Hey, what is up nation?
In this session I'm gonna be teaching you five Sketchup
mistakes every beginner makes and how to avoid them.
This first mistake is what I call "sticky business"
and basically it's not using groups and components, so a
thing that can happen a lot of times is you'll start modeling and you'll forget,
because you're new to Sketchup that you need to be separating groups and components
for things that you don't want to be stuck together.
So here I've exploded this, so that it's all one shape and you can see if I want
to move this design or something, everything is attached to it.
Or if I wanted to move these wings back a little, and I go to select them, if I
select this wing and I go to move it, everything gets stuck to it. So that's
just one mistake, if you want to correct this, it's a little bit tedious to go
back and retroactively fix this, but you can see here, I do have this, let's
also select these, I'm gonna make it a group, so now when I move it, you can see
that everything goes together and it's not stuck together so it acquires a
little bit of repair because it's not a group or component, or that's not how it
was made, and that will help you get rid of your sticky business. The second
mistake a lot of beginners make is what I call "overstocking from the 3d
warehouse". Basically that's downloading a bunch of 3D models from the 3D warehouse
and putting them into your model and I think that's a great thing, but I think a
lot of people who are new to Sketchup tend to go overboard with that and
you're not really a hundred percent sure of what you're downloading, when you do
it, so I've brought in this you can see that this pendant light has a huge box
that the box should be much more confined, and it's just straight from the
3D warehouse I haven't done anything to this. When I turn on view in geometry, you
can see there is a bunch of extra stuff in here.
There's like a, looks like a sink, that's over on the side, and this kind of
information can really slow down your model because it's extra, it's not
something that you anticipated for or necessarily want in your model. But
you're still loading it up, and it's taking up space in your model, so if
you're experiencing any kind of bug splats or anything, it could be
because you have a ton of models that you imported from the 3d warehouse and
they're not either poly size is much greater than what you need for what
you're doing and Sketch up, or they have a lot of these extra hidden things that
you don't know about. So you can always come into these groups like I just
showed you go to hidden geometry, and come in, and like even in this thing
there's some extra stuff going on, you can always come in and delete that
information, just gonna delete these things. So you can delete that stuff and
also if you just have too many components, what you can do is go to
window, model info, and there's this statistics column you can purge unused. I
don't get rid of any components that aren't currently being used in your 3D model.
The third thing I see a lot is getting hung up on styles and the way
things look as you're modeling. So here I'm using a sketchy style on the
right-hand side you can see styles and have this textile pen selected, and I'm
trying to zoom in and it just takes forever to go in, because of the sketchy
Styles. So, and you don't really need to do that when you're modeling, so if you
come down here and select, let's do a sorted Styles, you can see in the bottom
right here there's a little icon that means that this is a you can see it says
right there this is a fast modeling style, that means that I when you're
working, you should probably be using these different styles, save scenes
as your sketchy Styles if you want to do renderings or you want to see what they
look like with that style really quickly. But as you're working, try to make sure
that you're using a faster style and that'll make sure that your workflow is
faster. One thing that I know that I really got hung up on when I first
started modeling and Sketchup was modeling everything, and as I worked more
professionally, I realized that you don't really want to model everything because
you don't have time to model everything, and you're losing money the more that
you model, especially things that you you're never gonna see. So you know, if
you know that you're gonna be doing one perspective and if you have a
client or your boss has a client, you want to make sure that you're defining
those parameters. I think a lot of people think "Hey, you can do this in 3D and then
I can have as many models as I want", and I think you want to build the model so
that there's a skeleton there that you can build from, but things like if you
look in this model and this is a awesome model I'm not sure what they used it for,
but the kind of detail that went into this cabinetry, if you're not going to
see it from if you're not going to do like an interior rendering or anything
like that, it may not be worth it, you know, when I'm out here if I take a
perspective from down low, I'm not even gonna see that cabinetry. So is it
important to have that kind of information. And that's the kind of
things that you need to ask yourself as you're modeling is "What's my view and
what am I gonna see?". You know, these palm trees have some extra stuff model in
them. I think it's okay, this model isn't isn't massive, but, you know, as you start
to build in a background or if you want to build in the background it could get
pretty massive. You know these planks I think are
modeled pretty well because they have the lines, but they're not individual
planks, so you're cutting out a face on this side that you don't necessarily
need. Now what I've done in the past, is like "Oh, I want a little space between
all of these', and that may or may not be necessary
or you may be able to just do that with a texture instead of actually having to
model it. So as you go through and model in Sketchup, you want to be asking
yourself "What am I gonna see? What's my final image gonna look like? What am i
using this for? Are using it in plan, or using it for sections, or using it for
perspectives or using it for all three?". Then maybe you need to have more detail,
so just ask yourself those questions and wait. When you don't need to model - don't
model. Don't go into heavy details modeling things like smoke detectors. You
know, if you have those and you can throw it in, and it's relatively low poly
that's fine, but the more that you add to your model, especially
if it's not adding any information, it's detracting from your time and your
work and you could be doing more useful things with your time. The last thing
that I want to talk about is using too many tools. So you can see here I have a
ton of different plugins than I'm using, and I don't use a lot of them. But what
can happen when you have a lot of plugins, especially if you're not using
some is that they can start to conflict. When I was having issues of V-ray they
were pretty much saying "Hey, don't use this plug-in, don't use that plug-in,
don't use this plug-in". It's sucks that that happens, but when you have a bunch
of third parties making or essentially altering code or adding their own code
to software, there are obviously conflicts that can occur. So I would say:
"Minimize the amount of plugins that you can use", up here I have a thousand and
one bit tools, and there's a lot of stuff in here that I would never use, like a
door frame. I would make my own door frame, because I probably be more
architectural, and I'd have the door included in that, so like it's sort of
limited on what you can do with some of these things, but you know, like a chamfer
tool - awesome. Like that's really basic, I wish they had that in Sketchup but they
don't, so I use a hundred and one bit tools so that I can get that easily,
you know it's super simple, I think the more simple and fundamental the
tools are, I think, the better. That you're using don't use tools or plugins as a
crutch for your lack of experience modeling. And if you want to do like
fancy steps or something, use a component. Build a component. Do it once and then
use that over and over and over in your projects, and then the second part of
this is what I've seen a lot is that people don't learn a software fully and
instead they do one thing in this program and then they try to transfer it
to a new program, and then transfer that to another program, and I think the more
that you can stay in one program, the better.
So like Sketchup has layout, or SketchUp Pro has layout, and I think that's good
to learn how to use those tools before you start going into Photoshop or
Illustrator or taking your model out to a third party to do renderings, because
you don't like the way that it looks in V-ray in Sketchup, or whatever, because
that stuff creates problems and I've run into that. Just the way that things
convert sometimes is problematic. So the more that you can stay in one program,
commit to that program, learn as much as you can about it, and then, and I guess,
for this that means Sketchup learn all you can about Sketchup and then move
from there. Hopefully this helped, if you liked 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,
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