SketchUp Interior Design for Layout 1 - Walls from a Floor Plan Image

What's up guys, Justin here with theSketchupEssentials.com back with another Sketchup quick modeling tutorial for you. So in this tutorial we're going to talk about modeling an interior from scratch in order to be able to use it in layout, to export floor plans and also so that we can use this for different presentations and walkthroughs and all sorts of different stuff. So I wanted to go through kind of the ways to group everything. This is similar to my layout tutorial that I did before, it's a little bit more of an in-depth apartment. Before I get started, I do want to thank my supporters on Patreon. Patreon, as you know, is the crowdfunding website that allows you to support the show. And the support on that just helps me go out and get new things like new extensions and try new things from a software perspective. So if that's something you're interested in, if you like what I'm doing on this channel, please consider visiting patreon.com slash theSketchupEssentials or check out the link down below to support the show. So now let's just jump into it. Alright, so the way that I want to do this is I want to start off by bringing an image in as kind of a reference image to model from. So I've downloaded an image of a floor plan that I wanted to model and I'm going to import that as an image. Now you could do this with like a hand-drawn model or anything else. The process that we're using works for a lot of different things. So if you drew something in a notebook and wanted to bring that in, you could also follow this process. So what we're going to do is we're going to go up to file and click import and you're going to navigate to wherever your image is. In this case, I have a folder for this particular video series. But what we want to do is we want to use the image as an image. We want to click on it and we want to click import. When we import it, you can see how it kind of moves around with my mouse. Well now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to give it a base point and then I'm just going to click again in order to place it. We're going to resize it in a minute. But you can see how it's not nearly big enough. This is why I leave the default model in for a minute is so I can start figuring out the appropriate size for my model. So that when I start modeling, everything is at an appropriate size. You can pretty easily take a look at this and see that it's not big enough. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to resize this based on the dimensions in it. So you can see how a couple of these different rooms have dimensions in them. And some of these are a little bit harder to read because it's not a super high resolution image. But what we're going to do is we're going to use the width of this bedroom, which is 11 feet, to scale our image. So the way that we're going to scale our image is we're going to use the tape measure tool. And so in order to use the tape measure tool, what I want to do is I just want to click on the tape measure tool. It's found in your large tool set. Actually it's found up above as well. And then you can see how right now there's a little plus sign next to the lines on the tape measure tool. We don't want that because that means it's in create guide mode. That means if I come in here and click a couple times, it's going to create a couple guides. And we don't want to create guides. In this case, we just want to measure. So you're just going to tap the control key so that the little plus sign goes away. And then now you're going to click once on this face and then once over here. And you can see how that gives you a length of 3 foot 5 inches. Well what you want to do is you want to type in the length that you want that to be. So I'm going to type in 11 feet and I'm going to hit the enter key. And what SketchUp is going to ask you is if I want to resize the model. And the answer is yes, I want to resize the model. So you can see how now that got resized. Where if I come in here and measure across the face of this apartment, it's very close to 11 inches. It kind of depends on where you start your points and where you end your points. But you can see how this is now to scale. And you can check that by coming in here and saying okay this bedroom is also 11 feet. Well if I measure across this face assuming that plan was to scale this is going to be about 11 feet. So now that you've done that you can start using this image as your reference for coming in here and modeling your walls and everything else. And so there's a couple different ways to model your walls. You could start by coming in and drawing all across this face around the perimeter and then using the offset tool to create your exterior walls. That's definitely one way you could do that. I may do that for my exterior walls. And then there's another way we're going to do our interior walls. But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to start off and I'm just going to start tracing around the perimeter of this building. And you can see how I used inferencing right there to make sure these are level. Always try to make sure that you're lining everything up in your model when you're working on it. That'll just make your life a lot easier a little bit later on. Because you don't want those walls to be off by just a little bit. And so I'm just going to keep going around this perimeter. And the last thing I'm going to do is what I want is I want to end this wall straight across from this wall over here. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to move my mouse until this locks to the red axis and then I'm going to hold the shift key. And you can see how when I hold the shift key when I'm on the red axis it'll lock my line to that red axis. Now I can move my mouse back and forth and I can use this line up here as an inference point. And so I'm just going to click to set that wall and then I'm just going to draw a line all the way across. And you'll know that this works because it'll draw a face across the entire thing. And so what I'm going to do real quick is I'm going to delete that face out and I'm just going to come in here and I'm just going to check the thickness of my wall. Usually, see that's interesting. You know what this might be is since this would be an apartment it may be assuming that these exterior walls over here probably have a thickness of about three and five eighths or kind of a standard wall thickness. While these are probably thicker because they're probably exterior walls. Yeah, you see how this is about a six inch wall? And so that is interesting to me. What I'm going to do is I am going to start by offsetting everything to three and five eighths because that's a standard interior wall thickness. And then I'll use the push pull tool to make some of these a little bit thicker. So the first thing I'm going to do is just draw a line across his face to heal it. So you can see how when I drew a line across his face SketchUp automatically heals the face in here. Well now I'm just going to use the offset tool and I'm just going to type in three and five eighths and hit the enter key. So now you can see how that offset this by three and five eighths. Well if I was to push pull this exterior wall up then you can see how I've got a wall that's continuous all the way around here. So now I'm just going to come in here and I'm just going to adjust a couple of these walls. So like for example this one this is a thicker wall and so what I can do is I can come in here and create a guide with the tape measure tool. So I'm just going to activate the tape measure tool and you can see how the little plus is actually active on this one now. I'm just going to click on this line and you can see how SketchUp will allow me to draw a guide across here. Well I'm going to draw a guide to six inches from that point. So and you can see how right here this wall is a little bit thicker but then over here it isn't. So maybe this is exterior or maybe this is a thicker wall because it has plumbing in it. In any case what we want to do is we're just going to extend so I'm going to create another guide in here off of this other wall based on this 15 foot 1 inch dimension. So I'm going to type in 15 foot 1 hit the enter key and you can see how now I've got this corner point in here so I can come in here and make this wall thicker. So I'm just drawing along that guide and now I can come in here and erase out this extra. Well now this wall is in here thicker than this wall kind of like the floor plan is showing. So you can go around and you can do that for the rest of this as well. You can just kind of extend out this perimeter wall. So now I've got my entire wall in here as kind of an uninterrupted face. So if I was to push pull it you can see how this whole thing would extrude up. So I've got kind of my perimeter of my apartment modeled. Well what I want to do is I want to start organizing my model and the reason I want to start organizing my model is it's important to keep your model organized as you go because we're going to have to take this into layout and you need to be able to turn on and off various things based on the visibilities you need and all of that. So in this case so I usually kind of follow the Michael Brightman school of organizing my model. He's got several great layout tutorials. He also wrote a book called The Sketchup Workflow for Architecture where he talks about how to group your models. But basically what you do is you group your geometry in the outliner and then you put those groups and that geometry on different layers so you can turn everything on and off with different scenes and we'll get into that a little bit more in depth in a little while. But what you need to know for right now and I'm going to go ahead and delete out my default model just because I don't want it sitting in my outliner kind of cluttering everything up. But the first thing we're going to do is we're going to group our exterior wall and so in order to group your exterior wall all you have to do is double click on it because we drew on top of this graphic. It's got its own face in here. It's completely separate from the graphic because the graphic is grouped. So I'm just going to double click on this wall. I'm going to right click on it. I'm going to click make group and you're going to go over to this outliner section of your tray and you can see how this little drop down in here now my group shows up in there. So if I double click on that for example then it puts me inside this group and I can extrude it up and work on that. And so now what you want to do as you go is you want to name these. So you want to keep this really organized so you can tell what everything is. So in this case I'm going to come in here I'm going to rename this exterior wall. And so in addition to naming that exterior wall I'm also going to start organizing this by layer because what you want to be able to do is you want to be able to turn things on and off. And so we need to go ahead and put these groups on layers as we go. And there's three different kinds of layers that we're going to talk about. So there's levels which we're going to use to separate our level one from our level two so we can turn level two off. Then there's layers in here for more conceptual things. So things like door swings and other stuff that's going to make your model look good in layout when you take it to two dimensions. And then there's architectural items. And your architectural items are going to be the things that are actually geometry in your model. And so what we're going to do is we're just going to click this little plus and we're going to create a layer and we're going to call that ARCH for architectural and we'll call it exterior walls. Hit the enter key. And then now what you want to do is you want to click on the entity info. And so when you select a group it'll show up in your entity info. You can see how the name shows up up here. So the instance of this is exterior wall. So you can tell you have the right thing selected. Well you're just going to click this drop down and you're going to put it on this exterior walls layer. And so now you can just click this little box to turn the architectural exterior walls layer on and off. And so the nice thing about that is now that's kind of grouped and you can come in here and continue working with it. Now we can use this to extrude it up using the push pull tool. So we can go ahead and push pull our walls up and we'll go ahead for right now and I'm not 100% sure what this height is. I'm going to say the ceilings in here are 10 foot ceilings. So we'll say we've got some pretty tall ceilings in this space. And I'm not 100% sure if that's exactly right. But I'm going to go ahead and assume that it is. So we want to extrude that to the correct height so that it's easy to come in here. Well we want to extrude that to the correct height because when we start creating interior views and stuff like that you want to be able to get an accurate view of what a space is going to feel like at the proper height. And so you need to make sure that you model everything at the proper height so you can get that right feel. So you can see how when I come in here with the first person view I'm already starting to get kind of a feel for what this space is going to feel like. And you'll have to adjust your field of view and everything else. But for right now we just want to make sure that we're setting everything up to the proper height. So and actually I'm probably going to take this down a foot and we'll actually figure it's 9 foot not 8 foot. And so what we'll do in a little while is we'll come back in here and we'll add our windows and all of that. I want to come in and model my interior walls out first. And so one of the nice things about modeling the interior walls is now that I have these exterior walls in here I can use them as kind of a guide for my interior walls. And there's a few different ways you could do this. If you wanted to you could just come in here and model these out manually and manually create your walls that way. That's definitely a valid way to do that and you can push pull everything up extrude it. The nice thing about doing it this other way though is you can when you come to a partition you can leave in some guidelines or when you come to a door you can leave in some guidelines so you know where that's going to show up. And so in this case what we're going to do is we're going to draw a wall and we'll call it three and five eighths. We're going to draw it on this face and if you remember this wall is a group so you don't need to worry about this geometry merging. And all we're going to do is we're just going to push pull this. We're just going to push pull this to this first point and what I want to do in this case is I want to draw this right to the edge of this door and then I want to stop. And the reason I want to stop is because I want to use this and create new face mode which is an option that you have in the push pull tool in order to instead of just merging a face I want to create a new face at this point that way I know where this door goes. And so in order to do that you're going to activate the push pull tool again. You're going to tap the control key and you can see how as soon as I tap the control key what this does is this starts creating a new face instead of so instead of kind of merging this along this line it's got its own brand new face. Well now I can tell really easily by looking at this okay this is where a door goes. And so we're just going to call this a three foot opening and then we're just going to keep drawing our wall. And in this case what I'm going to do is I'm going to push this right to the edge of this wall and then I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to draw a three and five eighths inch new face and then I'll continue with create new face mode again down to this next door. And so now it's really easy for me to come in here and start this wall because you can tell that's lined up where you want it to be. So that's a little that's a little trick that I picked up from watching Michael Breitman model. And so we'll do the same thing over here we'll look at this door figure it's three feet wide and then in create new face mode we'll go ahead and finish our wall across to that face. So now I've got this one wall all the way across well now I can kind of continue my walls and I already missed one right here so we'll go back. So we want to go to right here and then this wall is a thicker wall I don't know if there's some kind of plumbing piping in there or why that's thicker but we'll go ahead and model that like it's thicker. We'll model our door and then we'll finish our wall off. And so you can see how we've got some kind of ugly lines in here but that's okay that's kind of how we want it. That's these are all usable lines so we're going to use these to finish off all of our other spaces. I'm going to do the same thing here. So in this case I'm going to use push pull and create new face mode to actually push this back so you can see how I'm able to use this end point tap the control key and create a new face that's back three and five eighths inches. So and in this case you want to make sure this is lined up with this wall so you can see how I'm using inferencing in order to make sure this wall lines up with this one right here. So I'm going to go ahead and finish off modeling all of our walls and then we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit about grouping them and layers. All right so I think I have all the walls in for part one and so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to take all of my interior walls and I'm going to put them in a group and also in a layer. And so you can see what I did is I went ahead and turned off my exterior walls layer just to make it easier to select everything. And so I'm just going to do a right to left drag over all these walls to put them in a group. And so if you remember if you go left to right it's just going to select the geometry that's inside your box that you draw. If you go right to left then it'll select every piece of geometry in here and actually probably what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to do a left to right drag across everything so that I can make sure I pick up the bases of all this geometry. But then I'm just going to select it, I'm going to right click, I'm going to click make a group and we're going to call this interior walls. We're also going to create a layer arch or architectural interior walls and we'll go ahead and put the interior walls on that layer. That way you can toggle exterior and interior walls on and off. And so the last thing I'm going to do and I'm going to try to do this real quick because this video is getting a little bit long. But the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and I'm going to add all my door openings. And so generally speaking I'm going to assume that my door openings are going to be about seven feet tall. Nope, not seven inches. So if I was to draw a guide across this you can see how this would be seven feet high. There should be, because I made my ceilings nine feet high, a two foot gap. But what we're going to do in order to do this is we're just going to use the push pull tool and create face mode kind of like we did before with our walls to push pull that down. And then you can just push pull these walls to the back side and that kind of creates this opening. So if you push pull something all the way through a wall so that it's level with this back side, SketchUp will erase out all the geometry. And this will give us kind of our door opening. And the other thing we could do right now is we could add our jams. I'm, I don't think I'm going to do that for right now. That may be a mistake. But if it's a mistake we'll deal with it and come back and fix it later. So I'm going to go back and add all my doors. And as I add my doors you can also erase out all this extra geometry that you don't need anymore. And the other thing we're going to do is we're going to try to reverse all of our faces so the light side faces out. That's the front side. So you've got a bunch of this leftover geometry in here. I'm going to clean that up as I go. All right. So now I've got my interiors modeled and I've also got my exterior modeled and they're on different layers. So in the next video what we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about starting to develop our doors and also our exterior windows and that sort of thing. We may get into some furniture and other stuff as well. We'll just kind of have to see. We also may start talking about putting some stuff into layout. All right. Leave a comment below. Let me know what you thought. Do you like this series? Do you like what we're doing here? 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. 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.