SketchUp Interior Design for Layout Part 3 - Adding Furniture

What's up guys, Justin here with TheSketchupEssentials.com back with another Sketchup quick tutorial for you. So in this video we're going to continue our series on modeling an apartment from start to finish for layout. Before I get started, I do want to take a second to thank my supporters on Patreon. Patreon is the crowdfunding support website where you can support creators that you like on YouTube. So, if you're interested in supporting the show, you'll like what I'm doing here. Funding from Patreon is how I afford getting new extensions and trying new things out to make the show better. So if you like what I'm doing in this channel, you'd like to help the show grow, make sure you check that out in the notes below. Now let's go ahead and just jump into it. So what we're going to do in this video is we're going to find appliances and furniture for our model as well as adding our plumbing fixtures. And then we may start setting up our views so that we can take them into layout. And so what we could do is we could start off and add faces down here to apply floors. Since I'm modeling from an image, I don't want to do that quite yet because you can see how you can tell where everything is right now. So later on, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add faces in here and apply flooring materials, that sort of thing. But for now, I want to leave it as is so I can see where all the furniture is. And most of the furniture we're going to get from the 3D Warehouse. We're not going to custom model it. You definitely could if you thought that you were going to have custom furniture everywhere. You could definitely model that in here if you really wanted to. But in this case, I really don't. We may come in here and model the cabinets in the kitchen, that sort of thing. But everything else we're going to try to bring out of the 3D Warehouse. And so a lot of you know the 3D Warehouse is a place where you can download a whole bunch of free 3D models. So it's basically SketchUp's repository of models. And so what you're going to do is you're going to go to the File, 3D Warehouse, Get Models option. And this warehouse has a ton of different furniture, a ton of different other things in it as well. You can find pretty much anything that you want in here. But what we're going to do, this is what it's going to look like when you pull it up. There we go. This is what it's going to look like when you pull it up. So this is the base 3D Warehouse. What we're going to do is we're going to download some furniture. And so there's a few different things you could do. There's some featured collections in here that actually seem to have some furniture. So in this case, there's like a Herman Miller collection. And a lot of furniture companies are starting to model their own furniture. In this case, I may actually use a whole bunch of this Herman Miller stuff just because it's a good collection. So or what you can do is you can just go looking for whatever you're looking for. So in this case, I could type in couch and find a couch. And so there's two things I'm going to look for when I download furniture into my model. First I'm going to look for furniture that's going to look good in plan view as well as in 3D. So we want this to look good in 3D for our presentation, but since we're also planning on putting this into layout, we want it to look good from a top-down standpoint. And most of these are pretty good about that. I don't foresee that being an issue with a lot of these things. Sometimes like chairs and that sort of thing, it can be more of an issue. The other thing we want to look for is size and number of polygons. So in this case, if I go to this fabric couch model and I pull that up, that SketchUp file size is 6.9 megabytes. Well, you don't want to start downloading a whole bunch of stuff that's like 6.9 megabytes just to show furniture in your model. What's going to happen is it's going to slow down really fast because you're going to have all these polygons or you may have some high-resolution materials, that sort of thing. So in this case, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to pull down this first model and I'm going to modify it because it's kind of built the way that I want it to be built, but it's a little bit too long. So if I bring it into my model, and you can see how the file size is kind of small. So it's not going to slow your model down a whole lot. You can see how when I bring it in, it's going to be too big because it's like four cushions long. And so what we want to do is you can come in here and you can modify models that you get from the 3D Warehouse. So in this case, what I'm going to do, so in fact, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to delete out because you can see how this is modeled as a separate piece. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete all of this out and then I'm just going to take this end piece from over here. So I'll just select it. I'll use the move tool and copy mode and I'll just flip it using the scale tool and then I'll move it back. So now I have a shorter couch so you can adjust the things that you find in the 3D Warehouse. And so now I'm just going to turn that and then I may also, since it's not quite the size that I want, I may actually scale it down just a bit so that it fits right here. And depending on what you're trying to do with your furniture and which furniture you're trying to bring in, you may not be able to do that quite that way. But in this case, it's going to work good for me. And so now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go in and I'm just going to double check and make sure that this looks okay in plan view. And I think that it does. I think it looks fine. So you can adjust the size a little bit if you want to. So we're just going to come in and we're going to do that with all of our different furniture. And so that's probably going to take me a bit. So I'm probably going to speed this piece up, but you can come in here and you can look for things like beds. And the other thing you can do is you could also look for low poly or low polygon stuff. So you can search for what you're searching for. And then you can type in low poly and what that's going to do is that'll help you find SketchUp files that are lower in polygons, lower in size. So in this case, this bed looks fine in 3D. So if I take this building and I put it in here in 3D, it's definitely going to get across what I'm trying to get across. And you do have to be a little careful if you're working with photorealistic rendering and that sort of thing, because you don't necessarily want super low polygon furniture models if you're trying to make everything look really photoreal. But in this case, I think this is going to work okay. The other thing we need to start doing as we do this, as we bring these in, is we need to start putting them in a group. So I'm going to use the outliner and select these two objects, and I'm going to group them. And I'm going to call that furniture. Then I'm also going to make a layer in my layers menu. So in this case, architectural furniture. And this is useful for a couple different things. The first of which is if these are higher polygon things and they slow your model down, you can turn them off. So I'm going to take this group, this furniture group, I'm going to click on it. I'm going to click this dropdown. I'm going to put them on the furniture layer. Now I can turn them on and off whenever I want to. And they're also organized in my outliner down here so I can find where everything is. And when you bring them in, it's probably a good idea to rename them as you go, just so you kind of know what each group is. So now everything's organized. I can get in here real quick and find the king bed or the living room couch, that sort of thing. So if you don't feel this is long enough, for example, you can come in here and adjust it using the scale tool so the size is more to your liking. So you're not stuck with what you bring in out of the 3D warehouse. And then one other trick that you're going to want to know when you're doing this is you may, is don't put an object in this group until you've already got it in place. Because the problem is, you see how my furniture's in place, if I double click on it, then it fades everything out in the model. And you can try to adjust that, but I don't think there's any way to get SketchUp to actually show the materials inside. So when you're inside a group, I don't think there's any way for it to show the materials outside the group. For some reason that doesn't really work. And so what I'm doing is before I drag these into this group, or before I add them to the furniture group, what I'm doing is I'm placing them. So make sure you place them first and then add them to the group. So get them in the spot that you think they should be in. Like for example, I'm going to place this bed. And then once it's in place, then you can just click and drag it into your furniture group and your outliner. So now that's in my furniture group and I can turn it on and off. And you can just do the same thing with everything that you bring in from the 3D warehouse. So I'm going to go in and start furnishing my model. And I'll probably speed this piece up. All right, so what we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're going to start adding our cabinets as well. And so what you're going to do is we're actually going to bring those in from the 3D warehouse as well, but you can find different manufacturers, kind of like this Medallion Cabinetry that I've found where you can actually, they've modeled out all of their styles of cabinets in the 3D warehouse. You can find those and you can bring those in. So I can do, like for example, if I click on this Briarwood Tall Cabinet, they've actually got this collection in here. And so I could actually bring this into my model. So you can see how this is modeled out already and it's already got kind of the trim style that I want. So I can actually come in here and I can use this entire collection and you can see how if I hide these front faces, they've actually modeled out all the shelves and everything as well. And so you can actually bring in an entire collection of casework based on someone's collection that's in the 3D warehouse. And so what I may end up doing in this case, this one's not quite the size that I want it to be. So there's a couple different things you could do. You could go find something that's, you could go find something that's wider in their collection or you could come in here and you could scale it out and cheat it out a little bit. Now you probably don't want to cheat it out too much. I'm assuming, so in this case, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to scale this out just a little bit, just to kind of fill this gap. That will give you a little warping in here, so you have to be kind of careful when you do that. But then the other thing you're going to do is you're going to do the same thing here where you're going to actually group your cabinets. So in this case, I'm going to rename this tall cabinet and we'll just go through this same collection. So in this case, we're going to want kind of a narrower cabinet like this one because we're going to have a stove in here. And so we're going to bring that in and we'll just kind of do the same thing. So I'm going to flip it, we'll put it in place so it lines up. And in this case, again, we may have to do the same thing where we scale it out just a little bit. And again, not always recommended. In this case, I think it's going to work fine for what I'm trying to do. Then I'm going to make a copy of it across here and I'm going to label these something like stove side cabinet, something that you'll recognize. And then you'll just come in here and you'll just put these in a group. So you'll just select all three of them in the outliner and we'll click make group. And then we can just rename that casework or cabinets. We can even call it like kitchen cabinets if you want. And then we'll just create a layer for those as well in our layer section. So we'll just click the plus, we'll call it architectural casework. And then we'll put the group in the architectural casework group and then we'll be able to check that box and turn it on and off. So then we'll be able to turn all our furniture on and off and our cabinets on and off as well. All right, so I've skipped ahead a little bit. I've come in and I've added the rest of my furniture in this model for the most part. So I've got all my vanities in here, which all came in here as kind of individual objects. I've got toilets, I've got kind of bedside tables and tables in the living room. So I've got most of my furniture in here now. Two quick things I wanted to know. First thing I wanted to know is that you're going to have to come back in here and because we downloaded the cabinets the way that we did, we're going to have to actually model our own countertops, which is fine. You can do that fairly easily. Like let's say we have a two inch overhang and let's say these are one and a half inches thick just for the sake of this exercise. So all we really need to do is just kind of draw a profile across this face and then we'll just extrude it using the push pull tool. So we'll extrude that countertop piece to about right here. And I'm going to turn my exterior and interior walls off because they're kind of getting in my way right now. And you can see how this island is a little bit different in the sense that it is actually in between the cabinets kind of a framed up wall. So we're going to have to go in and add that wall in just a second. But first I'm going to go ahead and finish adding in my countertop and then I'll just triple click on that. We'll make it a group and we'll call it kitchen counter. And again, we'll add that to probably we'll add that one to our furniture group. And if you wanted to, you could probably group everything by casework or something else within these actual furniture groups. Or you know what, we're just going to drag it in the kitchen cabinets group. So and then one thing you can do with these, if you want to just to add a real quick bevel to this edge. So you can just draw a line. We'll go three eighths and three eighths. And all I did is I just drew a line along that face. And you got to be inside the group for that to actually work. But all you have to do is draw a line across this face and then you can push pull this across to bevel your countertop to make it look a little bit more realistic. So now I've got my counter in here. I'm going to do that here and on these little cabinets over here. And I'm also going to come in and I'm going to model out my short wall that needs to go in here. That kind of wraps around the edge because I didn't get that in my first initial pass. And so probably what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide that counter. Come in and model that wall and then add it to my walls group. All right, so now I've got this wall piece built. And I want to make sure that this piece of geometry over here gets picked up in that group as well. So I'm just going to drag a mouse across it and I'm going to make that a group and I'm just going to drag that inside the other group I just created. And then I'm going to explode it. So that's my way of getting all that geometry into this wall. So this wall I'm going to put in the interior walls layer. And then this counter I need to model out the rest of that. And we'll say that that's going to overhang to about here. So all I'll do here is I'll just push pull this up a inch and a half. Then we'll draw our bevel on it real quick. We'll triple click make it a group and we'll just drag it inside our kitchen cabinets layer. And we'll call this island high counter. All right, so now you can see that we've got all of our casework, our counters, our appliances, everything else modeled in this model and it's ready to go. And you can see how it's all organized. You've got your appliances, your casework, your plumbing fixtures, all of that stuff where you can turn it on and off in order to create your floor plan. Since this video is getting a little bit long, I'm going to go ahead and end it here. In the next video, we're going to start setting up our different views for layout. Now that we've got everything organized the way we want it, we're set to go on views. That's where we're going to end today's video. Leave a comment below and let me know what you thought. Was it too in-depth for you? Were there some things that I didn't answer that I should have? 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.