Hi everybody and welcome to part two of this getting started with sketchup
tutorial
and we're going to go over groups and components and how to use the outliner
window
to
stay organized in your model
which is really important. I think this is
probably the most important thing to learn
when you're using sketchup.
so groups and components are used whenever you want to isolate
geometry from another part of your model so
you know if you're making anything beyond a simple box
you're going to want to use groups or components
so here you can see this simple birdhouse I created
and I have each part of it separated into either a group or a component
so you can see when i click on
any one of these parts
it selects this entire set of geometry
so you can tell that it's within a group.
You know if none of this was in a group, I would click it and it would just select
the face or
I'd click it and it would just select the edge
and you can open up any group really easily, you just double click.
Now it activates that group and you can see that very easily
with this dotted line
that's around it
and anything that's not
in that group
is kind of like grayed out a little bit which is awesome because you know
exactly what's in the group
and you don't
really get confused with you know all the other parts of your model
when you try to just work on this one part.
so it's a great way to stay organized and it also just keeps things from
sticking to one another.
so a lot of times like
you know if i want to move
this
this roof up, if it wasn't in a group
all of these here would stick to it and it would make it really
hard to
to move around so
it's just a really good way to
uh...
to keep everything in order.
Now the other great thing about sketchup is the outliner window
and i'll pull that up real quick. You just go to window
and outliner
and this
is like
I always keep this window open because this shows me everything
uh... that's in my model
anything that's in a group that's within my model
so typically in sketchup when you create something
it tends to stick to anything else.
I'll just create a couple of boxes here
and if I select this box
and move it over here and snap it
if I then try to move it
it's now stuck to
the other box that I just snapped it to
and you know that might be what you were trying to do but most of the time you
want things to kind of be independent of each other.
Let me show you how to make a group.
All you have to do is
triple click
whatever you want
to select- all of it or you could also drag a selection box
and then you right click
and click make group
and you can see right here in the outliner
it has made
this group and we'll call it box
box A
and then we'll do the same thing over here
we'll make a group
on that one and call it box B
so now if we move
this box
and snap it to
box B
if we wanna move it
it's not stuck to
the other box.
In fact you can actually
you can put it right in the middle here
of the other box and
you know they're both independent of each other
you know these groups do not affect each other as far as they're concerned
the other one doesn't exist
so it's
a great way to isolate
geometry from one another.
so you can see by default it names all these different groups
named group and you can leave it like that but what I like to do
is right click and rename it something that makes sense so
you know I'll name that top
uh... name this front
um...
what's this one here
the bottom
you know can right click rename that bottom
and
these components the wall components
uh... are already named
wall
and I have the back
and so you can see I just kind of click through my outliner
you know it automatically selects the appropriate group or component
inside
the model
just by clicking the name from the outliner
and just to tell you what the difference between a component and a group
is
components
are identical to each other
so this wall on the left side
and the wall on the right side
are the same thing.
so whenever you have something in your model that is going to be
duplicated
and you know that they're going to be identical
you're going to want to use a component
and the reason for that is watch what happens when I
go ahead and
open up this component
and
try to
edit.
Let's say I'm using the push pull tool
to push
this
front out, you can see the other component
is being edited at the same time
so that's a huge time saver
when you are working on you know
things at are identical to each other
uh... throughout your model
so you create it once, you duplicate it as many times as you want and you still
retain the ability to make changes to that component
and it will propagate throughout your model
and all of those components
will change as well.
so here's another great way to use groups
um... you can see we have this tree here and let's say we wanted to put this bird
house
and hang it up on the tree
now
what we would have to do is
select each
part of this birdhouse by holding down control
and clicking all the different components
and then moving it
to the tree
or
what we could do
is
once we build something
and select all the parts that make
make it up
you can right click and make that a group
so you can have groups within a group and you can see over here on the
outliner
we'll just rename this birdhouse
and you can expand and collapse that
you know as much as you want and that's
that's really
great to do you know you really want to try to organize your model as much as
you can.
That way instead of just having a huge list of all the different parts in your model
you can kind of group them together
and
you know make it so it's not a bird and try to
uh...
you know organize and figure out where stuff is
and check this out, so now that we have this all
this birdhouse altogether we just click once
and it selects all of those things that were
in that, that make up that birdhouse
and we can grab the move tool
and come over here
and hang that birdhouse
on the tree
so lets say I make a copy of this birdhouse
keep in mind
each of these bird houses are groups. They're not components.
so you can see right here
the outliner has created a copy
and if I wanted to
edit
one of these bird houses
the other one is not going to change.
Alright so let's say
I am
deleting the roof
for whatever reason I'm deleting the roof
off of that birdhouse.
The other one
hasn't changed at all
so when you create a group it's completely unique to itself
and changes do not
uh... propagate through any other groups that are similar
now on the other hand if we take this group, right click it
and select make component
now
this has become a component you can see
the differentiater
you know it's got four little squares that means it's a component
solid square means it's a group
so now that this is a component we can do the same thing.
Make a copy of it, bring it down
and I'll just pull it out a little bit
now
when I open up this component up here
you can see the changes are being made
down there
okay so if we wanted to delete that
roof
both components
are going to be the same thing and it doesn't matter which one you select
or edit
you know I could take this one
and edit it and it's going to
make the changes to all
components that are
identical
so the decision to use you know either a group or a component is up to you
I personally use groups more often than components because I've had times
where
I've been making stuff that at first I thought I was going to be
you know that I was going to have unique
copies
throughout my model
and I make a component
and then a
couple hours later I go and change one and forget that I have copies of it
somewhere else
and I end up
changing an original component that I
that I didn't intend to.
I tend to stick with the groups
but one trick, I'll show you one more trick
so we have this component here
we'll make a copy of it
and pull it
pull it out
and um... let's say
you know we we put this bird house here and we know it's going to stay there
we can right click it and
click lock
that will protect you from accidentally
you know making changes down here
because watch what happens if you try to edit this
it'll give you a warning and say
some of the selected components are locked
would you like to unlock the components
or leave them locked and make this selected component unique, so this kind
of gives you a warning letting you know hey wait a minute you know you have other
components that match this one if you make changes to it
you're gonna have to unlock the other ones. Are you sure you
want to do that or do you want to make this one unique? So
that's kind of nice you know if you want to get in the habbit of doing that
you can make
once you get something set
you can lock it really easily right-click and lock and then you can also
unlock it very easily
so that's it, I mean
this is probably the most important thing
that you should learn when you're trying to
pick up sketchup.
Groups, components, and the outliner
and if you'd like to learn more about sketchup
visit mastersketchup.com