Sketchup #23: Multiply & Divide

this podcast is produced by the Harwood productions podcast network to learn more about the network and to find more of our shows visit us online at wwlp.com this episode of sketch up a 3d tool box is brought to you by 3d connection makers of the space navigator to learn more about them visit their website at WWDC connection calm you hey there everyone and welcome back to another episode of Sketchup a 3d tool box I'm Cameron Harris and this is episode number 23 now today we're going to be talking about a really interesting feature in Sketchup multiplying and dividing I know this doesn't mean using Sketchup as a calculator this is actually a way of copying an object but copying it evenly over an entire space let me show you what I mean by that so this is what I have in my project for this particular episode and as you can see it's just a very simple slab I'm going to be calling this the floor actually and it's just four feet wide and 16 feet long and this is what we're going to model some railing on we're actually going to make a railing on one side of this slab now the reason we're going to be doing railing is because with a railing you need to have basically some poles small poles sticking out of the side right here and you need a lot of them so typically a railing would have you know those poles spaced maybe every 6 or 9 inches or something like that so over 16 feet you're going to have a lot of those now I'll show you a typical way you would do it the first thing you need to do regardless of whether you use do it manually or use the multiply and divide features is you just need to model whatever it is you're going to make copies of so I'll just use the rectangle tool here and want to point out I have grouped my floor here that's very important because I want to be able to move my posts that I do on top of this independently of the floor and if the floor is grouped they're not going to stick like usual so I can just use the rectangle tool I'm going to draw just a one-inch square so I'll just type in 1 comma 1 now give me a 1 inch square and then I'm going to use the push/pull tool and pull it up maybe let's say 3 feet 3 ' and enter and now I've got a 3 foot tall one-inch square rod sticking straight up out of the floor now typically what you would do is you would select this and then use the Move tool hit M for the move tool hit the option key to make it the copy tool and then just click and drag this out nine inches like that so there we have the beginnings of a railing but you can see that this is going to take a while and this is only sixteen feet some railings are going to be much longer than that and it's going to get really annoying and really old really quickly so I'm going to show you how the multiply and divide tools can really help you with this and you'll want to they're very similar in the way they work and what they do but depending on whether you're doing a railing or something else you'll want to pick which one will work best for you so first step is of course model the object you want to duplicate so the next step is and this is optional but I really like to group my object first so let's select it all and then right click and say mate group that just kind of makes it easier to keep track of things and then the next thing you want to do is you want to just like we did manually we're going to hit we're going to select it first and then we're going to hit the M key for the move tool and then option to make it the copy tool and I'm going to grab it by this corner here hit the right arrow key to lock it to the red axis so I can move my cursor wherever I want that it stays on the red axis type in 9 for 9 inches enter now this is where the difference is this is crucial do not des elect the copy that you made do not do anything else because this is the only time that the multiply and divide tools will work otherwise you have to redo your copy so don't des elect don't do anything then the next step is actually there's no tool for this there's no tool there's no menu bar command it's all done with the keyboard it's kind of almost a hidden feature actually but it works really well to multiply which is what I'm going to show you now to multiply you type in on your keyboard either the X key so look like a big time sign a multiply sign at X or you can also use the asterisks on your key on your number pad just like if you were typing onto a computers calculator you want to do a time symbol you do either X or asterisks and personally I like to use the asterisk key you might also think of it as the star key so I thought of it for a long time mostly because it's really hard to say asterisks but just do star or X and then you'll notice that in our dimensions box which is still says lengths from when we were doing our copy but it now says star or asterisks so now it's basically looking and it knows okay we are now in multiply mode the next thing to do is say how many copies of this thing you want so how many times you want to multiply it so in this case I'm going to multiply it by five so I'll type in five and then I'll hit enter and you see what it just did this is so cool because it has just made copies of these things and they are spaced nine inches apart it basically takes whatever movement you did with your first copy so like this was my original pole right here I copied it over nine inches this way and I said times that by five so it made in five versions of that that are spaced the same amount apart now this is a little bit confusing because while this feature is great this is one thing that I find I've always found a little bit odd that it works this way is that you'll notice we had our first original then we had our second copy and then I said times that by five you would think that it would make five more copies but it only made four it makes one less it's like you have to include you have to count the original in that multiply so it did create five it kept the first one and then it added four more to make it five so just kind of think about that the way I think of it it should really be you times it by 5 you get 5 more but if you think okay well I need 3 more here just type in times 4 and it will give you 3 more so that's a little bit confusing but once you get your mind wrapped around that that it actually works really nicely now in this case obviously I don't have an of these polls to make it all the way down timesing it by five didn't do quite enough now you might think well now you've got to redo it you've got to delete those old ones and make another copy or just you know start copying again well that's not the case as long as I don't do anything else I don't switch tools I don't select anything else I don't do anything I've just finished doing my multiply it's actually still waiting for a multiply command so let's say I wanted one more of these instead of times five I can just type in again times six and hit enter and it gives me one more it doesn't keep multiplying so like saying times six didn't give me six more copies it just made it so that it times it again but added one more in that case in this case I can just keep going oh let's go times twelve we're getting there you can still move around in your model without you know messing up the multiply thing so you can see where you're going but we're going to need more than twelve let's do times twenty getting there it looks like we need just one more so I'll do times 21 perfect look at that that's excellent and really it only took me seconds whereas before it we've taken me you know several minutes to make all these copies and then of course you know the next thing to do is add the railing on the top which for that I'm actually just going to grab my floor make a copy of it lock it to the blue axis set it right on top of those and then I'll just double click to edit the group and then I'll use the push/pull tool to push it back like that and now I have a very very simple railing so that is the way you multiply things in it you can see it works really really well but there's also divide I'll show you that next but first I want to thank the people who make this show possible 3d connection now as I'm sure you know by now these guys make the space navigator which is so awesome it's like a joystick almost for Sketchup it allows you to navigate eight without switching tools without using you know mouse buttons and hotkeys and all that stuff it just works it's so intuitive and easy to use and it's actually really great because not only does it have zero learning curve for you it has zero learning curve for anyone else say you have you know a friend that you're modeling something for and he wants to take a look at the model and see how you're doing you can just sit him down he can use the space navigator no problem it's just so intuitive now not only do they have the standard space navigator they even have a version for notebooks which is a little bit smaller a little bit lighter and comes with its own carrying case if you're the kind of guy who models things on the go say you go to someone's house and start modeling their living room for them you can take just your laptop and your space Navigator and start entering in the Sketchup dimensions right then and there they are absolutely fantastic be sure to check them out at their website which is www.hyken.com I'll dive I'd group it in my case that's optional but I really like to group things select that and then the next step is also to selected switch to the move tool option key to make it the copy tool and then copy it but instead of moving it just 9 inches down I'm going to go ahead and walk into the red axis again you move it down to the other end so think of this as like a starting point in endpoint you've got your starting point right here this is where you want your railing to start then just move this down to the end point where you want it to end so we'll put it right there now again just like the multiply tool you need to make sure you don't do anything else don't deselect don't switch tools don't do anything the very next thing you want to do is use the the divide key which are on your keyboard it's the slash key and it's just like a that's the same key that they use for divide on computer calculators as well so it's very intuitive so and again in your length box watch out for when you hit slash you see slash and then / and then whatever however many you want to you know have this / so if I were to say for example let's try I think I did something like 20 last time let's try 15 let's see what 15 looks like divided by 15 it divides up the space in between your starting point and your end point perfectly these things are all evenly spaced not 9 inches but they're perfectly evenly spaced all the way down and this is really cool now just like the multiply tool you can continue to tweak this say 115 a little bit far apart let's do / 20 boom there we go that's looking a little bit better and you can do you know say it divided by 40 and get even more of them now just like the multiply tool I'll show you let me show you something if I were to let's just do a smaller number so I divided by 4 you'll notice that just like the multiply tool it doesn't give us four of these polls in between our start and our end point it only gives us three because it counts the end point in that / thing so if I just say divide by one nothing happens if I say divide by 2 I get one in the center so that's the way that works figure out how many you want in between and then just add one so I'm just going to go and say divide by 18 yeah that looks pretty good and then I'll just do the same thing that I did last time I'll just grab a copy of my floor move it up and set it right down on top there move into here and push these back done now this is such a time-saver I mean you will find instances I mean railings that's kind of an obvious example but say for example you know you're doing a fence and you had all these slats that you were trying to make just duplicate them across another great example is a keep in mind that this is not limited to just one axis one dimension it's not like you just say okay move this to the left and then multiply or move this to the right and then multiply or move it up or down and then multiply you can actually do a thing let me show you one last trick here you can actually do a thing where if I delete these guys here I could select this pole make a copy of it and put this copy up and to the left like that right so it's both to the left and up then I just say to you know times five same thing it basically just takes whatever whatever transformation you did to the original and just does it again just keeps duplicating it so I mean you could do the thing where you move something in one move you have to do it you can't do it in multiple move you have to do it in one swift motion otherwise it'll just do whatever the last movement you did was so you can't just say like you know okay move this to the left and then up and then to the right it needs to be all in one movement but if you do that then it'll just multiply it all the way and this would be a perfect thing to do on a stair railing this would be perfect for that so it's a really really nifty feature well the multiplying divided tools really are very powerful in sketchup and you can see that you know particularly when you're dealing with a large amount of things I mean we were only working with 20 at the most today but imagine if you have hundreds of them you can see I was really going to pay off now until next time be sure to visit our website at wwlp.com we've got the show notes lesson files all kinds of great stuff for you on there and if you have any questions or comments for me or any suggestions for future episodes send me an email at Cameron at Harwood podcast.com until next time I'll just say goodbye and good modelling you

Channel: Harwood Podcast

Views: 570,185

Rating: 4.6467748 out of 5

Keywords: sketchup, tutorial, multiply, divide, copy, evenly, spaced, objects

Id: udIcI8vruMs

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 20 2010