SketchUp Skill Builder: Modeling a Spring

[Music] hey guys this is Aaron today I want to look at something that I hear requests for a lot and that is drawing a spring in Sketchup so we're gonna do this in Sketchup pro I'm gonna start by saying by Stacey I say C and I'm gonna start with a circle I'm gonna pull the circle out I'm going to do this hit kind of a large scale so we'll pull it out 12 inches and this circle look at the entity info has 24 sides this is important because the first thing we're to do is create our helix and it's going to be dependent on the number of sides here so I want to start at the green axes what I'm going to do is I'm gonna have an angled piece come up to just above the next cent segment so I'm gonna actually go to the segment just to the right of the green axes and just draw a vertical line and then one back down to the beginning point like I said I do want to keep it on the screen axes and we'll see why as we go through and continue draw our spring all right that looks good I can delete that vertical piece now I'm going to grab the angled piece and use rotate so while it's highlighted I'm gonna click in the middle I'm going to click at the end where it is now and I want to rotate it over to the next side but I want to make a copy of it I want to just move this I want to actually hit alt or option to copy and move it to the next point I want one of those all the way around so right now before I do anything else I'm just going to type X 23 I want to make 23 copies the original counts is 123 copies is a total of 24 enter there we go all right now what I want to do I'm going to animate to the side like this I'm gonna go to select and drag a box right to left so I want the dotted box not the solid box to select all those pieces now I can grab move and move from that first point again alter option to copy straight up I'm going to go right up to the piece above it which is that actual the next line over and I'm going to do that same thing before I do anything else x-23 enter so by making 24 copies in the copying of 24 times what I've assured is that this piece it starts on the green axes goes around like this and actually ends right here on the green axes as well so one way to verify that is to select it and we want to select all the selected pieces so to select all the connected edges you triple click online problem is all this is connected together right now so what I'm going to do is I'm going to erase the pieces of circle that connect this piece it starts on the green axes to the rest now if I double click and see that highlighted piece goes around and ends right above that green axes so I'm good to go that's awesome so what I can do now is I'm going to select and make that a group I'm making a group because what I need to do now is do a group select of everything except I want to deselect that little the one piece that I created I want to hold on to if I hold down the shift key well them and select of course I get the plus minus so you can just pick on that piece it'll turn that off and then I can delete the rest geometry now I'm left with my group of my single revolution of my helix I'm gonna go ahead and ungroup it I don't really need it in a group so I can explode that that looks good but it's a little bit stretched out for a spring so I'm gonna use scale to bring it down and I'm gonna be a little arbitrary I'm sorry if you're a machinist and want some exact measurements you could go through that but for this example that looks good for me now I'm gonna grab all of that use move with the alt or option key to copy straight up and I'm gonna say x 9 come on I want to spring this 10 piece of ten circles 10 I don't know what the term is for going around one time ten revolutions anyhow ten of the things I made before there we go that looks good so right now I could come in with a circle oh you come to the bottom and this is why it was important to get it on the green axes because because it's on the green axes I now know that if I draw a circle at the red axis I'm going to bring this out say one inch I know that that is perpendicular or about perpendicular to that first line to carry it around now I let follow me do its thing I'm going to triple click on this line it's going to grab all the pieces follow me and then click here and it's take just a second and there we go I got the start of a spring this is not a perfect spring we got some issues that we can we can clean up here first thing it's segmented see you cheese pieces a separate piece I can fix that of course by coming up selecting all by triple clicking again and then toggle soft and coplanar off and back on all right there that smoothed out it's also backwards I'm seeing that back edges on all the faces so if I triple click again right click and I can say reverse phases all right so now I have a better looking spring how do we do this I'm just going to triple click and slide this over you can see that this geometry is not connected to my original path so I can triple click and then use move to slide it over how do we go about making that without having to do cleanup afterwards well let's look at just that I'm gonna I'm going to do that and we're gonna actually add a couple things too first I'm going to do is I want to actually compress this last coil so this is going to be almost parallel and then start to come down same at the bottom I see a lot of Springs that look like that so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the last revolution again I don't know if I'm actually using the right term there or not and I can start clicking around I can also use group select again right to left gives me that dashed box so anything that's crossed by the Box gets highlighted you can see this is still kind of a tedious process and the problem is even I'm holding down shift if I accidentally select over one that was our selected it turns off so some people aren't aware of this but by just holding down the alt or option key I get the plus select that means it will only add things so then I don't have to worry about toggling things on and off a select since I'm only adding likewise if I hold down shift and then alt or option I get the - select and that will only deselects so if I select something accidentally that I didn't want I can turn to just - turn that one off and then of course I said just option will give you just plus a lot of people know that shift is plus or minus but there are options to use those others in isolation as well all right so now that I have that I'm just going to use scale not paint bucket but scale to just kind of squish that up I'll do it at the top - so again won't look at this one on up and again if I use my alter option key I can just drag across here I don't have to worry about accidentally selecting other ones and then I can use scale to squish that down and again I could be a little more precise I could put a reference line in there for how big I want that gap to be I'm just kind of showing you guys stuff now to put my circle in again red axes again one inch again and here's the first thing we'll look at the first thing is remember how it all came out inside out I can fix that by simply clicking on the the disc I'm going to start with and reversing faces that's going to actually keep that white side that the proper outside face all the way around the spring the other piece how it all came out segmented is because each of these lines right now is a separate piece so if I triple click I can use something like the weld extension to make that all one piece this will prevent me from having to soften and smooth afterwards all right so having done all that I've got my welded geometry my proper face my compressed end revolutions making words up as I go and follow me pick the surface and there we go that is my closer to one step spring and have to do any cleanup after that and look so it looks better than the first one I made especially at the way the first one started so that's it drawing a spring and Sketch up using only native tools I should point out that there are extensions out there that make this sort of thing really so you could just do it in the click but the point of skillbuilders is of course to give you guys some skills to draw stuff where if you don't have access to extensions or you have something that falls off the beaten path extension won't quite cover it you know what you need to do so how do we do did you like what you saw give us a like or maybe subscribe down below better yet leave a comment and let us know what you thought and if there's something specific you'd like to see us cover tell us about that too we like making videos but we like them best when they're covering the things you want to see thank you

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 100,697

Rating: 4.9510274 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling, Drawing, Flollow Me, Spring, Spiral, Scale, skill builder

Id: lRyHGTLXa7s

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 26 2018