SketchUp Tutorial – How To Turn 2D Floor Plans into 3D Models (in 5 EASY steps)

So, you're a design professional, like an interior designer, architect, or set designer, and you've got a 2D floor plan, but your clients are having trouble visualizing what that will look like in real life. You need a 3D model. But how do you? Hey guys, Alex here from SketchUp School. We've helped thousands of professionals like you learn the right way to tackle this piece of the design process and avoid the common and frustrating mistakes that often trip people up along the way. And today, I'm going to show you how to turn a 2D floor plan into a 3D SketchUp model in five easy steps. But first, a quick warning. This video isn't for beginners who are completely new to SketchUp. You should at least be familiar with the concepts we cover in our Getting Started with SketchUp video. And if you're looking for more info on how to create a 2D floor plan in SketchUp as a starting point for this process, we've also got a video for that. I've added links to both in the cards. Alright, ready to learn the five key steps for turning your 2D floor plan into a 3D SketchUp model? Let's start with number one, import and scale your 2D plan. If you created your 2D floor plan by following along with our How to Create a 2D Floor Plan in SketchUp video I just mentioned, or you've already got a correctly scaled SketchUp floor plan as your starting point, then you won't need this piece of the process. Otherwise, you're likely to be starting with a CAD file, a PDF, or even an image file such as a PNG or JPEG. If it's a CAD file in a .dwg or .dxf format, you can simply import it into SketchUp, and so long as it was drawn properly in the CAD software used, it will come into SketchUp at the correct scale. Now, if you have a PDF or an image of a CAD file, or even a to-scale hand-sketched floor plan, you can import that as well, but you'll have one extra step to set the scale correctly. Once you've clicked to import your file, click once to set down the corner of the imported plan, then move the mouse and click a second time to set the other corner. To scale it properly, you'll need to take a measurement of a known entity in the plan using the tape measure tool. For example, if you know the size of a door opening, click once at the end of the opening, and again at the opposite end to measure it with the tape measure tool. Then, no matter what SketchUp says for the measurement, type in what the measurement should be, and press enter or return on your keyboard. SketchUp will ask you if you want to resize the model. Click yes, and your imported plan will now be scaled correctly. Now I should note, I'm using SketchUp Pro for this video. If you're planning on using SketchUp Free, just know that you're limited on the types of images you can import for the floor plan, and you won't be able to import CAD files or PDFs unless you upgrade. Also, the interfaces between Free and Pro aren't the same, so the tools and menus will look different if you're using Free. But the good news is that once you locate them, all the tools and menu options function the same between both versions. Alright, you've got your 2D floor plan imported into SketchUp and scaled correctly. The next step is, number two, draw the walls. If you started from a CAD or SketchUp file, and you're like most of my students, at this point you're probably eager to jump right in and start pushing and pulling wall segments to begin shaping your model. But wait, while it might seem like the most straightforward route to directly edit the geometry in your floor plan to build your model, that would be a mistake. Why? If you start editing the underlying CAD or SketchUp geometry, there's a chance you'll make an unexpected edit to it that throws off the precision of the project, and sometimes you'll only realize it weeks later and after countless hours of SketchUp modeling. Or the opposite might happen, where something was inputted incorrectly in the CAD file, and that's what you end up building your SketchUp model from. Later, retracing those discrepancies back to how they affected your SketchUp model can be difficult and time-consuming. So what's the right way to draw your walls? Well first, you make sure that your floor plan geometry has been made into a group. If you imported a CAD plan, this should have happened automatically. Or if you created the floor plan in SketchUp, you will need to select everything and right-click on the selection to pick the option for Make Group. Then, use SketchUp's drawing tools to trace the wall segments on top of your imported floor plan group. The edges and faces you draw won't stick to the underlying grouped floor plan, which means they can be edited separately. With a CAD or SketchUp file as your base plan, this process is quick, easy, and dead accurate, because SketchUp will automatically snap to the endpoints in your floor plan group. And there's an added benefit to this approach. As you get further and further into the modeling process, you'll always have your unaltered floor plan to reference back to. Now if you're working from a PDF or image file, you won't have the benefit of SketchUp's automatic inferencing, since there aren't any underlying edges or endpoints for SketchUp to snap to. That said, the process is essentially the same. You'll want to trace your floor plan image to create the base geometry for your walls, and you can still be dead accurate. Let's use the rectangle tool as an example. Starting at an approximate point on the reference plan, click to start the tool operation. As you draw to trace the wall segment, type the exact dimensions for the length and thickness, and press enter or return on your keyboard. SketchUp will set the rectangle to the exact dimensions you specified. If you're starting from a hand-drawn floor plan, especially if the drawing isn't precisely to scale, this is a key step in making sure you're creating an accurate 3D model. Now whether you're starting from a CAD file or an image, as you go through this process of tracing your wall outlines, I recommend ignoring all door and window openings. Why? We'll get into that later in this video, but as you'll see, your future self will definitely thank you. Come in past me, over. Uh, hello? It's you, from the future. Just wanted to give you a quick thanks. Roger that. Alright, once you've traced all the wall segments on top of your 2D floor plan group, erase away any unneeded edges using the eraser tool. Then use the push-pull tool to set your Now, you're ready for the next step. Number three, add the door openings. As I mentioned in the previous step, we ignored the window and door openings when drawing the walls. That's because it's more efficient to add them after all the wall heights are set. Here's a great way to create the door openings. If your floor plan was a CAD or SketchUp file, the easiest thing to do is simply navigate underneath and draw rectangles over all the door openings. Then use the push-pull tool to begin creating the opening for your door. Enter the correct height on your keyboard and press enter or return. And here's a bonus tip. If there are other door openings that are the same height, you can now simply double click with the push-pull tool on each one and it will automatically match the same height. Pretty cool, right? Now, if you're using a PDF or image, you can use a similar strategy with one additional step. When you navigate underneath the floor plan, you won't be able to see through it, but you can turn on x-ray view mode and now you can see through the image and are able to trace the outlines for the door openings. Just remember that since SketchUp can't infer and snap to points on your image, you'll need to enter the dimensions to be sure everything is absolutely accurate. A good way to do this and avoid making mistakes is to measure the distance from a corner or end point to your door opening using the tape measure tool. Click once, then begin pulling a guide and type the dimension you need and hit enter or return on your keyboard to set it in place. And then pull another guide for the width of the door opening. Now you can use the rectangle tool to create the area for the door opening and it will snap to the guides you've just created. And again, use the push-pull tool to create the openings in your walls. When you're finished, you can leave the guides there for reference or clear them using the edit menu. In SketchUp Free, you'll find that option in the display panel. Then you're ready to move on to number four, add the window openings. Before we get too far, I wanted to mention that I've gone ahead and put together some notes that will make it easy for you to review everything we're covering. I've added a link to download them in the cards. All right, the window openings require a little more work than the doors since you'll need to know the height of the window opening from the floor as well as the height of the window itself. The complexity and shape of window openings can also vary greatly, so the most surefire way to keep your model accurate when you get to this step is to first use the tape measure tool to help you set up guidelines. With a CAD plan for the window widths, pick the tape measure tool, click once on a vertical wall edge, and pull the guide to one side of the window opening in the plan. Click again to line up the guide perfectly. Then with the tape measure tool still selected, click again on that guideline and pull another to the opposite side of the window opening. For the heights, you'll follow the same process to create horizontal guidelines. You'll need to know the height information ahead of time or reference it from any elevations you have. Note that you could import the elevations to help, but it's faster to just type the heights in for the bottom of the window opening and then the top of the window opening as you create your guidelines. With an image of a floor plan, it's the same thing, only instead of having a reference you can infer in the plan, you'll need to know the between the edge you are pulling the guide from and the side where the window opening will be. Make guides for the width of the window opening and repeat again for the bottom and top. Once you've set up guides for all your window openings, use the rectangle tool to trace a rectangle from one corner to another on each one. Then you can use the push-pull tool to punch your openings through the walls. To do that, click once and push-pull into the wall. Keep going until you get the on-face inference or until you see the blue and white faces flickering. This lets you know that you're touching the other face, which means that if you click again, the two faces will cancel each other out and punch out an opening. This process for the door and window openings is much faster and simpler than if back in step two, we'd left gaps for the doors and windows and had to go back through all the walls to fill in the surrounding geometry, which reminds me. Come in past me, over. Uh, hello? It's you, from the future. Just wanted to give you a quick thanks. Alright, you've got your walls built and your window and door openings in place. The next thing you'll want to do is number five, group and tag. As you remember from our watch this before you get started with SketchUp video, it's important to group almost everything to avoid the frustrating issues that arise from ungrouped and sticky geometry. So now that you've created your walls with all of the openings, be sure to make them into a group. To do that, take the select tool, select all the geometry of the walls, and then right-click and pick the option for make group. Then to stay organized, it's a good idea to create a tag and assign that tag to the group. You can create a tag from the tags window. Then right-click on your walls group and pick entity info. You'll see a tag drop down where you can assign the correct tag. If you're using SketchUp free, you create the tag in the tags panel on the right. Then in the entity info panel, you click on the current tag and then assign the new tag. Tags allow you to control the visibility of groups and components in your model, which can be helpful while modeling since you can turn off things that are getting in the way, and later when it's time to hide or show things when presenting your design ideas. At this point, it's not a bad idea to also create a tag and assign it to your imported floor plan so that you're able to control its visibility as well. Alright, you've made it through the five key steps to turning your 2D floor plan into a 3D SketchUp model, but you're probably saying, hold on, this doesn't look like a finished 3D model yet. Of course, we could fill out the remaining pieces of this example model in a number of ways, but your projects at home are likely to look vastly different from this one with their own design parameters and nuances, and it's just not possible to go over every scenario in this video. Fortunately, the five steps we just went through actually cover all the core concepts you need to follow to finish your own model, no matter the scope or size. Just remember, as you add new elements, such as the floor, you can use either your imported floor plan for reference or the 3D walls you've created to help you draw things precisely. And once you've drawn something, make it a group and assign a tag to it, and then repeat for all the remaining details for your specific project. Depending on what you need to show, you may also want to add colors, materials, or objects to your design. It's a bit too much to get into here, but if you're looking for helpful tips and strategies about this part of the design process, be sure to check out the videos on this playlist. How far you take your model next is up to you, but if you're serious about learning SketchUp and can't afford to waste time or pick up bad habits, then I recommend checking out our video course library. It's filled with $8,700 worth of SketchUp courses exclusively for professionals, including our complete Intro to SketchUp course. Head over to the SketchUp school website and try our courses for free. Until next time, happy sketching!