Please be sure you have watched the previous Getting Started videos,
we’ll build on the concepts learned there.
In this video we’ll create an interior room, something that you may create to test out
paint schemes or furniture arrangement. We’ll build out the basic room, apply some simple
colors, and then use the 3D Warehouse to find furniture we can put in and arrange.
If you were creating your own space, the first thing you’d need to do is to take some basic
measurements of the size of the room, and where windows or other prominent elements
are to accurately recreate the space.
We know how to draw accurately in SketchUp from the previous video, for our example let’s
begin by drawing a room that is sixteen feet wide by twenty feet long and Push/Pull it
up nine feet.
When you are working only on an interior room, it’s often helpful to erase some of the
walls and we can always draw them back in later. Using the eraser, erase this corner
edge which will delete two of the sides. You’ll see the inside surfaces are a different color
from the outside surfaces we’ve been working on, but it will have no effect on our example
and we’re going to paint these surfaces anyway.
Navigate to get a good view of this back surface, let’s use a new tool to help us lay out
some guide lines. The Tape Measure tool can measure between points in SketchUp, but it
will also create guidelines we can reference. Click once on this corner edge and start moving
your cursor this way, type 40 inches to create a guide 40 inches from that edge. Now repeat
this process from the opposite edge. Create a guideline that is 24 inches high, and a
final guide that is 18 inches down from the top edge.
With these guides in place, let’s add detail to our room by creating a built in structure.
Draw three rectangles using the guide intersections, here.. here.. and here.
Now we can delete our guides. You can delete guides with the Eraser tool, but some of our
guides are now hidden behind edges. You can see this by zooming out. Zoom out far enough
to see all the guides and erase them, or you can also delete all the guides in your model
by going to the ‘Edit’ menu and choosing ‘Delete Guides’.
Navigate back into our room. Use Push/Pull to pull this middle surface out 24 inches.
Now pull this lower surface out 18 inches. We need to pull the far surface out 18 inches
as well, but rather than manually inputting the distance, we can use inferencing. Click
once with Push/Pull on the far surface to start pulling it and leave the surface with
your icon. Watch how hovering over various surfaces will pull it out to match. We can
simply infer to this near surface and click on it to finish. Try again on these upper
surfaces. Pull one out 12 inches, then pull the other surface out and watch how it will
infer to the other surfaces. Remember, you’ll click once on the first surface to start the
Push/Pull, but you’ll finish by clicking on the other surface.
It’s good modeling technique to keep your model clean. Let’s erase these extra edges
created from our Push/Pull. Anytime you have surfaces that are coplanar, you can erase
the edges separating them. This is called healing the surface. Zoom in if you need,
to erase the unnecessary edges.
We need to navigate to the other side and erase those edges as well. When you do, it’s
tricky to find the ideal view and it’s easy to orbit outside of the wall surface.
Try this: navigate back to a full room view, then choose the Zoom tool. Look down in the Measurements
box, it shows your field of view is 35 degrees. You can change this just like changing the
lens of a camera, allowing us to see more perspective in our view which is particularly
useful for interior scenes. Type 50 and press Enter. Now the field of view shows 50 degrees
and we have a broader view of our scene. Navigate back to the corner and find a good view to
erase the extra edges.
With that done let’s turn our attention to creating some windows. Navigate to a good
view of this wall, and use the tape measure to create a guide five feet from the far wall.
Create another guide 30 inches from the first.
Now create a guide from the bottom edge, and infer to our built-in structure to finish it.
Do the same from the top edge so our windows will line up with other elements in our room.
Draw a rectangle using the guides for our window. Our room will have three windows on
this wall, and they'll be 18 inches apart. Create a guide 18 inches from our new window.
Now select the new rectangle then the Move tool. Move the rectangle from this lower corner
and start moving it along the wall. While still moving the rectangle press the Ctrl
key on a Windows machine or the Option key if you are on a Mac. This leaves the original
shape and creates a copy for you to move. Use the guideline reference to place the new rectangle.
Practice this again for the third window, create a guideline 18 inches from the new
window, select and move a copy of the window by pressing Ctrl or Option on a Mac, and remember
to move it exactly by moving from a corner to a corner.
We are finished with the guides, so go to the Edit menu and choose ‘Delete Guides’
to erase them all. To make the windows more detailed, we’ll use the Offset tool, and
introduce some new tips to help you work quickly.
Zoom into one of your windows and offset the surface inwards three inches, then select
the inner surface and offset it one more inch. Now use the Line tool and draw two crossing
edges from the mid-points of the inner surface.
Finally, select one of the new rectangles created by the crossing edges, and offset
it in half an inch for a window mullion. SketchUp will remember the last distance you offset,
so rather than typing in a value for the remaining window mullions, select another surface. Then
using the Offset tool, double click on that surface. It will offset it the exact amount
of the last offset. Try again on the two remaining rectangles, select the surface,
then use the Offset tool and double-click to quickly offset it by the last amount.
Double-clicking also works with Push/Pull. Try selecting then pushing one of the windows
in, then select a new window and double-click with Push/Pull on a different window. Continue
this for all windows, select the surface, then double-click with the Push/Pull tool
to push it the same distance.
To push the window mullion back, let’s first zoom in and erase the crossing edges to heal
this into one surface, then push it back, and also pull the other surfaces in or out
to create an interesting window and frame.
Now we need to repeat this process for our remaining windows, and because we’ve built
one, we can use inferencing to quickly repeat the process. For example, I can offset this
surface from this lower edge, and infer to our completed window for the correct distance.
Although we are offsetting the whole surface, choosing the right edge to start the offset
will determine which inferences are available to you, so in our example we want to offset
from horizontal edges to infer to parallel edges. Offset the frame inferring back to
the complete window. Divide the windows with 2 edges drawn from the mid-points. Then
offset one surface using this inference and the remaining window surfaces by double-clicking
as before.
Use Push/Pull and inferences to complete this window so it’s an exact replica of the first window.
This third window is available for you to continue practicing on. Repeat the steps we’ve
taken to replicate another window.
Of note, we are drawing these windows manually to practice these drawing techniques, but
in our next video and other videos you’ll learn about better techniques for creating
copies and repeated elements, but that is beyond the scope of this video.
At this point our example has some interesting details, but color would help a lot.
Let’s apply some paint and materials.
Applying color is one of the few tasks that is slightly different on a Mac vs a Windows
machine, so we’ll cover both. The basics are the same though, pick a material and paint
it to surfaces in your scene. Select the Paint Bucket tool to bring up the
Color or Materials browser. On a PC you are shown a default palette of colors to pick
from and on a Mac you are given a color wheel to pick colors from. Choose a color and then
click on a surface to paint that color. Continue painting surfaces in your model, pick different
colors and try some various color schemes in your model. Navigate around as needed to
get different sides for your walls, but don’t paint the windows yet.
For the windows, we’ll introduce a tip to make the process easier. To start let’s
pick a pale bluish color to represent the glass in the windows. The trim however has
lots of little surfaces to work around and paint. Try this: since our window trim is
all still the default blue color, we can paint it all at once by holding the Ctrl key on
a PC or the Option key on a Mac. Choose the trim color, hold down the Ctrl or Option key
and click on one window trim surface to paint all connected surfaces of the same color.
With one window done, we can quickly complete the other two, however we need the bluish
window color again. With the Paint Bucket active, hold the Alt key on a PC, or Command
key on a Mac to turn the paint tool into a sampling tool, then click on one of the painted
windows to sample and pick that color for use. Now paint the remaining windows then
hold Alt or Command again to sample the trim color, then paint the remaining trim as before
by holding the Ctrl or Option key.
In SketchUp you can apply full textures and materials, not just colors. On a Windows machine
click the house icon to see what materials have been applied in your model and open the
fly-down menu to access textures to paint in your model. On a Mac choose the brick icon
to access additional textures. Paint some more materials into your scene as you’d
like. It’s also possible to create your own textures to use in SketchUp;
see our documentation for more information.
To complete this example, let’s add some furniture from the 3D Warehouse, which is
an online repository of millions of models where anyone can upload and share SketchUp
models. As long as you are connected to the internet, you can search the 3D Warehouse
directly from SketchUp. Go to the ‘Window’ menu, and choose '3D Warehouse.' From here
you can browse or search for any models you’d like. Searching for “chair” will return
thousands of results, so be more specific to refine your results.
Simply click on one of the results, then click download to place it in your model.
With the new model in your scene, let’s look at how to properly move it around the
room. The chair is grouped together, and we will learn more about groups in the next video,
but objects that are grouped can be moved and rotated like a single object with the
Move tool. Select the chair, then pick the Move tool and hover the cursor around the
chair. There is a bounding box indicating the group, and small red points show up on
different sides. Hover over one of the red dots and a rotation gizmo appears. Click on
the red dot to rotate the chair in that axis, and click again to finish. You can rotate
freely, or in 15 degree increments by hovering the cursor close to the rotation gizmo.
Orient the chair as you’d like, and let’s talk about moving it in your scene. You may
want to move the chair over here, and suddenly it’s buried in the floor! Probably not what
you expected. Let’s undo that. When you move objects in SketchUp, you always need
to be aware of where you are starting and finishing the move. For example, if I click
on the armrest to start moving the chair, it will move that point to other elements
in the scene that I hover over. To be sure the chair stays on the floor as I move it
around, I’ll move it from a point that should touch the floor, the leg corner for example.
Now I can move it easily to another point on the floor.
Another way to quickly move it is by pre-selecting the chair, then using the Move tool, I can
click on some point on the floor and move to another point on the floor. Remember though
that you started moving from this point on the floor, so you must move to another point on the floor.
You could still move the chair up by moving it to some point on the wall.
Always be aware of the red, green and blue directions as well, so you don’t accidentally
move the chair straight up. Remember as well you can press the Ctrl key on a PC or the
Option key on a mac to create a copy while moving the object.
Now practice by finding more items from the 3D Warehouse to add to your scene, and placing
them around the room.
In the next video, we'll learn more about creating groups and copying objects by creating a small table.