Hey everybody Matt from MasterSketchup.com and recently a friend of mine asked me
to draw an addition for him. It's a very small addition
since I
used to do carpentry, I said sure why not?
But I thought It would be cool to
record my screen as I was modeling in Sketchup so you can see exactly
each step that I take along the way to setup Sketchup
and really the whole process.
So, what I did is I recorded the whole screen and I'm gonna play it fast forward
for you and just kind of talk you through each step of the way of what I did.
To hopefully help you out in your thought process on how you approach
a similar project.
So the first thing I did was I actually went to his house
and we took some measurements and I just put it on paper.
So I basically took some rough measurements like this
and
you just want to make sure you get
your main widths
and lengths of the house, get a good foot print
but then you also want to get
some heights
and uh...
dimensions for
the rafters uh... the soffit details
things like that. So
the more dimensions that you can capture early on,
the easier it's gonna be
once you bring it into Sketchup.
Alright, so you can see we got a
blank sketchup file opened
and I usually start with a rectangle on the ground
just to give myself a reference point for whatever I'm drawing. So
I'll make the rectangle turn it into a group real quick.
The
calculator you see there I'm just adding up some of the dimensions that I
had written down on the paper.
Just some of the widths of the house I did get some full dimensions so.
And so I start out with a
rectangle
and with the
dimensions of the
the full size of the house
and then using the tape measure tool
I'll make these guides
to
to finish off the shape and then
you could see I'd jump right in with
the
sill plates and
the floor joists
and
sometimes
when you look at those floor joists
you would think that I would use components
for those since they're all the same size
but sometimes I'd find that I catch myself
trying to make a change to one joist
and
unintentionally
it changes all the other ones. I know that you can go to select the
unique
component
just for that one but sometimes it's
pretty easy to forget so
sometimes, I do different things
all the time. Sometimes i'll just use groups
for simple things like studs and why not?
Now this thing i'm building right now is actually like a story pole, so I'm just,
I know what my ceiling height needs to be,
and then I'm adding
my
sheet rock and
furring
and my
ceiling joist height.
So i'm just, I just made that object that way i can reference it now with my
my studs.
And
this was one situation where I
used
groups for all the studs and then I realized, you know what? I wanna make a
component for
for the main stud and I'll label it
the main stud
height.
The way I can use that
throughout the project.
And then once you get this, once you get one wall built,
you make a group out of that,
and then just copy that group over 'cause all your walls are gonna be
different so you don't really want to use a component for that.
So, now I'm adding in my
top plates and
this is why I decided to use a component for the main studs as now I can
make the changes to one of the studs and all the other ones will
make that change as well.
So here
I have
a template just for the rafters.
So you notice I kind of use
these temporary
objects
just to help reference. For the inferencing
system within sketchup it's nice to have other objects that you can
reference off of.
so I'm creating one
rafter
and making components
from that
getting the space and everything
and then I'll group all of them together
and
take that group and make a copy of it turn it inside out for the other side.
And then this is the ridge
and I'll just make the change to the
one of the rafters and all the other ones will change as well.
so I can delete that temporary story pole
and
We have our basic
shape for the,
for the addition.
It's taking shape already.
Actually I lied, this isn't the the actual addition part of the
house. This is an existing part of the house that I wanted to
detail
out. See you can see exactly how the addition
attaches to it.
so I just adding all the ceiling joists
and now I'm adding some
dimensions on the inside
of the
of the house.
So in about one hours time
this is what I came up with.
And
you could see that I'd basically just, I created the outline
of it. I created the outline of the addition
and
some of the main house
and
I'd wanted you to notice how
I structured some of the groups here.
So a lot of the main
components
are grouped together.
So what's nice about that,is you can select it
and hide
the different parts
and you can see I can
go a little further and probably group all these blocks in there as well but,
and then what I did is I
just used
a regular
rectangle and push pulled it up
and
sat down and went over okay where do you want these walls? stuff like that so
it's a great way to visualize layout of walls
and
....
then once we get the final
planned figured out,
I'll go ahead and finish
creating the studs for these walls
and I'll fully detail the electrical, windows, doors, all that stuff
and create a completed
set of construction drawings.
So I hope you've enjoyed this
quick look on
kind of a quick and dirty
way that I've used sketchup.
I know I've made mistakes and what-not along the way but
I wanted to just hit record and see what happened
and just share with you my thought process as I went along so
if you like to learn more about sketchup, don't forget you can always visit my
website at MasterSketchup.com