Hey, what is up nation!
In this session I'm going to teach you the fundamentals
of groups and components.
One of the biggest mistakes that I see, new Sketchup users make
is not utilizing groups and components or not using them properly.
One of the things that is really beautiful
about Sketchup is that allows you to mold things to be what you want. If I was
to make a box and push and pull it, I can move these endpoints in a very sort of
fluid way, but I may want at some point to move this, and if it's not a group or
component, it's really hard to do that. You know, if I start pulling this out to
the right, it's going to move everything with it.
So, you want to avoid stuff like that. When you have a geometry that you love
and you want to keep that geometry pure, so that's when you use things like
groups, and I have a habit of using lots and lots of groups, and it because it's
incredibly helpful, so to make a group, all you do, I'm going to leave this guy
right here, what you do is right-click and you hit "make group". You can see this
is a group and if I make a copy, I'm just hitting M to move and then ctrl to
make a copy. I can now move these independently and they're not stuck, but
again if I was to explode this, and then select this, and try to move it, it's
going to pull that with it, and you know you start to make some interesting
geometries, but a lot of times that's not what you want. You want to be able to
have these pure geometries that are independent of everything else. I've
opened files before next thing everything stuck together, and it just becomes
very difficult to edit things when you don't have groups separating items. I
just downloaded this 3d Plaza from the Sketchup warehouse, and this is something
that you need to be cautious of when you do that the 3d warehouse is amazing
anybody can upload stuff to it you can find really great things and then
sometimes the modeling isn't the most perfect. If I wanted to change this fence
and shrubbery to, let's say, a planter box, what I would do is I would come in
here and click. What you can see is that everything other than the fountain is
connected, so when I start to edit, it becomes increasingly difficult. If I want
to move this up, you can see that the geometry of this fence starts coming
with the file, so and there's really no way to fix this easily.
You just have to go back and remodel and regroup things. So there's just something
to be really cautious of, as you're modeling, and this just shows why using
groups and components is so essential in modeling. Now I converted this to a group,
but components essentially make the same instance of a group, so if I want to make,
let's say, five of these, I'm going to make a copy that there and then hit five, and
all of these I want to be the same. If I edit this one, it's a group, nothing
happens to the other ones. They're all independent of each other, however if I
was to undo that, and then right-click on this and say "make component", it's going
to give me this little component window and I can give it a name, so I'm going to
just call it "Mask 1", then I'm going to copy this, another distance, again five,
and I start editing this, let's say, I want to take this off all of those are
altered, so that's really useful, this helps save or cut down on your file
sizes by using components, so if you're having issues because you have a lot of
groups, but you don't have components and you have repeated geometries, I would
suggest using components because it will make your life a whole lot easier and it
will reduce your file size. I made all of these the same, but now I've decided I
want every other one to be different. What you can do is come in here, I'm
going to hit ctrl to get this little plus sign next to my Arrowhead, and I can
just select these three, right-click on it, and hit "make unique", so what that does
is it makes a separate component for these three that I just selected, so
now if I want to delete this line, these three are edited, but these three stay
the original, so just give you some flexibility on what you can
do, and how you can make a component and then later edit it. The final thing that
I want to show is that you can actually right click and save a component "as"
that's basically it will save a new sketchup file with just this component,
so you can start to develop a library where you have all of your components, so
you can bring them in later, and then if you wanted to, you can reload, and basically
that's like loading in a Sketchup file, and replace your component with whatever
that Sketchup file is.
So hopefully this helped. If you like this video, please
don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this video with your friends, 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!