THE MOST UNDERUSED SKETCHUP TIP - Save Time with the Outliner!

what's up guys Justin here with the sketch of essentials calm back with another sketch up quick tutorial for you so I wanted to make this video really because I think this tool is being underutilized in Sketchup and I think it's very powerful so today I wanted to make a video teaching you how to use the outliner to keep your models organized so I know model organization doesn't sound like the most interesting thing in the world but stick with it watch the video I promise using the outliner is gonna make a huge difference in the way that you work with in Sketchup today's video is brought to you by the Sketchup essentials course sketch of Central's courses of course I created to uh basically give you an easy to follow start to finish Sketchup training so if that's something you're interested in this is probably the easiest way to get from Sketchup beginner to Sketchup expert so if it's if you want to take your Sketchup training to the next level make sure you check it out at the Sketchup Essentials comm slash course now let's go ahead and just jump into it so I look at a lot of different models as a part of the Sketchup essentials you know looking at people's models and trying to help make them faster that sort of thing and you could almost say that the outliner is sketch ups best-kept secret it's a little menu off to the right-hand side and I think a lot of people don't understand or even know that it's over here if you don't see the outliner in your tray off to the right you just want to go up to window default tray make sure the box for outliner is checked also make sure your tray has been turned on that should show up the outliner in your default tray off to the side and so basically what it is is anytime you have a group or a component in your model they show up inside the outliner and so as you can see my default model which is a component my Mian Bonnie one shows up inside the outliner so basically any kind of group geometry that you have within your model is going to show up in the outliner so for example if I was to come in here and I was to create a box I was to push pull it up and then I was to select it and I right clicked and I made it a group you can see how as soon as I make it a group it shows up inside the outliner and once it shows up inside the outliner I can start making changes to it and adjusting it and you to organize my model so to start off you'll notice that groups and components look a little bit different so a group is gonna have an individual box right here in just an instance name so that's basically the name of the group inside your model so you can right click on this and go down to the option for rename and I can go ahead and call this box and so you'll notice that when I rename this and call this box if I click on it and select it then the instance name up in the entity info has changed as well and so if I come in here and I make a copy of this so if I use the move tool in copy mode I'm gonna get a second option in here and you can see how since the first one is named box and then I made a copy of it the second one inherited that name as well so the second one is also called box and so you'll notice that components look a little bit different components have a name in here that's inside brackets and so the piece that's inside brackets is the component definition name so what that means is we've took we've talked about components a little bit before but basically objects within Sketchup that our components are all linked so if you make it change to one you're gonna make changes to all of them so for example if I came in here and I made a copy of my me and Bonnie component and I was to come in and I was to adjust my shirt color to something like let's say I picked out a blue color like this you can see how because these are components when one of them changed the other one changed as well and so that's what makes components so powerful but you'll notice that inside the brackets you've got the name or the component definition of each object showing up in here and that just indicates that those are copies of this same component in addition to that if you want if each one of these has a separate instance name we'll talk about this a little bit more and we'll talk about this a little bit later but if each one of these has an individual instance name so if like this one for example was my me and Bonnie this is the one that's by the origin point so I can enter an instance name in the entity info up above for origin and then this one I could call this yeast version or something like that and you can see how those instance those individual instance names will show up in here as well as the component definition so you can use that to label these and we'll talk about that a little bit more in just a minute but basically you can adjust the information of these objects inside the outliner and so in addition to showing individual object the outliner also shows nested objects so let's say for example that I was to take these two boxes right click and I was to put those in a group so now I have two boxes inside a group and you know how usually in Sketchup in order to get to those once they're grouped you have to double click in here and then if you wanted to edit one of these individually you'd have to double click again in order to get in here and be able to edit them well what you can do instead is you can see how once you created this group inside your model these show up under this overall group in the outliner and so what you can do is you can minimize and maximize those as well as adjusting different things about that but let's say for example that you wanted to edit just this one box instead of having to double click and double click and double click to get inside of this you can just double click on whatever object you want to edit in here so this is a really great way to keep everything organized but also to give you quick access to things within your model and so you can also rename the groups that have groups nested inside them so like for example if I wanted to rename this group I would just right-click on it I would click a rename and in this case I would rename this one boxes so I have a group called boxes and then I have individual groups in here called box and so let's say for example that we had a couple different kinds of geometry so let's say I was to model a cylinder for example and I was to go ahead and make that a group and I was to call that cylinder and then I made a copy of that one so I'm just using the move tool in copy mode well what I could do is I could right-click on this one I could click make group and then I could call this group cylinders and then let's say I was to use the follow me tool in order to create a cone then I made a copy of that over here and then I could put that in a group and we could call that one cones so now I have three groups in here I have a group for boxes I have a group for cones and I have a group for cylinders and what you can do is you can select multiple different objects within the outliner by doing a shift click and then you can right click in here and you can click make group so now what I can do is I can rename this group shapes so what that allows me to do is that allows me to have a group that contains all of my shapes and then within that group I have a group that contains my boxes a group that contains my cones and a group that contains my cylinders and so this starts making things in your models really easy to manage so you can come in here and you can edit any of these just by double clicking on it instead of having to come out here and double click and double click and double click in order to get in here you can just find the object that you want if you've done a good job labeling everything and just edit it that way and so you can also use this to edit different visibilities within the outliner or you can use the outliner to edit different visibilities within your model and so if you remember you can hide objects in Sketchup by right clicking and clicking the option for hide but the problem with that is if you don't have your model organized and you hide a whole bunch of stuff it becomes really difficult to figure out what's hidden and what's in your model so if you're not using the outliner for example and I come in here and I hide a whole bunch of individual things and some of these are nested within groups and then some of them aren't and I hide all this stuff what happens is you've got all this stuff in your model but it gets a little bit difficult figuring out in there that's hidden and isn't hidden because if I come in here and do an unhide all for example because these objects are inside a group they're not gonna unhide and so it's really easy to lose track of geometry in here well what you can do instead is you can open up your outliner and you can see how anything that's hidden shows up in a gray text so the stuff that isn't hidden is in this darker text the stuff that is hidden is in this gray text what you can do is you can use this to hide and unhide different individual objects really easily so you can see how I can come in here and I can find all of my cylinders and unhide those if I wanted to hide I can come in here and hide and unhide different things really quickly and really easily and I can use this to manage all of that and one thing to know is if you put things on a layer so let's say for example that I was to create a layer we'll call it so if I was to put this group on the layer cylinders and I was to turn that layer off that's not going to show up in my outliner until it gets turned back on so hidden objects show up in your outliner layers that are hidden do not show up in your outliner so if you just want to like get something out of the way you just don't want to see it in there at all you can definitely put those on different layers and just kind of hide those by turning the layers off so another thing that's really valuable about the outliner is you can also use it to reorganize different objects so let's say for example that I no longer wanted my cylinders group to show up within my shapes group well usually what you'd have to do is you'd have to double-click in here you'd have to cut this click out of it and then do like a edit paste in place in order to put it in here to move it outside of that group and that's fine but if you're moving a lot of different things around then it's going to take you a lot of time to do things like that and so what you could do instead is let's say I wanted the cylinders group to just kind of stand on its own outside of this group in my model well what I can do is I can click and drag this and I could just move this up into my models section so now my cylinders are no longer in this group so you can use this to move things around let's say I wanted my boxes group to show up inside my cylinders group I can click and drag that over here and so this gives you a lot of versatility for moving and organizing different things and if I messed up if I put things where I didn't want them to be I can just click and drag them back into that group really quickly and really easily so in addition to that let's say you didn't want these to be grouped in the shapes group anymore well you could come in here and you could right-click on this and you could explode the group so that it's not in here so if this is a really easy way if you need to explode things to see exactly what you're exploding so if I do an undo and let's say for example that I no longer wanted my boxes cones and cylinders to be in their own group you can see how what I'm doing is I'm doing a control click to select these and then I'm gonna right click and I'm going to click explode well now all of those shapes are inside this group but they're not grouped in funny ways this is one of my favorite tools inside of Sketchup I think it's very underutilized keeping your model organized can save you a ton of time especially if you organize your model as you go so just get in the habit of organizing things as you go I promise you it will save you a ton of time down the road when you're going back and making changes that's Harmon in this video leave a comment below let me know what you thought was this helpful to you are you using the outliner I just love having that Sketch up conversation if 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 in this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month so make sure you 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 not we'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 40,244

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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 organization, sketchup model slow, sketchup model speed, sketchup model outliner tutorial, sketchup outliner groups components, sketchup outliner layout, sketchup ouliner, outliner sketchup, outliner sketchup tutorial

Id: mcq3eunYyFM

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 18 2018