Model a House in SketchUp (pt.2) _ SketchUp Show #28 (Tutorial)

One of the things that starts to get kind of confusing is the fact that the edges in the SketchUp model are black. A lot of the information in the CAD drawing is black, so it's kind of tough to see what's on what, you know, what's going on. So just keep in mind that up at the top of the screen, you've got the image for hidden line mode. And what that's going to do is kind of turn the textures off and just show you where your lines and surfaces in the model are, what you've drawn. If you go back to surfaces with textures, you can do that and then see the plan image again. So I'm just going to kind of keep going here for a little bit. Now in situations where you want this to be super accurate, you want the wall to be exactly six inches wide or eight inches wide or whatever, you can take the tape measure tool and the tape measure tool will allow you to draw construction lines as long as you see that little plus symbol. You can draw construction lines or guides by clicking on an edge where you see that red on edge inference dot, you can pull away from there and see that construction line or that guide line. And I could type in six inches and with that guide offset six inches, take the push pull tool and rather than referencing the image, I can just snap right to the guide. So that wall is six inches, maybe it's really a five and a half inch wall, push it back, type in 0.5, get it half an inch pushed back. So you kind of get what's going on there, you get the idea. On the side surfaces, another interesting thing that you can see is that this image object, when it's exploded, right, remember back a few steps, when we brought that image object into the file, right click on it, you saw the option for explode and that turned it into a surface with a texture applied to it. The texture that's applied to that surface is a projected texture. So that's why you're seeing the streaky stuff on the side. If I right click and go to texture, you see there's that check mark next to projected. So that's what that streaky line, the streaky lines are SketchUp picking up the pixel color right at the edge there of that surface. You can see it over here. I'll just take the rectangle tool, draw a rectangle. And when I pull up, you'll see that black pixel color there, the white pixel color there. So it's just kind of projecting that texture down onto the whole model from above. But what that means for those vertical surfaces is that the projected texture just kind of ends up looking like a sheer cut or a streak down the side. So typically what I'll do to fix that is I'll look at the model from the side. Let me just fix this part real quick. And I'll bring this up to the same nine feet, snap to that wall. What I'll do is I'll look at the model from the side and take the select tool, do a thin little crossing window so that I get all the side surfaces. Not really worried about the top. But I get all the side surfaces, then I can take the paint bucket tool and just pick the color white and paint them all white. So now we're looking at the plan from the top. We're also looking at the floor plan. And from the side, we've got a bunch of white walls. So that's typically what I'll do there. Maybe to do that a couple of times or whatever, but it's worth it. Now for things like windows, same as we were doing with that CAD model before, you can just take the tape measure tool, set a construction line with a 12 inch sill, and then set a construction line with an eight foot header. Then take the rectangle tool and you can draw a rectangle, punch that through. And if you want to get this texture down there now, you can take the paint bucket tool, sample the texture for the plan, paint it onto the surface below. If it's a projected texture, it'll pick it up exactly. And then you can take the push pull tool and push it back to where it needs to be in plan. And same thing over here. We can push it back to where it needs to be in plan. Since this is a doorway, I can take the rectangle tool, draw a little rectangle, and erase the surface there that filled in. Then take push pull and push that down. So when I drew that rectangle, the side surface is filled back in, but I erased those and then pushed the door threshold down. Erase those extra lines and I get the floor plan back. And so from here, we kind of want to take a look at getting the garage and the first floor established as two separate levels. So in order to do that, I kind of want to get rid of a lot of the excess around this floor plan, this particular floor plan. If I just take the pencil tool, I can finish it off by just sort of tracing the outline of that particular floor plan. And again, I'm just sort of approximating this stuff based on the image. Use inference locking here actually to get this lined up perfectly. And then come back over. So that should give me enough of an outline to where I can take the eraser tool and erase the outside edges. And that sort of leaves me with the first floor plan. I can kind of roughly finish this one off just in terms of getting the walls mocked up just for a better visual. Take the rectangle tool, draw that one across. Actually, I can just push this one all the way through. I've got that one drawn already. Erase that piece. And that'll be good enough for now. You guys kind of get the idea. We got the first floor exterior walls model. We can come back and do the interiors later. But what I want to take a minute to show is just getting this garage level also mocked up and in place. So I'm just going to take the rectangle tool, draw a big rectangle around that one. Actually, that's a group, so we got to go inside there first. Draw a big rectangle around that. Take the eraser tool, erase the outside edges. And this one, I'm just going to do a quick offset to offset the wall thickness. Take push-pull and pull that up again just so that we kind of get the idea. Eight feet. Hit enter. So we got an eight-foot garage. From the side with the paint bucket tool, I can select the side surfaces, paint those white. And now take this garage. Luckily, the garage is already grouped. If it wasn't, this is a point where you would definitely want to go in and do that. We're about to put two separate objects right on top of each other. And to avoid having them stick together, you want to make sure that they're actually both grouped. So we've got the garage as a group already. I can come over and select everything on the first level and also turn that into a group. So these two groups, take the garage, it's actually rotated around 90 degrees, and then move it over right underneath this plan. Is it rotated? I think when I look at it, it was this way. So we can move it over. Use inference locking to move it down. And then also use inference locking to move it back. So now having grouped both of these pieces and gotten them into position, I want to set them up on a couple of layers and then set up a couple of scenes so that we can easily toggle back and forth between the two different levels of this unit. So first thing we're going to do is just go to the Entity Info window, select the main level, and we can put that on the main level layer. And then select the lower level and put that on the lower level layer. Go back to scenes now, open up the layers palette, then we got both of those layers in there. Actually, lower level didn't take. So let's type that in again, hit enter, there it is. And if I turn off the main level, the main level goes away. If I turn off the lower level, the lower level goes away. This part just must not have been captured inside that group when I made the group. So what I'm going to do here is triple click that and then cut it, apple X to cut it, go into the group and then edit, paste in place. And now that should all be in there. When I go to main level, yep, that one hides away. And lower level, the garage hides away. So with scenes, now we can add one scene where the main level is turned off. Create that scene and we can title that scene lower level. And then turn the main level back on, turn the lower level off, create another scene and title that scene main level and hit enter. And now I can use those scenes to just toggle back and forth between being able to see the lower level or the main level. Hope that helps you guys in terms of being able to work with images of floor plans to generate SketchUp models. If you have any other questions, feel free to check us out online on our forums at gotoschool.com or email us at info at gotoschool.com. See you next time.