Top 10 Tips for MODELING CABINETS in SketchUp

What's up guys, Justin here with TheSketchupEssentials.com back with another Sketchup quick tutorial for you. So in today's video, we're kind of continuing down our interior design path and we're going to talk about some different tips for modeling and creating cabinets for your interiors in Sketchup. If you're looking for more great Sketchup tips, make sure you check out my free Sketchup tips guide at TheSketchupEssentials.com slash tips. Now let's go ahead and just jump into it. All right, so what I wanted to do is I wanted to talk through some different things that you can use in order to really save time when working inside of a Sketchup model, especially when you're creating different cabinets. So I wanted to talk through some things that have kind of saved me time. And this is going to vary based on your workflow, but a lot of these can just save you from having to do a whole bunch of extra work. So tip number one is only model what you need. And what I mean by that is when you're coming in here and you're creating models, you can see how these cabinets look fairly similar. This one has a little bit more detail on the exterior because I created it with an extension. But generally speaking, when you're modeling things like your cabinets, you don't need to come in and get into a whole lot of detail. And so I'll show you what I mean. I'm just going to take a section cut across this. And we'll just kind of move this section cut down and look at the inside. Or maybe we'll hide the doors. That's probably going to be easier. So if we come in here and we look at the inside of this cabinet, you can see how this is actually modeled in with all the different pieces of how this is going to be built. So it's got the drawer on the inside. It's got the shelf. It's got the piece coming across the middle here. It's got all of those things in it, which is great if you need to illustrate what the interior of the cabinet is going to look like. If you're going to have these doors open in a rendering or something like that. But a lot of the time you're not going to do that. A lot of the time you're just going to give kind of an overall view and nothing else. And so if we take a look at this, which I've modeled myself instead of with an extension, you can see how if I hide this door, the only thing that's really behind this door is just kind of a panel. So there's no extra detail in here or anything like that. And so what that means is that means I didn't have to come in here and model all that extra stuff. And since I'm never going to show this with the door open, I don't need to. So that's tip one is only model what you need. And really this is something that you should use for anything you're modeling in SketchUp. So the next tip is going to be if you have any kind of specialty details that are going to be inside of your cabinets. So like for example, let's say that we wanted to come in here and we wanted to model out like a little trim piece or something like that. And this is going to be updating with this one. We'll talk about that in a second. But let's say you just wanted like a raised trim piece or something along here. So let's say it was going to be like maybe an eighth of an inch this way. And we'll draw a line that's going to be a quarter of an inch the other way. Let's say that you had something where you wanted this to be a profile that was going to stick out kind of like this. And you wanted to add this to this face. Well, an easy way to add a trim profile is to use the follow me tool. And so if you remember what the follow me tool does is it allows you to extrude a profile. So in this case, a little arc like this along a path. And so to use the follow me tool, all I have to do is either select these four edges in here or just select this face. And this will automatically know that the perimeter of your selected face is going to be your path. And then just activate the follow me tool and click on this. And so what this does is this allows you to extrude this quickly along this length in order to add a piece of trim or detail or something like that really easily. So the follow me tool is a great tool for adding details like that in here. You could also use that if you wanted to remove detail. So let's say for example that we wanted to like round off this edge or something like that. I could just draw a profile that goes or just a little face that goes along this edge. And then I could select this and then I could use the follow me tool to remove material around that edge as well. So you can see how I was able to bevel that off just by drawing that little face in there and then using the follow me tool to remove the material all the way around. So the next tip I want to talk about is using components for repeating objects. And so I want to kind of draw your attention to something that happened when we did this. So what you're going to notice in here is I made all of those changes to this door on the left hand side. However, if you look at this, these changes have actually been made to the door on the right hand side as well. So you can see how when I added the trim piece and when I rounded this edge off, that got changed over here as well. That's because these are instances or copies of the same component. And what that means is they're basically linked. So when I created these doors, I created them as a component. And that way, whenever I make a copy and I change one, the others are going to change as well. So what that means is if I was to come in here and maybe like push pull this face back or make a change like that, you can see how the other one changes also. I will link to a video that talks a little bit more about components in the notes down below. And you can see how by doing this, that can be very valuable if you want to change like styles or something like that. Or maybe if you want to like swap out the hardware. So if you have repeating objects in here like these cabinet doors, make sure to model them as components in order to be able to make those changes really quickly. So another tip I have is to use objects from the 3D warehouse in order to kind of fill out your model. So like for example, this cabinet hardware, I didn't actually model this. I actually went into the 3D warehouse and I just searched for cabinet hardware. So what that allowed me to do is that it allowed me to find different pieces of hardware that have been modeled in here. And then bring this in without me having to worry about remodel or modeling it myself or anything like that. So like for example, if I wanted to bring this piece of hardware in, I could just download that into my model. And I'll probably just place that right here for right now. So usually what I'll do is I'll kind of put these off to the side and then I can kind of bring them in as I want to. But for this one, I would just copy it. So I would select it and do a control C. And then I could erase out this piece of hardware and paste this other piece of hardware inside of that group. And so going back to what we just talked about, you can see how that piece of hardware is also showing up in this other door. Because I pasted it inside of this component. So you can see how swapping out that hardware can get really easy inside of your model. So you can download hardware and bring that in without having to model it yourself. Which really kind of expands out your ability to do different custom things and things like that. Without having to actually model all of that hardware in there yourself. So another tip I have, especially if you're using standard off-the-shelf casework. Is you can actually go in here and search for different cabinets from manufacturers. So like for example, if I was to search for a craft made cabinet. Then I could come in here and I could check this box for manufacturer model. So this will limit this to only models inside of the 3D warehouse that SketchUp has seen marked as manufacturer models. But you can see how they actually have doors and different base cabinets and things like that. That you can bring in. So if you want to model around like a certain kind of like craft made or something like that. I'm not sure of all of the manufacturers that have cabinets in here. But instead of modeling it yourself, if you want to use just off-the-shelf stuff. A lot of that can actually be found in the 3D warehouse. There may be other places that you could do that as well. But you can just bring those into your model and they're already pre-sized. And they're set up where you don't have to come in here and do all of that extra work. So another tip that I have for working with cabinets inside of your models. Is to use the inference locking when moving them around. So a lot of the time you're going to have cabinets like these or like this. And you're going to want to move them around in different configurations. And one thing that can make your life a lot easier. Is if you use inference locking in order to do that. Then you don't have to worry as much about things getting off axis or that kind of thing. So probably the easiest way to do something like this. In this particular case would be to just use the move tool. And just find an inference point here. And then just move it around and line it up with this other point. Just like this. So you can use those point inferences in order to move this stuff really precisely. So you could just use this corner point and put that right here. Alternatively if you wanted to like for example move this around. Or move this along this length right here. You need to be kind of careful where you click. Because you don't want to click off in space. Because then all of a sudden everything's not aligned anymore. And it can just be a little bit frustrating. So what you can do instead is when you want to move this. You can just single click on a point. And then you can either move your mouse so that it's on the red axis. And that red axis will show up. And you can hold the shift key in order to lock this to that axis. Or if you activate the move tool and click on this point. And just single click. And then you tap the right arrow key. You can see how as soon as I tap the right arrow key with the move tool active. This locks to this axis. Meaning I can move this based on any point that I want. So I could type in a value. Or I could just click out here in space. And you can see how because that was locked on that red axis. You don't have to worry about this kind of flying off somewhere else. And having things not be aligned and things like that. So make sure you're using that inference locking. Or that axis locking in order to save time. And make sure everything stays aligned inside your model. So and I'm going to bring in. Let's bring in a single cabinet for this example. It gets a little more complicated with double cabinets. But let's just find a single cabinet like this one. And download that into your model. So let's say we have a cabinet like this one. And we want to resize it really quick. And so adjusting the size of something like this can get a little bit frustrating. Because if you use the scale tool in order to do that. You can see how you start getting this distortion in here. So what we want to do is we want to make this cabinet wider. But if you use the scale tool it distorts what the wood looks like on the sides. And you don't necessarily want to do that. Well one good work around for that is to use an extension called Fredo scale. What Fredo scale does is that gives you a bunch of different scaling options inside of SketchUp. I will link to a tutorial about this extension in the notes down below. But in particular there is an item in here called box stretching. And what box stretching allows you to do is it allows you to stretch an object like this. Based on a center point or a point that you set. Instead of having to use the scale tool and having these edges get distorted and all of that. And so what you can do with this particular extension is you can activate the box stretching. And then if you right click on it and you click show or hide divider. You can see how when I mouse over this it actually gives me a divider that I can click and drag. And I can adjust the point that this is going to scale from. So like for example if I was to move that over here. This would scale this object based on this point. Which obviously is not what we want. But this allows you to kind of adjust where that scales from. So you can use this in order to scale this object out to a different size. You can also right click and you can set if this is going to be by the center or if it's going to be by the opposite point. That's going to allow you a couple different ways to adjust this. But you could also if you wanted to for something like this cabinet. Let's say you wanted to make this wider and you didn't want to come back in and remodel this. You could do the same thing where you could click and drag this. But you could select the option for from center. Which then would allow you to adjust this based on a center point that you set. So if you select the from center you can set multiple points that this will scale from. And you're not getting any of that distortion. It's just literally scaling from this point that you set. Meaning all of your trim pieces and everything else retain the same proportions. So this is more of like a high level trick. But it is something that can save you a ton of time if you're having to come in and make a bunch of changes or something like that. If you do a lot of kitchens and cabinets and things like that. You might want to think about purchasing an extension that really helps you model those cabinets. So like for example these cabinets were all modeled with an extension called GKWare Cabinet Maker. Which is a very in-depth cabinet extension. But it allowed me to create all of these really easily. Without having to manually create all of these different wood details and things like that. So you literally just activate the extension and then put in all of your dimensions and styles. And it will generate those for you. So you might want to think about that. There's a couple others that I will link to as well. Like I think there's another extension called Sketch This Kitchen Design. Which also allows you to create things like this. So if you're creating a lot of cabinets consider using an extension in order to really save a whole bunch of time working inside your models. And then the last tip is more of a high level tip if you're planning on creating any kind of 3D renderings using your cabinets. And it has to do with making sure you model your cabinets with a gap so that they look realistic. You really need to think about modeling this with a gap in here. And the reason why and I've created like a very very rough image box in here. And we'll just run this in Inkscape really quick. Inkscape is a 3D rendering program. And so we'll kind of fly in here and look. So and this is kind of an odd setup with the lighting and everything else. So it looks a little bit weird. But what this is going to do is when you're rendering your interior. Kind of like this one. You can see how if I look at this cabinet and this cabinet. On the left hand side you can see the gap between the doors and the drawer right here. Where if you look at this one and I don't know why. But that's just kind of a blurry image. But you can't actually see the gap between the doors. Which really gives you kind of a realism problem when working with a rendering or something like that. And so what I would recommend is when you're working with these. And you're modeling out your cabinet. Set up your doors so that there's a little bit of a setback. Between the edge and where your door needs to be. So there's actually a light gap in there. So if you're going to create any kind of a 3D rendering or anything like that. Just model this with a gap kind of like these have. So that will show up visually when you're actually rendering those doors. So that's where I'm going to end this video. Leave a comment below and let me know what you thought. Are these tips that you use? Do you have any tips that help you with cabinets? 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 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. I will catch you in the next video. Thanks guys.