Showing Interior Design Options in Your SketchUp Model - The SketchUp Essentials

What's up guys, Justin here with theSketchupEssentials.com back with another Sketchup Essentials tutorial for you. So in this video, we're going to talk about a few different ways to show different options in your interior models in Sketchup. So everything from showing different paint options to different furniture layouts, that sort of thing. So before we get started, I do want to take a second and thank my supporters on Patreon. Patreon, as you know, is the website where you can support creators that you like. In this case, any support that I receive goes back into the show in the form of new extensions and new things to kind of make the show more interesting. So if you're interested in supporting the show, please make sure to check out that link in the notes below. Now let's go ahead and just jump into it. Alright, so all the things in this model are things that I've downloaded from the 3D Warehouse. So these are all things that have already been modeled and I just brought them in to kind of make up my interior. Even the basement model itself is a 3D model from the 3D Warehouse. And I will make sure to link to all those items in the notes below so you can kind of see where they came from in case you want to download them or whatever. So what I want to talk about in this video is I want to talk about using your layers and your visibilities to show different options. Because right now, a lot of the time what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to weigh different options based on what you want the function of a space to be. Like for example, let's say you have this basement. And for right now, I have it set up as kind of like a gaming and pool and TV room. But sometimes you're going to want to look at options for things like adding a bar or just even different colors of the wall. And so what you're going to want to do, what I'm going to show you how to do is a couple different ways to kind of group everything so that you can turn different views on and off. So that you can quickly switch between different objects and options in order to kind of compare them back and forth and kind of pick what you like best. And so what's going to be really important in here is you have to kind of plan ahead for the way you want to group everything. Like right now, what I've got is I've got several different furniture models that I've brought in out of the 3D warehouse and they're all in here as kind of separate components. Well what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at a couple different options. I'm going to look at this option and then I'm going to look at an option with kind of the bar in the corner and the TV and the entertainment system over here. And so one thing you could do if you wanted to is you could just select everything and then just make a copy of it over here. And then you could model all of that geometry separately. So you could take, let's say that you didn't want your pool table over here and your arcade. You could just come in here and you could just take these items and you could just kind of flip them around the way that you want them. So that's probably the easiest way to show different options is just to have options next to each other. You can definitely do that. One of the issues with that though is your model starts getting pretty big first of all and also it's just a lot of stuff to manage. So you know, but if you wanted to you could definitely do that and you could even go so far as to, you could just do kind of an overall group containing this geometry and then just turn one on and one off. And so I could bring this bar over here into this space and I'll probably have to modify this a little bit. Probably delete this wall out to make it kind of fit in here. We'll call that close for right now, but let's say you build this bar out in the corner. Now you could take all of this geometry and you could just throw this in a group. So we just say make group and then all you do is you'd come down here in your outliner and you could just rename that option two or whatever you wanted to call it. And then you could name this one option one. So you would group this one and you would call it option one and then you could create a couple scenes where you could see your different spaces. So you would just go to view, animation, add scene and we could go into our scene section and call that rec room option and we could go ahead and hide this geometry and update this view. And then for your second scene, you could do the other. So you could unhide this one. You could hide this one. And you'd want to go ahead and hide this geometry so that SketchUp's not trying to render it in the background. But then you could take this option here. You could add another scene and you could call it bar option and you could update this scene. So now that this view is in here, now you could click back and forth and look at your different options without having both of them on at the same time so SketchUp's not trying to render everything all at once. So that's one way to do this if you want to do this is you can just create a second group over here and just name it option two. I don't like that as much just because I don't like having all of this extra geometry in my model. So probably what I would do instead is I would actually come in here and I would take all these items and I would group them. So I would kind of plan for what I wanted to do and then I would set up corresponding layers so you can swap them out in place. So what I would do is I would take, in this case I would have my TV and my couch in a group and then I would put that on a certain layer. So I'll show you what I'm talking about. The other thing you probably want to do when you're doing this is you want to use the outliner to go ahead and name all of these options. So in this case I want to call this one couch. I want to call this one pool table. And then this one is the entertainment center. And so then I could group these items accordingly. So the pool table and the arcade game would go together and we would just call that video games or probably not video games, we'll just call it games. And then you would just create a layer and you would call it furniture option one, video games and couch. And before I do anything else I'm going to make a copy of these and kind of move them off to the side. So I'm just using the move tool and copy mode to do this. But then I could group all of these objects together and we could just call this furniture option one and we'd put it on the furniture option layer in your entity info. So you just pick this drop down, you pick furniture option one and then you could turn that off. So now furniture option one you can turn on and off. And there's a whole bunch of other layers in here which I may or may not, I think I'm going to go ahead, these are all kind of left over from when I downloaded this into Sketchup and I'm just going to take everything and I'm just going to move it to the default layer except the options that I want because I didn't really like the way the layering was set up anyway. Well now I've got this item so I can turn off furniture option one and then I can move this stuff back into my model and I can just move it around using the move tool and the rotate tool. And you see how I'm moving these along the green and the red axis? So I'm not just moving this to the corner, I'm moving this along the axis so I can make sure everything stays so that you don't have your furniture kind of merging into your floor. It's really easy if you just like randomly move your mouse around here for things to kind of get up in the air or down in the floor. And so instead, if you move this along the green and the red axis, then you can make sure that stuff is maintaining the height that it had. So then what we could do is we could move our bar in here and there's some other walls that I'm going to go ahead and get rid of real quick too because I don't really need them. They don't really make sense in this context. So I'm going to get rid of those so I just have my bar. And then once I have my bar, I can center this or get close to centering this on this back wall. And then once I've placed everything the way that I like it, what I could do is I can just group these objects in my outliner and you see how right now my bar is outside of my option one. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take it, I'm going to rename it, and then I'm just going to drag it inside that group. So now it all makes a lot more sense. You can take these three options, you can group them, and you can rename them furniture option two, bar, and you can create a layer for that. And so now what I would do is I would make a layer called furniture option two, bar, and then I would put this group on that layer. And so now what I can do is I can switch back and forth between the two layouts so you can see how they're on different layers so it's really easy to swap back and forth between the two of them. So in that way you haven't doubled up on all your basement geometry or anything like that. And so not only can you do this with things like furniture, you can also do this for things like wall colors. And so what you would do in this case is you would come into your group here, and I'm actually going to remove this option one group, I'm going to drag this out of here. The option one was really for this scene right here. And you can see how I'm just constantly coming in here and organizing things. So what you can do in this case is you can figure out which walls you're going to want to be different colors and you can group that geometry. So you can group the different geometry in order to create like a color option palette. And so what I mean is I'm going to take all the walls that I would like to consider painting a different color, and you see how I'm just grabbing them in here by double clicking on them? Well then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take them, I'm going to right click and I'm going to make them a group. And I'm just going to call this wall color option one, and we'll call this tan. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a copy of all of that geometry because now that's in a group. I'm just going to make a copy of that group and drag it off to the side for just a second. And I'm going to color this one a different color. So in this case, this one, let's say that I want kind of a dark red color in my basement. So you see how I colored this group, well now I'm going to rename the group. So I'm going to call this one wall color option two, red. And then I'm going to do the same thing I did before where I call these, where I create layers for them. So color option one, tan. Color option two, red. And then I'll put each group on its own layer. So in this case, I'm going to take the tan group, I'm going to click on it in the outliner and then I'm going to go up to the entity info and click the drop down. And I'll put it on color option one, tan. Now I can turn my tan walls on and off. And then we'll do the same thing with the red option. We'll call this color option two, red. We'll drag this back in place. So I'm just going to move this back right here across this corner. And so now, I mean you can do this as many times as you want. So you could make a blue color option, you could make 14 different color options if you wanted to. Well now I can just use my layers to swap back and forth between my different color options. So you can see how I'm just turning each one of these on and off in order to see my different options in here. So you can do this with things like your walls. You could also do it with your floor. So you could take your floor material, you could make that a group. And we could call this one flooring option one, carpet. You can just make a quick copy by moving it off to the side. And then color this one up, let's say like we wanted it to be like a stone or something like that. We'll try this granite tile, see what that looks like. Not very good. Maybe we'll try a different, let's try a wood actually, a wood would be good. So let's pick, we'll go to wood, and we'll go with this wood floor dark, and we'll apply that material. And so we'll take this group, and we'll call this one flooring option two, wood. Then we'll just do the same thing, create a pair of layers. So floor option one, carpet. Floor option two, wood. And so we'll take our wood group, and put it on the wood floor layer. We'll take our carpet group, and we'll put it on the carpet layer. And then now you can just move this piece back to where it was, and now you've got a couple different flooring types. So now you can come in here and you can actually turn your different furniture pieces on. You can swap out different flooring types real quickly with your furniture pieces on. You can swap your wall colors. Once you set this up and you get your options created, you can come in here and you can look at a whole bunch of different options really quickly and really easily. So all you have to do is just kind of plan ahead, plan your organization, and think about what you're going to do. And then you can use this to really do whatever you want, and really kind of analyze a space. Leave a comment below and let me know what you thought. Was this helpful to you? Did I kind of go on too long? Was it just about right? 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.