TEN MISTAKES BEGINNERS MAKE IN SKETCHUP and How to Avoid Them!

whoo what's up guys Justin here with these sketchup' essentials calm back with another Sketchup quick tutorial for you so in this video we're going to talk about some of the mistakes beginners make when they first start modeling in Sketchup and how to avoid them um this video is brought to you by the Sketchup essentials course the Sketchup essentials course is a comprehensive course designed to basically give you the value of a 2-day in-person Sketchup training but with unlimited access and a lower cost so in this course I'm gonna cover everything from an introduction to all of the tools in Sketchup to advanced modeling techniques geolocation modeling extension modeling introduction to photorealistic rendering modeling for layout and more so if that's something you're interested in you want to get some more in-depth Sketchup training that course is on sale for anyone who pre-orders for 40% off through the 28th of February so if that's something you're interested in make sure to visit the Sketchup essentials comm slash course for more information now let's go ahead and just jump into it so mistake number one is modeling without putting geometry in groups so a lot of beginners don't know that they can even use groups so they just jump right in and start modeling well this enthusiasm is good modeling like this can lead your entire model being made up of sticky geometry it's very difficult to change later so here's an example of two different cabinets on the walls in this model so the model on the left doesnt have any group geometry this is all just in here as raw geometry and the model on the right has been modeled and then grouped so if you try to move this cabinet on the left around on this wall especially on the axes you can start running into issues with geometry sticking together and Auto folding and creating a lot of different problems so what happens is when you model like this you start having trouble making changes later however if you take your models and you group your geometry so that it doesn't merge together then you can move things around off of walls quickly and easily you can see how this model which is being grouped isn't actually merging with anything and you can put it wherever you want and make changes with it quickly so grouping geometry can be very important mistake number two is clicking and dragging so most of the tools in Sketchup support clicking and dragging to activate them models however clicking-and-dragging with tools active actually makes your life a lot harder so for example if I was to activate the push-pull tool in this model there's two different ways that you could do this you could click on this face hold your mouse down and drag it and then let up in order to create this face however if you do this it can be much more difficult to inference and also to set distances of different tools instead of clicking and dragging when you activate a tool do a single click move your mouse and then do a second click in order to create this second face what that does is that allows you the ability to a move your mouse around and take your time placing your new face and be enter a distance value so in this case I could type in a distance value of five feet and hit the inner key so you can do this with the mouse button held down you can still enter that but you find yourself sitting and it's it's almost stressful holding the left the left mouse button down while you have a tool active save yourself some trouble and just do a single click to activate a tool and then click again to set a new face number three has created a lot of frustration for a lot of people in Sketchup and that's not drawing along the axes so most you know if you use a tool in Sketchup like the line tool Sketchup will give you an inference line whenever you're actually on an axis so for example if I activate the line tool and I click and then I move my mouse you can see how it turns green when I'm on the axes however if I move my mouse to off to the side I'm still drawing a line but I'm not drawing it parallel to the axis anymore and so what happens is if you don't draw with your tools on an axis what can happen is Sketchup can kind of sketch up kind of guesses as to where your lines need to be so if I come in here and I'm just drawing in space like this a lot of the time what happens is you'll end up with lines that just go up just a little bit so something like this and then you'll end up drawing and you can see how this line looks like it's on the green axis but not because it didn't turn green and so this can lead to issues like faces not closing and other things like that so in order to avoid this when you're working with tools use the arrow keys to lock your tools on the axes so in this case if I was to use the line tool I could click in the space and then I could tap the left arrow key to lock to the green axis or the right arrow key to lock to the red axis or tap the up arrow key to lock to the blue axis by locking to the axes when you're drawing you can save a lot of time and having to go back and fix a lot of geometry later that accidentally gets drawn off axis number four is modeling things that they don't need a huge time trap that a lot of beginners fall into is modeling and creating things that they don't need like things that won't show up in your final view so let's say for example that you have this house and you have a car in front of the building you have a default model or you have a model in here of people you've got all these different things and then let's say that this is the view you're going for so you're gonna export this to a rendering software and create a rendering of this house well if you look off to the side there's no reason to go in here and model things like this mailbox because they're not going to show up in your final view unless they're gonna show up in your final view there's really no reason to spend a lot of time on them so a lot of the time what will happen is beginners will really dive in and get into the detail let's start modeling all this stuff that's not going to show up in their final view and it's a huge waste of time so have an idea of what you're going to create and then create just that and whenever possible utilize models like this car from the 3d warehouse that have already been modeled so that you don't have to go in and spend a lot of time modeling the extra Entourage and other things for your model one of the easiest ways to double your workload in Sketchup is to remodel two sides of symmetrical objects so for example if I have this table and I've modeled the top face as an individual face and then I come in here and I want to round off the corner of this object you can see how I'd have to come in here and do this four times this can also lead to a loss of symmetry because it can be difficult to recreate things like this over and over again however if you model symmetrical objects with each half being a component then what can happen is it can become really easy to just come in here and make changes because all you have to do is model half of your table so you can see how with this model I have a half a table component and then another half a table component over here and as soon as I made the change on this side the copy of the component adjusted over here as well and so we could even divide this up into four pieces instead of two pieces so that we'd only have to change the corner once but you can see how this this can basically cut your workload in half because you're only having to model this once and then you just create a copy just flip it in place and then put your two pieces together so anytime you have symmetrical objects look for a way to split it in half and use components to do half the work another mistake the beginners make when they first start we're working in Sketchup is that they don't organize their models and what this can lead to is this can lead to issues later where you want to look at certain things and you can't turn things on and off in your models you can't change anything that sort of thing so this model for example is the apartment building that we did for layout but you can see how everything is organized so you can turn everything on and off in order to get in order to get the visibility's that you want in your models so you can see how I set this up or I can turn the furniture off I can turn the casework off I can turn the appliances off so organizing everything with layers and groups can be really important for being able to make changes but also get the visibility's that you want in the future so when you're modeling in your Sketchup models make sure that you're grouping your geometry and also putting that geometry on layers in order to turn that on and off and you can put different groups on different layers in order to do this easily this will be especially important once you start modeling for layout so number seven is beginners often don't know that you can save views in sketchup so when preparing a model for presentation or just for general modeling they can waste a lot of time trying to get that perfect view by flying around in their model and then once they get that view whatever that view might look like they may take the image that they want and then just navigate away from it instead it's a good idea to save different views in your model so that you can get back to them really quickly so you can see how in this model I have multiple different views for things like bathroom elevations overall floor plans a working view so whenever you find a view that you like just go up to view animation adds scene you can manage and name your scenes by going over the scenes manager in your tray issue number eight is not setting autosave so one of the most frustrating things that can happen to you in Sketchup is that you work and work and work on a model and then you forget to save it and then something happens and you get the bug splat page and you lose everything however if you set autosave in Sketchup using window preferences general you can set your Sketchup models to create a backup and also do autosave on a time increment of your choice obviously if you have this saving more often then it's gonna slow down your modeling process but you can set this duration to whatever you want just in case something goes wrong so that you'll have an auto saved version to open up so that you don't lose all of your work make sure that both of these boxes are checked in your models so one of the things that a lot of beginners don't understand is there's a difference between dragging from right to left to select objects and from left to right so you can see how if I drag from left to right my selection box becomes a box or the solid line however if I drag my mouse from right to left my selection box becomes a dotted line and these act differently in your models like for example let's say that we have this sphere and we want to select half the geometry in this model if you drag from right to left and you get this dotted bounding box this means that anything the selection box touches is gonna get selected so you can see how if I drag from right to left and I drag past the center point of this model all the extra geometry gets selected because the selection box touches it however if you drag from left to right only objects that are actually inside this box fully will get selected so you can see how if I drag from left to right I can get half of this sphere without picking up the other half of this finally one of the mistakes that beginners make when they're moving objects around in their models is they simply try to take an object and just put it in an arbitrary point in space and as you can see when you do this without using any kind of inferencing you don't really know where your where your object is gonna end up you can see how I can't really adjust based on just trying to pick an arbitrary point in space where this box goes so you can see how I can drag this and it kind of looks like it's next to this box but it's really not because Sketchup isn't sure where to put that in space however what you can do instead is you can just move your objects quickly along the red green and blue axes in order to precisely put them in a place so let's say that I had a box that was way off in the background way out here if I wanted to put this object next to that box it can be very tricky to try to do that just by moving my mouse out here however if I was to just move this along the three axes I can move along the green axis to line up the front I could move along the blue in order to line up the side and then I could use the red to just place where this is in relation to the other box so you can see how putting this next to this box it's off in 3d space gets really easy if you just move along the axes that's where I'm gonna wrap up today's video leave a comment below and let me know what you thought do you still catch yourself doing any of this stuff I know that I do I'll have you here your opinion on this or if there's anything I missed I just love having that 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 so make sure to check out that link in the notes down below 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

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Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup for beginners, sketchup beginner, sketchup beginner mistakes, watch this before you get started in sketchup, sketchup mistakes, sketchup problems, sketchup beginner tutorial, sketchup quick tips, sketchup tips, sketchup time saving

Id: QlwUkPrekj4

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018