Hey, what is up nation?
In this session I'm gonna teach you how to make a spiral or spring in Sketchup.
I saw this tutorial by Kenny Studio, that they
make a spiral, but unfortunately they don't have any audio. It's all text and
sometimes I know that that can be hard to read, but his tour is awesome mine is
gonna be based off of that, so there's gonna be a link to his video down below
so that you can check it out. I've had people steal my content and not give me
any credit for it, so I don't want to just take his idea because this is
really cool and I want to share it with you guys, but you know, check out his
video, I don't know exactly what he's doing in his channel, but if you like
what he's doing and you like this, you know, subscribe to him. So the first thing
you do to create this is make a circle. So right now I have this set to four
sides, we're gonna use 24, I'm gonna use the origin here I'm gonna lock my center
point to that, and then I'm gonna use the red axis here. You want to make sure that
you're drawing your radius along that. You can choose whatever you want, I'm
just gonna randomly pick one, delete the middle here and then I think
one thing that you might be using, Kenny might be using, an older version of
Sketchup this is Sketchup 2008, so what you have to do here is explode the curve,
now what you're gonna do. You can see that the way the Sketchup works is that
it makes everything in segments, so a circle has a certain amount of side, so
you saw we changed it to 24, so this has 24 sides and the more side you have the
more round is going to be. And the less you have the more geometric it's going
to look or the more fasted. So we wanted to take one of these intersection points
of these segments and move it up. So you can see I'm on the blue axis there, if
you want to be sure you can always press the up arrow on your keyboard and that
will lock you in the vertical or blue axis. So I'm gonna do that. Really this
angle could be anything, the shorter the angle is that you pick,
the shorter your spiral will be. But you can always change that afterwards by
using the stretch tool and I'll show you how to do that. So we're gonna pick
somewhat shallow angle for this, just be different, I'm gonna select this line, hit
cntr+X to delete that line, ctrl+A to delete everything else, and then edit
paste in place, so I have that line. Now what we're gonna do is rotate this and
make copies. So I'm gonna select this line, hit Q for the rotate tool, go to
the origin. Since we drew off of the origin we can mix that pretty easy. I'm
gonna select this, and you can see it starts moving the line, but I'm gonna hit
ctrl here to make a copy, and because we have 24 sides and a circle is 360
degrees, are gonna divide a 360 degrees by 24, which will give you 15, so we're
gonna choose angle 15. So we did that once, now if we'd hit the asterisk symbol
that's times 24, it'll do a whole bunch of those. So you can see now we
have going around these little lines. This is essentially the spiral. I'm gonna
select all of these, going from left to right, that'll select everything within
that box, hit M to move and then ctrl when I go to move that to make a copy,
and you can see that I moved that up! Now if I hit times again, let's say 24, I can
get a whole bunch of these! Now you can see there's like a ton of spirals here
but if you double click on any of these lines, it'll select the whole thing. You
can see it's in segments which is kind of annoying, let's just say I want one of
these, so you have a whole bunch of them now but I'm just gonna double click on
this, hit cntr+X like we did before, ctrl+A to select everything, delete, paste,
paste in place. So now I have that single spiral, now you can take this and you can
hit S to scale and you can make it more springy or less springy,
one other tip that I think would be helpful for this is that because it is
segmented, what I've done is I've install a plug-in called WELD, you can get
it on the extension warehouse, it's free, it's by Smustard, so you just select all
these lines, where is it, extension go to extensions what you have
it install go to WELD and you can see now I have one line, so I when I go to
use the follow me tool along any of this, I only have to select one thing and I
don't have to select everything. Tt just makes a little bit easier for me. So now
I'm going to draw a circle, I'm choosing the arrow keys to draw in a on a
particular plane, I'm going to select my path, choose the follow me tool, select
the shape that I want to go about here, and you can see we're good. You know, if
you wanted to go back, let's say I wanted more, you can always do that. Just choose
your top line. Now one thing you want to go straight vertically, you don't
want to offset anything like this or it's not gonna work, so you know, let's do
a whole bunch. Let's and we'll choose this guy. I used to place circle
Here we go. I have my path, let's weld it just because it makes it a little bit easier,
choose your path and then the shape, you can say have the reverse side here if
you right-click and do reverse phases it'll give you though
the white side. You'll notice when you do this is that if you were to take this
and try to squish it, so I hit S there to scale everything, sort of obviously
squishes, so if you don't like the way that this looks and that's not your
intent, what you want to do is I'm just hitting ctrl+Z to go back there, it
select your actual spring, your line work, and scale that beforehand so that it's
more smushed, and then select your circle or select your path, follow me and then
your line, and you can see you get a much more squished Springer or whatever spiral.
So hopefully this helped, if you like this video, please don't forget to
like, subscribe and share this video with your friends. Make sure to check out
Kenny Studios channel and as always, happy hacking!
All right, designers! Just because this episode of designer hacks is over,
doesn't mean we're leaving you out in the cold!
Tony's got tons of great content available at designerhacks.com, so join
design nation right now and we'll see you on the next episode of designer hacks!