The 35 tools you wish you had in SketchUp | SketchPlus Extension Review

sketch plus is like the swiss army knife extension for sketchup it's pretty much the missing tool set that you wish you had and in this video i'm going to walk you through every single tool really quickly so you can see exactly what's included in sketch plus alright so sketch plus comes with six categories of tools components draw tags materials move and select so let's explore the components tools so the first one here is the sketch plus component finder which you may think is similar to the built-in components panel in sketchup but the biggest difference is you can search by name so if you may not be aware the search feature in the components panel actually searches the um the 3d warehouse it doesn't search the current like the in-model collection of components so if you're trying to find a component that's in your model you'd have to basically just go to go to the list and like search for it by browsing and scrolling up and down to finding to find it but with this component finder feature you can actually search by name and then when you find the component you want you can click on it and place it in your model just like that so the next tool is the change axis tool so this will allow you to position the axis at any one of these predefined points in relation to the bounding box of a component next we have the replace component tool so i can select this component and replace it with this component you can also replace multiple components at once by creating a multi-selection and then using the tool now keep in mind the component that is being replaced will keep the same axis orientation so if the axis is located somewhere weird like this it will if i use the replace tool it'll kind of orient the component kind of strange because it's keeping the axis orientation where the previous component was so just keep that in mind if you're replacing things like this you want to have a consistent axis orientation next we have the mirror tool which will allow you to mirror components or groups along the specified plane so if i snap to the green plane here and click at the midpoint it'll mirror across to the other side and then i can grab these two grab the mirror tool again snap to the red axis and do the same thing to the other side with smart array this is really cool because it's very intuitive so you select two components that have been you know oriented differently from one another so you select the first one you select the second one and then you can see it kind of will copy additional components based off of the transformation of the first two and so you can use this obviously the most obvious uh application is for making stairs spiral stairs or anything that has a certain transformation as it is being copied all right check out this path array tool you select a path activate the tool you're going to click a start point for the path select a component and then you can aerate the component along the path hitting shift will toggle whether the component will rotate along the path and then you just click to finish you can also type in a fixed distance if you want so that's a really awesome tool all right let's say you have a bunch of copies of the same exact tree in the model you just select all of them click the random spin and when you click it will rotate the components randomly so you have a little bit of differences between all of the trees and there's also a randomized scale button so it kind of does the same thing just with the scale so this is a great way to get away with using the same component for multiple objects it's kind of a dead giveaway when you have all the trees looking the exact same so randomizing the scale and rotation really gives it the illusion that these are different components and the last randomizer is a random position tool so you create a selection of multiple objects activate the randomized position then what you're going to do is click and then you're going to specify the range of randomness that you're going to allow so let's say in the red direction i want a maximum random movement of this much and then the maximum along the green axis will be wider so i'll go like this and then for the height i actually don't want to change the height at all so i'm going to make sure this stays collapse and i'll click to finish and it's now randomized the green and red position along the green and red axis within the parameters within this this box um range that i've defined so it's a really clever user interface to allow you to randomize the position of multiple objects all right next we have recursive explode so if you've ever imported an ifc file you know how many nested objects there are and what's great is with this one tool you can explode all of those and be left with just the raw geometry so all the the nested objects will be instantly erased all right so next we have the drawing tools now these are a number of different tools for creating primitive shapes the first one is a sphere so before you click you can define the number of segments and then you click you drag the mouse click again and you have a sphere you can also define the radius we also have the cone tool again defining the segments first dragging for the diameter and then the height and then we have the torus so you do the radius and then the thickness of the torus sometimes you might have a situation where you've done something to break the faces in the model and you might typically grab the line tool and like retrace the face uh or retrace the edge in order to regenerate the faces but then you have a situation where sometimes interfaces are not um kind of subdivided so then you have to do the same thing and like subdivide that and then come over here and retrace this edge to subdivide that but now with the with this tool right here make faces what you can do is just select all of the geometry here grab the tool click one of the edges and it'll instantly regenerate all of the possible faces that can be created with the selected edges so that's a really handy tool as well all right next we have some tag tools so the first one will untag all of the selected entities and the cool thing is when you activate the tool sketchup will switch into color by tag mode and if you have the entity info and outliner open as you hover over the different objects it will kind of temporarily select it so you can see which tag it's assigned to you can see exactly what you're highlighting so then you just click so right now this is on the cabinet's wall tag if i click now it removes it and it's untagged so i can do the same thing here so we get the visual feedback with the color by tag and we can see uh what we're doing in the entity info and outliner the next one will untag just the faces and edges so most of you know that it's best practice to keep all of your faces and edges on the untagged layer or tag rather still have that issue i still say layer sometimes so this is a great way to go through the model and just completely remove faces from any sort of tag and just keep those on untagged and then this last one here will untag all groups and components within the selected entities so i could remove tags from literally everything in the com in the model uh just like that and then when you activate a new tool color by tag turns off and you're good to go next we have some material tools the first one is kind of neat it's a deep paint faces so if i wanted to paint the side of this cabinet a wood color i can use deep paint faces click on just the face without having to actually open the component and you can paint that face so this one these are actually two separate components i believe so that's why yeah that's why both of them appeared painted when i orbited around and then we have some similar tools like with the tag tools so we can do unpaint all unpaint faces and edges so i can go like this and remove that material from the face and then unpaint all groups and components so if there's any paint applied directly to a group or component so this group has a paint applied to it i can use that and it will go back to the default material all right next we have the move tools and this first one is called the nudge tool so this you can just use your arrow keys to nudge a selection by a specified increment so you can type in an increment here so i could type in one foot and every time i tap the arrow key it'll nudge one foot next we have move to origin this one's pretty obvious you click on it and the object is moved to the current origin all right this next tool is the align tool so if you have multiple objects you create a selection grab the align tool you get this really cool interface that gives you instant feedback so you can align multiple objects along the red green or blue axis so i can drop these all to the ground and then if i want to bring them all towards the green axis we have the perfect alignment i'd say this is one of my favorite tools just because of how intuitive it is the the instant feedback that it provides i think is really really awesome and this tool is an instant move to z tool so with the selection move to z and all of those objects are instantly brought to the same z position that you pick in the model so the next command is the drop command so you create a selection of objects grab the drop tool click and the components or objects will drop down until it intersects with a surface below and lastly in the move tools is the flatten to ground so if i select this mesh here and click the flat into ground and click it'll flatten it all the way down to the origin z so it's completely flat and lastly we have the select tools so this first one is a select filter so with the current selection you can select only the faces for instance so you click select only and it selects the faces if i create a selection again let's say i only want to select the groups it erases all of the selection because these are these are components so i could say components select only and so now i've only got the components selected you can do the opposite you can deselect so if i want to deselect the faces i can select faces there click deselect and now i'm left with everything else so there's a lot of different options here you can select by uh groups components whether they're solid non-solid images text dimensions all of these things here you can select by material uh it's it's a really powerful this is another one of the tools that i found myself using quite a bit once i had sketch plus installed so i would have to say this is one of my favorite features as well there's also a lasso tool selection so you can create a selection using a lasso instead of using like the standard box selection that comes with sketchup this lasso allows you to create a custom shape selection just like that and similarly is the polygon lasso so this is where you can just click and create a polygon to create your selection like that now deep select face is really cool if you have really complicated models that have a ton of nested objects because with a single click it'll open up all of the nested objects and get down to the very base object that face uh exists in so it's a great fast way to select and open groups and components that are in your model and we also have the selection painter where you can select objects by clicking and dragging across them so actually let's jump inside of here and do that again so click and drag to create a selection across multiple objects all right and next we have the select all instances tool where you click on one component and it'll select every single copy of that component that is within the current context so then i can go ahead and grab my paint bucket tool and paint all instances of that component in one step and lastly we have a previous selection kind of like a a memory of the different things that you've selected so i can click this button and bring back the previous selection that i just had all right so that is the entire sketch plus tool set from the component tools the draw tools tags materials move and the selection tools so it's a great tool set uh it's kind of like the it's like i said it's a swiss army knife of sketchup extensions it's the tools that you wish you had if you'd like to check it out i have an affiliate link in the description and that is gonna do it for this video thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: MasterSketchUp

Views: 2,604

Rating: 4.9175258 out of 5

Keywords: Sketchup Tutorials, Sketchup, Google Sketchup, Trimble Sketchup, Sketchup Tips, SketchPlus Review, SketchUp Extensions, Best SketchUp Extensions, Plugins

Id: jpwa_7GbxI8

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021