second face or a second line on here you can just click on your original line and then once you do that that's gonna create your shape and so it's gonna ask you a few things it's gonna ask if you want to reverse the direction and you're gonna say no it's gonna ask if you want to reverse the faces and I usually say yes because I want the white face facing out and then it's also gonna ask me if I want quad faces so you can see how the way that takes this and creates this right now it's got all these kind of diagonal lines in here well if I say yes then it'll make these in here as quad faces instead of in here as the faces that are split diagonally so in this case I'm gonna say yes quad faces cuz that gives me a lot much cleaner mesh and then it's gonna ask if I want to erase the original curve and I pretty much always say no on this because uh I like to keep my original curve just in case I need to do something else with it so basically what I have and I'm gonna move this off of my original curve is I've got this shape that extrude tools creates by taking this profile and basically just moving it along this line so you can see how you could create some pretty complex shapes with this and so the other thing that's really nice about this when you're working with extrude tools is this basically gives you an object with four corners and if you remember when you use the extension flow fi you need an object with four corners in order for this to work so you can take this and like for example if I was to make a copy of this and then flip it down here and then move it back I've basically got two different faces along here and so what I can do is I can bend a shape along this object with flow Fi and then I can flip it and put it on the other side so you can use this to bend things along the shapes that are created really easily you don't need to modify it or anything like that and so what we're gonna do is we're going to draw a couple target lines off of our object so basically if you were to flatten this out this would have one two three four corners well the way flow fi works is you draw a line to two your four corners in order and then a flat face and you basically tell it to map this object to the flat face and so go ahead and just draw a line up and we'll go ahead and draw a face and then we'll draw another line up over here and so basically what we have is we have our target face we have our base face and we have our two lines and so select those two lines by just clicking on one and then holding the shift key and clicking on the other one and then just right click and say make group and then you're gonna do the same thing with this face just double click to select everything right click and click make group and then you're gonna take all three of these groups and put them in a group and usually what I do is I recommend people that people take a look in their outliner to make sure everything is group properly so you should have an overall group with three objects in it and if you don't group these properly Flo fi is not gonna work right so I have my group right here and then I'm just gonna click on it and to test and see if it works properly you're just gonna go to extensions flow if I impose grid and if you have it set up right you should get a grid that shows up on here so basically it takes this object and it maps it to this face and so now what we can do is we can draw on top of this in order to draw our shape that we're gonna bend along here so I came in here with the rectangle tool and I just drew a rectangle along this face and now I'm gonna hide my flow if I group for just a second so that I can come in and I can work with this face right here and so if you remember in the video I had before about bending things along a face basically what I did is I drew a series of rectangles and then I use the extension multiple offsets in order to create kind of a structure and so I'm just doing that again where I'm just coming in here and I'm just drawing a series of rectangles and they're just kind of random rectangles and then once you've done that what you can do is you can you can either offset these individually or you can use an extension like multiple offsets and so I'll link to that in the notes below as well but basically that's an extension that lets you offset multiple faces at once and so I'm just gonna go to extensions multiple offsets and I'm gonna select constant I'm gonna click OK and what that's gonna allow me to do is that's gonna allow me to offset all of the lines in this object either to the inside or to the outside by a set distance so in this case I'm going to set my number of offsets to 1 and I'm gonna set my distance to 3 inches and then we want to select inside direction and delete faces and know and click OK and so you can see what that did is that came in here and that offset every one of these inside 3 inches and so now if I erase out these extra lines and the best way to do this is to click on the junctions of these lines where they cross that allows you to erase multiple different lines is once and so it's really fast but so what you can do is once you've done this once you have your is once you've erased all your lines out you have this as kind of an uninterrupted face that you can come in here and you can push pull and so then the other thing we need to do is we need to erase out these faces in between and you could come in here and click each one of them individually with only a few faces this doesn't take that long but there's also a way faster workaround which is if you double click in one of these faces that'll select your in uninterrupted face in all your lines and then if you hold the shift key and click and drag across this it'll deselect all the objects you had selected and it'll select the stuff that you didn't so now you have all these faces selected and you can just hit the Delete key in order to delete that out and so now I'm gonna push pull this up to give it a little bit of depth and then I'm just gonna drag it across it I'm gonna right click I'm gonna like make group and now we can come in here and we can unhide our flow fi group and so now what we have is we have this this basically shape that we've created on top of our grid that's a group and then we've got our flow fi group in here and then all you do is you just select your flow fi group hold the shift key and click on this other group on top and then just go to extensions flow fi flow fi and it'll take a second to do this because it's bending all this geometry along a face but you can see how I'm gonna go ahead and hide my flow fi group and my original group so we can take a look at this so you can see how what this does is this basically bends that shape along this face and so you can see how you could create some really complex geometry by doing this and you can see how it's kind of ugly geometry right now cuz you've got a whole bunch of like intersecting faces and that kind of thing well what we're gonna do is we're gonna click on it and we're going to go to the soften edges option in your tray and if you don't see that in your tray you're just gonna go to window default tray soften edges and that should pop this up over here and basically what that does is that gives you it gives you a slider that allows you to slide it back and forth in order to slide or to hide faces and so you're gonna want to make sure you check the box for soften coplanar in here so if you click on softened coplanar and then you move this slider and you shouldn't have to move it very far if you move this slider over to something like 20 degrees basically that'll um that'll hide all of your extra geometry so this will show up as smooth faces and if you come in here and you triple click you can see how that's still in here it's just in here as hidden geometry so it's in here making up the faces but you can't actually see it and the other benefit of doing this is this actually shows up as a solid group so I think you should be able to 3d print this object so this if you do this this way it looks like this gets created as a solid so any of my 3d printers go ahead and chime in on that one so I'm not a hundred percent sure but I think that you should be able to 3d print these objects and so this will work for basically basically any face that has these four sides in here so anything that has kind of four edges should work so like for example I've got another face I'm gonna go ahead and save my model first and so this will work for other more complex shapes too so if I come in here and this is another line that I've created but if I take this and I created this by welding multiple edges together along this face and so if I was to do extrude tools with this object this would work as well so it's got the same kind of thing where it's got the two rails and then the face but you can see how if I create something like this face which is obviously a much more complex face than the one I created over there this will still work so if I take another similar group so if I make another object like the one before and then I do the same thing or have my target lines so my target lines need to go in a group so my face is in group my target lines are in a group its upper face is in a group if I take all of those I make them a group will test it with impose grid and that worked and then I take this object in this object and I use the extension flow if I again this is gonna work the same way and this is obviously a much more complex shape but it may take a little bit longer it's got to create more geometry as it bends it along this phase you can see how the rectangles are smaller in here and so that means it's having to split it up into more lines because basically what flow if I does it splits these objects up into along this grid and so if I come in here and I can hide my original group you can see how you can bend this along much more complex shapes and if I take this and I soften everything this is also in here as a solid group so you can see how you can use this basically once you get any kind of complex faces you can bend anything along this u1 you could use this to create other things too so if you had faces and like let's say you wanted to generate some kind of pipe work or detailing this is probably this is probably really good for like sci-fi modeling and that kind of thing as well but you can use this same workflow in order to do that so that's where I'm gonna wrap up today's video leave a comment below let me know what you thought um you have some good ideas for how you can use this extension I just love having this sketchup conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new sketchup content every week if you like what i'm doing on this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 243,857

Rating: 4.9673948 out of 5

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup flowify, sketchup bent arch, sketchup extrude tools, sketchup complex structures, sketchup structures, sketchup 3d printing, sketchup complex models, sketchup complex faces, sketchup complex, sketchup organic modeling

Id: 2EKyf5pI55c

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2018