SketchUp tips for interior designers

hi my name is Josh and this video is a recording of a presentation I gave at the Clerkenwell design week in London in May of 2015 so if you attended that events and are looking for that presentation this is the right place if you've stumbled across this video it's basically a collection of tips that I'd like to aim towards beginners and Sketch up especially in the interior design field so it's really just a collection of tips that I thought I could fit into about an hour and it's not really a follow along video it's more of a sit back with some coffee or tea and hopefully I can show you a few tips first thing I want to talk about is groups components and layers in Sketchup it's good to understand how those things work first I'm going to draw a secondary smaller cube here next to this larger one and move that so it connects to it and show you that it does geometry and Sketchup does stick together if you don't have a group or component that's fundamental behavior and it's actually pretty useful for conceptual design but a lot of times we don't want that to happen so I'm going to undo that and show you that if you make a group out of it first I can right click say make group move that over there again and you can see that it no longer sticks to that geometry because it's in its own wrapper a group or component is basically a wrapper for geometry so I have to double click now to get inside the edit mode for this so you can see that there's kind of a bounding box that's enclosing that geometry now when I get copy of this one off to the side here and show you that you can also explode a group to kind of undo that step so here's the same object exploded so it's no longer a group and that one is still a group over here if I make a component out of this one same process select it all right-click choose make component and you can see initially I have the chance to give it a name and fill out a few other areas in this case I'm not going to do any of that but it is good practice to name your components it's good for organization for your model I'll choose create so visually there's really no difference here between the component and grupe I'll show you here if I make a quick edit to this component so it looks a little different the fundamental difference between groups and components I'll show here as I copy both of these and I'll cover copies a little bit later as well making arrays in Sketchup but if I make a change to this group here you can see that only the group is affected however with the component if I make a change to this component every instance of that component is updated because they're all linked together so the basic difference is that components you want to use for repeating elements in your model and groups are really just basic wrappers for any kind of geometry or you can also make let's say if I select all these objects I can make a group out of all of these so now there's groups nested within a larger group and you can see here if I open up my entity info panel window entity info when I click on a group for example it'll tell me it's a group or in a component that's an opponent so this is a good box to have open perhaps when you're modeling all the time it's good to click on different things and see information about them so here I can see the area of a surface click on a line I can see the length of that line and I also want to mention that if you hear me say base geometry what I mean by base geometry is geometry like this that I can click once and select a surface or a line or geometry that's inside of a group or component like this when I get into the edit mode here selecting now down into the base geometry so regarding base geometry a really important thing to know and Sketchup especially if you're a beginner is how layers work with what's called layer zero or the default layers if I open up the layers panel here you can see I've got a couple layers already created there I'm gonna get rid of this stuff for now and show you this in the context of the model hover here so for example with these seating cubes here if I click once you can see that it is a group it's a group with nested components inside so if I double click I can get to these components inside the larger group you can see it says component and there's 18 of those in the model if I double click on one of those make a change you can see that they are all linked every instance of that component is updated but the really important thing I want to show here is that the base geometry of this component is on layer 0 so if I wanted to make a layer called seating for example and put these on the seating layer I'll show you the best way to do that so I just made a new layer called seating when I click on this group now you can see initially it's on layer 0 but I can click on this drop-down and choose that new layer that I just made now it's on the seating layer and I can uncheck that box for visibility uncheck that and it goes away but the geometry the base geometry of those elements is actually still on layer 0 so if I go back into these components here and click on this surface that's on layer 0 so that surface one of these lines or edges is on layer 0 but if I jump back out you can see that the group that contains that information or that geometry the group itself is on the seeding layer that's really important in Sketchup is that you're your base geometry all your edges and surfaces should always be on layer 0 and a good way to ensure that happens is to always make sure that this radio button on the left side of these layer names you always want that to be on the left side you don't want to be clicking around like this because you're changing the active layer if you do that so keep that next to layer 0 and any geometry that you draw will be automatically placed on that current or active layer and if you're curious about these colors over here a lot of people ask about that all that lets you do is if you click on this little button here and choose color by layer you can get a quick view of the layers that you have based on the color over here not super useful but if you're wondering what that is you can toggle that on and off ok let's talk about the 3d warehouse so as you can see if i zoom out here I've got some material swatches over here I've got stuff on my countertops and lots of things in my model that didn't actually draw myself which is pretty great because you can use our 3d warehouse to download items like this for your model that you don't have to actually draw so light fixtures all this entourage you can get that for free from our 3d warehouse and focus on your design and if you're new to that what that is is you can access that by going to file 3d warehouse get models or you can use this icon here and if you're new to this it's important to note that there's two ways to access the 3d warehouse and also the extension warehouse which I'll talk about a little bit later but the 3d warehouse and the extension warehouse can be accessed from within Sketchup so right now I'm accessing this but I'm still in Sketchup and if I go to my browser I'll show you that you can also access both of these things a 3d warehouse and the extension warehouse from your browser and that's the address for the 3d warehouse there and you can certainly use this if you go to the warehouse or from your browser you'll just be downloading an escapee file to your computer which will then need to open separately so they benefit to using the warehouse inside of Sketchup is that you can download something and put it directly into your model so the three warehouse is basically a collection of a lot of content you can upload to the warehouse for free and we've got a lot of good stuff from menu as well so you can see here if I just cruise through some of these logos you can do a search for these companies here or click on one of their logos and it will take you right to their page on a 3d warehouse you can scroll down and find curated collections in this case I'm going to choose seating here and see what they have for seating I've got one of these sofas in my model already so I just want to show you when you click on an object like this you can see a little more information about it so you've got downloads likes file size and polygon count here if that is a new concept to you basically that just means it tells you how many polygons that that model is made up of so polygons are basically the building blocks of a 3d model so you just want to pay attention to that number and just make sure it doesn't get too big if there's no exact number that you need to pay attention to for certain models it's just sort of a ballpark estimate you know as you download things like maybe trees that maybe have every leaf modeled you may have a larger polygon count there so just just be aware that that number does matter as things start to get larger and as you download more items maybe just look at that number and kind of see the polygon count the things that you're bringing into your model and the reason that's important is because sometimes you can put an unnecessarily large model into your model which might slow down the performance so just kind of be aware of that number there and this little icon up here lets you orbit the model before you actually download it into your model so you can see here I can click in orbit and maybe inspect it a little bit longer so a chance to check it out before you actually put it into your model okay I want to show you the Advanced Search now and if I click on this little arrow here you can access the Advanced Search that's pretty nice because you can really narrow down the results by filling out some of these fields here I'm just going to give it a few pieces of information drawer author named Sketchup and I want to show you this check box here for only show dynamic models also known as dynamic components so really just filling out three things here the next for the title area and author name and dynamic models if I do a search on that I'm only going to see results that are all dynamic components if I click on this base cabinet here you can see that this little icon if you see that that's what that means that it signifies that that model is a dynamic component and again because I'm inside the 3d warehouse inside of Sketchup I can just click on download and toss the small right into my current model so I want to show you what's special about a dynamic component I'll pull up the toolbar for dynamic components click on this button here to see the options that I have for this component so this is currently 48 inches wide I can change that to 36 and perhaps say yes to finished end and then apply and you'll see the model update here so I don't actually have to update that model myself by changing the geometry if it's a dynamic component and has these options you can see that this is reflects a real-world object so it does have fixed options there you can choose from another cool thing is I can use this little magic finger if you hover over different objects you'll see that that little icon indicates that something can be animated so this is nice for space planning you can click and do a quick animation for certain objects of course not every components going to have that ability so you can certainly do the same type of action with perhaps the rotate tool here so I can rotate this drawer this door out and see maybe it helps me for space planning understand how that affects the space that it opens up into so let's get rid of that guy and I want to zoom out a little more and show you these material swatches over here you can also get this kind of stuff from the 3d warehouse I've already got this material applied to a countertop in my model if I wanted to change that let's say I wanted to try this one here I can use the paint bucket tool and I can sample that texture so I've sampled that put it in the paint bucket and I can apply it elsewhere the important thing here is that I don't actually want to just click before going into the edit mode for the group or component I certainly can try that and sometimes it'll work you can see here it doesn't actually appear to do anything if I go to entity info and select that you can see that the material was applied but it doesn't appear to be actually on the surface here so I'm going to undo that you'll see the default material go back there so what I want to do is go double click to get inside the edit mode for this group and I want to apply this directly to the surface so that way I'm applying it right to the surface in Sketchup and that's the best way to apply materials is to actually go inside all the way to the base geometry here and apply that right to that surface now let's say don't want to keep that one there I want to actually use the ones I had before so I can perhaps sample one over here so I'll do that again paint bucket tool using a modifier key to sample that material go back over here get inside the edit mode and then reapply that you'll notice that sometimes you may have a seam so for example if I right-click go to texture position sometimes you may have a seam like this where you don't want it so if you take a look you can see here I can see that this texture is tiling right there in this case this material swatch is large enough I don't need to have a seam right there so I can right click on that surface go to texture position to adjust that now you won't see this option if you're outside of the group so if I go out one level there try to right-click here there's no option for texture I need to be inside all the way to that base geometry level and then right-click and do texture position so now I can adjust it and here I'm just kind of looking at that blue dotted line there that shows me the boundary of this material swatch I can move that around if I want to rescale it I can use these grips here the green ones pretty useful at one's eye is the one you probably use the most you can click and drag on that one to rotate or scale it up so in this case I'm just making sure that the boundaries of this texture swatch do not intersect with this geometry so now if I right click and choose done there's no seam where it's tiling on that surface I also want to mention that as you're downloading things from the 3d warehouse you need to remember that these items are created by somebody else so as you download them you may see new layers appear and you just want to be be careful that you're kind of managing that as you bring these things into your model so if new layers come in just kind of clean those up if you don't want that layers that are part of that component I just clean those up and match them to the layer hierarchy that you have regarding these texture swatches over here I also want to mention if I delete something let's say I get rid of these materials here are these objects they're really just surfaces in Sketchup with a material applied but if I get rid of something like this delete it it appears to be gone but Sketchup actually retains that information in the model so what you want to do is occasionally purge your model and the best way to do that is go to window model info you can purge unuse and this is under the statistics on the left side here you can see here I just deleted those materials or textures and it tells me now it's at 171 if I choose purge unused you can see that it updates to 161 so even though it was deleted Sketchup still retains that information until I purge it and that's important because your file size can be reduced and especially if you're pulling in lots of 3d warehouse models and deleting them as you're changing your mind remember that Sketchup is retaining some of that information until you purge it you can also purge separately from the materials browser here I can click on this and purge on use there same with layers any unused layers can be purged as well but it's a little bit better to do this from the window model info because you can just purge it all at once alright let's talk about the manipulation of textures again on this area here that has tiles let's say I wanted to have three tiles across this width here so again I'm double clicking to get inside the edit mode and then I'm right-clicking right on that surface choosing texture position and again this green grip is the most useful I can rotate and rescale from there if I click anywhere I can just move it around but if I click on that green grip here I can resize and I'm just kind of eyeball on the grew out there and making sure the grout lines up when I have what I like I can push enter or right click and choose done and you'll notice that the adjacent texture here on this other side is the same material or texture but it's not the right scale anymore so I can again sample this one and apply it to the adjacent surface I also want to show you how to soften and hide edges if you need to in Sketchup so let's say that this cushion came in from the 3d warehouse and looked a little bit weird so I'm just going to choose this all and right click and go to softens maybe the edges I'm going to undo something real quick to show you that you may have something like that and you want to clean that up a little bit and the way to do that is with the eraser tool if I click on that tool you'll see in the bottom left it says shift equals hide option equals softens smooth so tools and Sketchup will often give you little hints down here in the bottom left so pay attention to that because it tells you keyboard modifiers that may alter what that tool does so in this case I can hold down shift or option and on Windows it'll be a little bit different you'll see the the keys there that show you which modifier keys correspond to that tool but on the Mac here shift is hide an option is soft and smooth the difference between those I'll show you here if I don't click the key at all of course I'm going to delete geometry so that gets rid of the edges and the surfaces go away so I'm gonna undo that if I hold down shift I can hide those edges if I hold down option I can soften those edges so the difference here is you can see that it treats the the way the texture transitions between those surfaces so here when I've hidden the edges it's not quite as smooth as I want but over here where I did the soften smooth that gradient really flows nicely and makes it look more curved so again that's the softened area these are the hidden edges if I turn on hidden geometry you can see those edges are still there they're just either hidden or softened and as you saw me just do I can also select everything then right-click choose soften smooth edges and from here I could perhaps off an entire piece of geometry all at once let me turn off hidden geometry there so here I can soften all this at the same time if you'd like to import a texture from your computer perhaps an image file that you've got on your computer it could be a JPEG or a PNG or various other image files you can go to file import and before I do this I actually want to jump into the edit mode before this group because I want to apply this right to this surface so I'm going to go to file import now that I'm inside that component or this group in this case and choose between one of these images here so I've got that JPEG selected if you if your image file appears grayed out or is not selectable it's possible you don't have the right format selected so if I change this to AutoCAD files you can see that I can no longer select that image file so make sure you've got the right format chosen and I can choose that jpg can double click or choose import here and initially I'm given the ability to scale this and at this stage you have to worry about scale too much because as I place this I can then go to that right-click option again and choose texture position and then place that and how I want it to go and here I'm holding down the shift key actually it's a toggle you can just tap the shift key and you can get these fixed pins or use these colored pins so the fixed pins let you click and drag almost like you're pinning up a poster so this is keeping the location of the pin in relation to the image fixed and letting you pull that to a corner of the model so you can kind of snap to geometry just make sure you're clicking right on that pin so sometimes it skews it a little bit so you may not want this option so I'm gonna undo that and just go back here and just click and simply drag to put it where I want a nice little trick to is you can kind of hide images in your model so in this case let's say that I wanted to have a texture available to me but not really visible in this model I can go behind this perhaps and sample the one that I've got back here and apply to the other side so it's still in the model but it's kind of hidden unless I want it okay so I like that one a little better okay let's talk about shading for interior spaces in Sketchup and this is really important because a lot of beginners don't consider this as they're working in Sketchup and I want to open up the shadows panel here and show you what this is all about so it's minimized layers there and if you don't see all these options keep in mind this little button here can expand certain boxes and Sketchup so don't forget that you may be able to expand it if you don't see what you're looking for there so this is important because in Sketchup with interior spaces like this there's actually a lot of control you have over the shade value and a lot of beginners don't even deal with this they kind of just go along with the whatever's preset there and your model can look very dark kind of like this if you don't pay attention to that so you do have control like this where you can really precisely affect those shading values so the way that you do that is this use Sun for shading checkbox what that means is I want to not to cast shadows but I do want to affect these sliders for shading so if I go to view I can turn on shadows here I can also toggle them on or off with this button here so this button does the same thing as the view shadows where I can turn on or off shadows so if I turn off shadows but have this box checked I'm telling Sketchup I don't want you to cast shadows but I do want to control the shade values here you can see if I uncheck this box then nothing changes as I move these sliders so again you're not casting shadows shadows are off but you're using Sun for shading you can very precisely dial these in and that's important because as many of you know if you're in a room with four white walls based on the lighting conditions and the inside you know the four white walls could look very different like this where one is more gray one is more white so as you're showing a client an interior space and you've picked out a precise wall color remember that you really can change the way that wall color looks by using these sliders so don't be stuck on a precise material that you choose because it can really look very different as you move these around and again you can see that there's time/date light and dark and even though we're not casting shadows we're still able to use these to change the shade value and if you get those where you like you can actually save that information to particular scene in sketchup and scenes in sketchup are these tabs I have at the top and when I make a change here you can see that if I right-click and choose update and I'll also change this next scene here we'll make a change to this one right click update as I toggle between these two you'll notice that these sliders will change so they remember that information and scenes if you're new to that I'll go to window scenes here and show you that scenes can save a variety of properties so you can see here all these that are checked that's information that can be saved to certain scenes so you can uncheck certain things if you'd like the most used one is camera location so you can kind of think of scenes as bookmarks for your 3d model where you can at the very least use them to just kind of keep a certain spot in the model or our vantage point and saved okay let's talk about how to navigate inside of a space that's somewhat small you know when you're working inside interiors and Sketchup you don't want to use some of the basic navigating tools because you actually may want to keep your position fixed and perhaps just look around the tool that lets you do that is this look around tool here so you can see if I look down I'm in a corner of this room and I can just click and drag to look around from a fixed stationary point kind of like you're turning your head and the reason that this is nice because if I use the orbit tool here I can easily orbit outside of where I want to be and perhaps get inside of a wall and if you're showing a client a model it's nice to navigate efficiently and be able to swiftly show what you want without being kind of clunky and making it kind of tough to watch so really get good at using these tools and speaking of that I do want to mention that you should be using a mouse with Sketchup so for example you've got these tools up here the orbit tools here but you never saw me go to that tool because I'm using a mouse so if I use my it's a basic three button Mouse with a middle scroll wheel button if I depress that metal scroll wheel button it activates that orbit tool if you're on a touchpad you certainly can still use Sketchup but the difference is I'll show you here is I start drawing a line if I start this line and I want to orbit and I don't have a mouse I actually have to go click on the orbit tool and it kicks me out of that line tool as I go to orbit now however if I undo that draw that line again and start using my mouse you can see here I can draw while I'm actually still in that line tool and I can orbit and pan using shift here so I'm just using the mouse to shift and pan and I'm still in that line tool so that's really important because you want to master navigation in Sketchup first if you're really new to Sketchup perhaps download a model from the 3d warehouse and just practice navigating around it that's really important helps you model more efficiently and it's also as I said a nice way to show your model to somebody else when you're not fumbling around and navigating kind of rough so let me get back into these tools here let's say we wanted to check out the vantage point from our buddy over here in the corner so I can actually take a look at what the room looks like from his eye vantage point and that's what this position camera tool if I click and drag from his eye height here I can release the mouse and look at a certain spot so now you can see the eye height is a little over two feet if I want to change that I don't need to click down there I can just type in the new eye height that I want and then push enter and that updates and I'm already in this look-around tool now so I can just swivel on my view so you see that a lot in Sketchup in the bottom right as you're drawing you may see this information change and you never have to click down here you can simply type the information push enter because Sketchup is always awaiting that input the other tool want to talk about here is this walk tool if I click on this tool and then click and drag you can see that as I get further away from where first clicked you can walk a little faster so it's kind of a proximity sensor here from where you first click and drop down that cut those crosshairs so I'm just clicking and moving slowly away and this is nice because it has collision detection so I can run into walls and I don't actually go through things up kind of did there but let me show you an example if you're backing into a corner let's say that I go over on this spot here turn around and I'll use the walk total back into this corner so I'm just backing up and because it senses that wall there you can see it stops right there if I look down I'm now in the corner there so those are nice tools to master for tight spaces like this let's say I want to look a little bit more over this direction and a lot of times in interior spaces you want to show a little bit more than perhaps the default field of view so if I go to camera the field of view I can click and drag and skew that field of view to show a little bit more if I need to more or less I can also type in a very precise field of you degrees there so about right there I can type in 45 or 35 or simply use the field of view tool here just to click and drag okay let's talk about arrays in Sketchup and how to make copies of objects so for this chair here I can what I want to do is pre select the object with the Select tool the default shortcut is spacebar so it's kind of nice to use the spacebar to just get into the Select tool here click on that tool or that object go to the move tool and move the chair you can see that in the bottom left again it's letting me know that I've got some keyboard modifiers for this move tool option is copy and then I've got a few others there in this case I do want to use option again on the windows you'll be it'll be another key it'll be the ctrl key and I want to hover out in the direction that I want to make a copy in this case I want to stay on that green axis so I'm just hovering in the green axis direction you can see in the bottom right down here it's now showing a length so I could type in a precise length or just click to drop that copy down and then now if I type in let's say for X enter it'll make those copies and I can change my mind if I don't do anything else to X enter so it's pretty easy to change your mind and keep getting that right until you like it so that's a linear array if you wanted to do more of a polar or radial array I'll show you that with this tool here let's move this outside so same process here I want to pre-select the object and I'm going to the rotate tool and in this case I don't have any geometry to snap to so I'm just going to kind of pick a point out here as my center point of rotation so I'm going to click there the first time the second click is on the object somewhere and I'm starting that rotation and then now again it says in the bottom left here option is toggle copy so I can tap that key I'll have to hold it down is just a toggle so I just tap it once to engage that copy and here I can type in an angle as you see in the bottom right there it's awaiting an angle input so I could type in 15 degrees or just place it down and then type in the number of copies that I want so I could type in 4x enter 12x enter and a lot of times you want to do a radial array where you place the last object first and then define the spacing in between so to do that again you pre select the object go to the rotate tool start rotating I'm gonna tap option to toggle that copy on and in this case I want to go all the way over here and place the last one down so when I type in one eight zero enter and now I'm gonna type in let's say six and then the slash key and then enter so it's keeping me equidistant copies there it's in filling that space and if I don't do anything else I can again change my mind twelve slash enter let's try eight slash enter and then these are facing the wrong way so I could click on the object and go to the move tool in this tool if I hover carefully over the bounding box you can see that there is the ability to do a quick rotation here as well if you wanted to do that with the rotate tool you could select the object go to the rotate tool and with this tool as you hover around it changes its orientation based on where you're hovering you can rock that by holding shift so if I hold down shift here you can see I can lock that green rotation plane in this case I want the blue ground plane saw release that hold shift here and then make my rotation but I actually want to go to the bottom here to find the center point so to do this you can hover on the perimeter of a circle like this just for a few seconds and then hover to the inside and that will give you a center snap point there we go so you can rotate this from the center so a couple different ways to do those rotations let's talk about the follow me tool now so with this tool we have a crown molding profile here so what I want to do is pull this profile across a defined path you can see here if I just double click into it and use the push/pull tool I can push-pull that but I can't really do much more than a perpendicular push-pull from the from that surface there so with the follow me tool I want to draw a path first and you may have seen me toggle on the model like this and what I'm doing here is actually it's a shortcut for this view component edit hide rest of model and I made that a shortcut because I don't want to keep going into this nested menu here so it's nice for me to just tap it one key to turn that on and off so if you want to make shortcuts go to the Preferences menu on the Mac it's right here Sketchup preferences if you're on Windows it'll be in the window menu window preferences so Sketchup preferences and on the left side you can go down to shortcuts and in this case you can type in a tool or in this example I want to type in hide rest of model and just type in hide rest and you can see that it comes up here with this function and I've got this already mapped to the H key so I'll just close that if you wanted to change that you could just type in the new key there but I want to keep that at H and if I just tap it the H key you can see that it pretty easily turns that on or off and I use that a lot it's nice to be able to access the geometry in your model sometimes that's outside of a grouper component or perhaps turn it off to get a better look at what you're what you're doing there in this case I do want that turned on because I want to trace the geometry out here but have the lines appear inside this group so I'm going to take the line tool and just trace on the geometry out there and trying to figure out or draw the path here that I want this profile to follow so I'll toggle that off again you can see that line is actually inside this group but I used sketch ups inferencing to draw it with the model turned on outside of this group so with the follow me tool it's pretty easy I can just select the path so in this case I'll do a triple click on the line to get all of these lines connected and simply go to the follow me tool and you can see that it takes that profile and extrudes it along that path so it's creating a lot of geometry for you especially in those intersection points so I want to talk about an extension now that is pretty cool and it does a similar function that the follow me tool does it's called profile builder so the extension warehouse is I briefly showed before is right here you can also go to window extension warehouse and the extension warehouse is a place where you can install add-ons or extensions for Sketchup that extend the functionality of Sketchup so there's a lot of great tools here a lot of them are free so if you're new to Sketchup really explore the extensions we have here that a lot of them that are free so there's it pretty easy to just grab those and see what they can do I'll show to here but there's there's so many to look at you can search for the top developers they're not showing up here but there will be categories here that you can click on and inspect and see what we have in different categories I'll just type in profile builder you can see here I've got a few different results I actually want to choose profile builder too this is the one I'm going to show here and this one does cost money but I want to show some of the power of extensions so here when you go to the page for an extension you'll see a little video that shows what it can do perhaps information about it so you can see a lot about it before you decide to download it or purchase it I'm going to close this for now and I've already got this installed so if I go to extensions you can see profile builder too is there there's a lot going on with this extension so I'm just going to show the basic functionality event let's get rid of these stools out here so at this tool again it does a similar function that the follow me tool does but the power of this one is that you can actually combine profiles together so for example if you had a wall section and you combined all the different elements of that wall perhaps the drywall the insulation the footing the exterior cladding you could combine all those profiles together and perhaps trace a floor plan so I'm just going to show this with let's just grab one of these from the library here and I can click around and just drag that profile around as you can see if I had a more complex wall here I could very easily just trace a floorplan and already have those walls already created so an example of the crown molding I'll show you how that works here let's get rid of this one and if I choose a crown molding here I can make anything a profile to be used with this extension so I don't have to use what's in this library here I could draw any profile and tell the extension that I want that to be my profile so you could draw your own of course I'm gonna just choose this one and as I click around on the path you can see it does that for me so it's a pretty great tool lots of uses and it's pretty complex does a lot of great things we'll have a blog post about this I think later this month so look for that if you want to find out more about that extension I also want to show the soap bubble extension it's just kind of a fun one not necessarily directly applicable to interior design but uh it's kind of fun too to show what it can do so I'll just draw basic shape here if you're new to Sketchup you can inference other geometry so here I can type in the height of that or inference the height of the wall here to make that the right height I'm just doing this to create some a complex loop of edges here it's pretty easy sometimes to get off axis so if I'm trying to draw this on this surface here it's pretty easy to sometimes come out to the side and accidentally draw that perhaps not on the surface so most of the time it's the way to fix that is just to adjust your viewpoint so if I just orbit a little bit differently it changes kind of how a Sketchup is inferencing and you can also see if I hover it'll say on face but usually just changing the way that your vantage point is and just orbit a little bit differently sometimes makes that easier so again I'm just drawing this to help me create this more complex loop of edges and what I'm trying to do here is put a surface on these edges so I'll move this out to this side a little bit so I want to drape a surface on this loop of edges let's go to that extension party guy that installed this one's in the tool palettes here soap-bubble so I want to select everything click on this first button and you can see in the bottom right it's awaiting a division input so I could change that to 20 push enter get it more dense grid there push and enter again this one's fun because you can watch it work so it's calculating how to drape that surface based on those bounding edges I can also change the pressure of that as well if I click on that go to this button here you can see it now it says pressure I could type in 50 perhaps 100 could even do a negative number to go the other direction so it's just a pretty fun extension to show just to help you understand what extensions can do let's get rid of that and let's talk about styles now for interior design styles are pretty useful so Styles basically apply a stylized look to your model with watermarks and certain edge styles so this one here I've already got saved to this particular scene I'm gonna open up the Styles browser here and again this one has a similar button to help you expand part of that panel so Styles there's a lot going on with styles I won't cover everything here but just a brief overview if I go into assorted styles here I can change using some of these preset options here so I can quickly click on one of these new styles and see how it looks in this current scene it's important to note that you don't actually want to model with a complex style on because Sketchup will try to rerender the scene as you orbit and model so a lot of these styles are really just meant for a static view that you maybe tie or save to a scene if you do want to think about which styles to use as your modeling if you see this little green icon here I'll go to the default Styles here if it has a green icon like this that means that it's a fast style and it's good for a modeling so it'll be a little bit snappier if it's got that green icon you can also mix and match attributes of different styles to create your own custom style so let's say in this one here I wanted to adjust it a little bit based on attributes that I borrow from various different styles so I can go to the Edit tab to change various different things about the style or go to the mixed have here and the mixed tab allows me to drag these attributes down here into the category settings right there so if I wanted to change the edge style for this I could go into let's say sketchy edges and choose one of these and drag that into the appropriate category let's go to assorted styles and let's change let's use the watermark from this one drag that there and I'll use the face styles from this one and as I'm making those changes it's important to note that you actually need to update this if you want to save it so if I like this style I need to click here to update that and save it as a new custom style so there we go I click on that you'll see those arrows disappear and if I right click now I can update the scene and this scene will be saved with this particular style again there's a lot more to style so you can at the end of this video I'll talk about some resources to find more information but styles are pretty useful and again for interior design they're especially useful because they may help show your model in a way that doesn't look as finished perhaps it's more of a conceptual design you don't want the client to think that it's done styles are a really great way to make it look sketchy in somewhat unfinished on the other side of that spectrum you can do rendering in Sketchup and I want to talk about one extension it's called visualizer and I want to show this one because it's the most simple rendering option in Sketchup and it's free so if you're new to rendering I recommend this one I'll jump into the warehouse here the extension warehouse do a search for that so a visualizer for Sketchup I've already got this one installed but I just wanted to show you where this was and again it's free and it's really easy to use so you can go here and watch a quick video I'm gonna close this now so I've got a scene saved here with shadows turned on that I want to use for my visualizer render so I'm gonna go to extensions visualizer and start it up and it's pretty quick as you open it it already starts to render the current scene so you'll see it start to render here and if I change my view as its rendering it will update and restart the render so I could zoom in a little bit there you can see it's updating and restarting and you notice I didn't do any kind of setup before I started the renderer here and if you've used renders before a lot of times you do need to do a little bit of setup at the start to define reflectivity of materials and various other things before you render so it just kind of depends on your needs sometimes you may need a more control over your scene so you may want to choose a different renderer in Sketchup and there's a lot of different options so I encourage you to go to our extension warehouse and check out those options but I do want to show this one because it is free and easy to use so it's a really great way to get introduced to rendering in Sketchup and I've already got this scene already done so I'll cruise over to that and I think this one took let me close the visualizer here and so this one took maybe about 20 or 30 minutes you can see it's not quite finished here but pretty easily you can get an output that's a more of a realistic render you can see here in the reflection the windows is pretty good without me having to do any kind of setup so I'll close that down and the next scene here I want to talk about the use of sections for animation so perhaps not something you're going to use a lot in interior design but just thought it was kind of a fun example to show as I cruise through these scenes you can see that you can animate certain things so perhaps a progression of items appearing may be useful to you and I can tie that to different scenes here so I can animate the it's basically a transition from a section cut in a static viewpoint or I could change my view as well as show that animation happening so if I go to view the section planes you can see what's happening here I've actually placed two section planes inside this window group and if you right click and choose active cut you can save which cut is active to certain scenes and there's actually a plug-in that does this almost automates this process called animate sections so you should check that one out too it's free as well so it's pretty fun way to show a little bit of animation in Sketchup and if you do want to go deeper into animation in Sketchup I'll show you how to do that you can right-click and play animation this just toggles through the scenes that you have and animates those for you if you so right now I'm not clicking between these scenes here I'm just letting it play the animation I can change the scene transition time as well if I go to window model info animation I can up the transition time so it may be a slower transition between scenes or I could actually turn that off if I just wanted to jump between scenes if you go to file export you can export animation as well so here you can see the format options we have and if you choose one and go to this option button you can actually control a little bit more about that and about that way that's exported okay lastly I want to talk about layouts so there's not a whole lot of time left but I do want to briefly mention this loud is a secondary application that comes with SketchUp Pro so if you've not heard of it it is what you want to use to showcase your Sketchup model in some form whether that be via presentation or in maybe 2d documentation so what I can do here is set up a few scenes in Sketchup but I know I might need and layout so for example I've got plan here and elevation you can see that my perspective is turned off in these scenes so for the plan view if I go to camera perspective you can toggle that on or off so in this case I wanted this scene to just have the perspective turned off or my straight down plan view and there's elevation if you have different elevations of course you can change with these buttons up here use this quickly snap to those views there's not a very complex model so there's not a lot of interesting things going on there but if I had an off angle elevation you can also right-click on a surface and choose a line view and that aligns you to the perpendicular view of that surface but I want to show you how to go into layout from Sketchup here so if you go to file send to layout oops gotta save the model first a quick note about saving in Sketchup you might have seen the that little wheel appeared a few times as I was modeling and that's because I had autosave set to a certain time period if you go to model info actually it's in preferences general so I have it set for every 20 minutes it's probably better to do that every five minutes perhaps five or ten minutes so Sketchup will autosave and create a backup if you tell it to so it's good to pay attention to this because in Sketchup it's nice to have auto saves happening in the background okay I've saved my model and now I'm going to file send to layout and here you can see that I'm in layout now no longer in Sketchup and initially I have the choice to choose between a maybe a default template I can also create my own in this case I'll just choose arc D landscape with this default template here I can see you've got some choices there I'm gonna choose that template and the first thing that I see is a viewport being placed onto my page so what this is is a viewport into my Sketchup model again I'm not no longer in Sketchup it's back here I'm in layout now and this viewport is pretty nice because it's it's a portal into the Sketchup model so I can access various things from this viewport I can right click and go between different scenes that I've already got set up here so I could go to my plan scene and you'll see it's rendering automatically it's a rear end during that scene I can change the scale here by right-clicking going to scale choosing a new scale and they can adjust that viewport after it renders let's go to a smaller one and then let's make that viewport a little bit smaller and then I can copy this viewport as well let's move this over to the side and make a copy and I can right-click and choose the elevation scene that I already have made if you decide that you want to make new scenes after you've already started a layout document that's no problem you can go into sketchup make a change and then and layout you need to update that model reference so if i made a change maybe added some new elevation scenes i could right-click and update model reference and that syncs up the Sketchup model with your layout document so here I can of course change the scale here to something different and another cool thing you can do I can draw a circle or any shape really to create a clipping mask so I could combine this circle with the viewport right-click choose create clipping mask so pretty easy way to do a quick detail and so any shape can be a clipping mask as far as the cover page goes let's say we want to copy this viewport I'm gonna copy this over to the cover page and then paste that there let's say I wanted to access one of my Styles here I can choose the style scene so for the cover page if I wanted a particular style view I could do that pretty easily you can see here Sketchup is auto rendering this if I uncheck that Auto button there I would then need to render it manually and click on that button each time I made a change if you've got a view like this that's a stylized view you actually want to use the raster choice there's vector raster in hybrid for any kind of line work like over on this page I want to use actually in this case I want to use a hybrid and hybrid will show the rasterized version of the textures or colors along with the vectorized line work if you just have a elevation without showing the materials or colors you do want to choose vector and vector will give you what make those lines just all vector but back on the cover page I wanted to keep that raster because it was a stylized view in Sketchup so I don't need any vector lines there I just wanted that stylized raster view let's go back here let's say that I wanted to use my rendered image in place of this one so I can delete that viewport and I can also insert a static image file like this visualizer one so I can bring this PNG into this cover page if I prefer to use the rendered view instead of that stylized Sketchup view so there's a lot going on with layout and we have other videos and documentation about how to use the layout this is a super basic view of layout don't forget that you've got things like text and labels and dimensioning that you can do in layout so you're not going to be doing you shouldn't be doing dimensioning in sketchup you should do all this in layout but I'm out of time here so I don't want to go too deep into this there are other other videos that are better for that and I will briefly show you some of the resources that I mentioned before so our homepage on Sketchup com you can go down to the bottom here and you have access to things like the knowledge Center our forum and our blog so our knowledge Center is really nice place to type in your search for certain tools in Sketchup or certain techniques we have a lot of great articles in our knowledge center here the forum is a really great place to ask a question or do a search for your question and see if someone else has asked it we have a lot of people in here that are really excited to help you out and answer your questions so I really encourage you to try to try our forum if you have any kind of questions or curiosity about our community or our YouTube channels probably the first place you should go if you're looking for any kind of tutorials or quick videos this one's a little bit longer but we do have a lot of short videos that are really nice to understand certain tools and techniques in Sketchup I to point you to our playlist option here so playlists the skill builder one is really good we're just starting this one up so there's 8 videos now you should see more as time goes on this is a really great curated collection of videos that will just be kind of a few minutes showing you a tool or a technique in Sketchup so check that out and again our YouTube channel is our scheduled channel is a special channel on YouTube so if you do a search for Sketchup YouTube channel you'll see it's called Sketchup video our blog is also a really good place to read about case studies tips and tricks lots of good things on our blog and again here's the 3d warehouse and extension warehouse outside of Sketchup that you can search and browse there but again these are really better accessed from within Sketchup thanks for joining me today I'll see you next time

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 528,516

Rating: 4.9259486 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling

Id: zmDFIW0J8JU

Length: 61min 41sec (3701 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2015