Hey design nation!
In this session I'm going to teach you the difference
between tools, plugins and extensions in Sketchup.
And then I'm going to teach you how to find some, and how to install them once you do.
I'm just going to start off this by saying that the difference
between tools, plugins and extensions is pretty slight,
and in sketchup 2014 the lines start to get pretty blurred.
I'll go into that a little bit later, but for now I'm just going to describe
how those three are typically defined.
Okay so tools are anything that is built in to Sketchup,
so if I was to say grab the rectangle tool, you would grab this,
and not any sort of plug-in. A plug-in is typically a something that you add into
Sketchup, it's an added feature that doesn't come with the vanilla version.
So I'm going to teach you how to find and install those,
and then the other thing is extensions, which are usually sort of robust plugins
they're not developed by Sketchup. To develop by third parties. Just like plugins.
And a lot of times they have more robust features,
like user interfaces, they can do a little bit more
and they just look nicer and usually work better.
So since this is a vanilla version of Sketchup I don't have any extensions or plugins installed,
so it's going to be a good sort of learning experience if you've never installed any plugins or extensions.
And so since a Sketchup 2013 they added the extension warehouse,
so installing extensions has become super easy, so if you go to window
and scroll down to extension warehouse, it'll pop up this extension warehouse window.
In here there are different ways to navigate through the extensions, so
you can choose your industry or your category, so I might start with architecture,
since that's the field that I'm, in and maybe I'm looking for drawing.
Over here it'll tell you the price if there is a price.
But for this one it's free so you just click on it, and the easy way to do this
is just hit install. You can see that it didn't actually do anything,
that's because I'm not signed in, so it might be frustrating at first if you keep
clicking this and it doesn't do anything. So all you have to do is sign one with
your account, and then you'll be good to go.
So now that I'm signed into my account when I hit install, you'll see that it
pops up a message, and it says "Do you trust the author?", and I'm going to "Say"
and it's going to go through and it's going to install
and now you can see, that I have a toolbar. So now I'm going to show you sort of the manual way
to install extensions and I'll talk about how to uninstall them if you get
tired of the ones that you need. A really good website to go to if you're looking
for plugins or extensions is Ruby library Depot, there's also a Smustard.
It's also a very good website to go to. You just click home or products and you
can search through, some of them are free and some of them are paid.
For this I have already discovered a couple, that I've discovered an extension and a
plugin, so I'm just going to use this for now, but essentially use it download
it'll download it to your ear file. And then I'll take it from there how you install.
Okay, so i've downloaded my two files and they're in my downloads folder.
This one has the extension RBZ at the end, and this one just says RB.
The one with the Z is an extension and the one with the B is a plug-in.
The first thing you need to do is to go to your C Drive and your Program Files and you need to
find your Sketchup folder, so that's essentially what I'm doing.
Sketchup the latest version that you want to install your plugin on I'm using
14 and this is where the discrepancy comes in that I was talking about earlier.
So in previous versions of Sketchup there was a plugins folder.
Now there's this folder called tools, which is essentially the same thing.
So you want to drop your
your plugin over here, you can see there are other plugins in there now, just to
continue, I'm going to drop this in there as well.
You'll need to exit out of your current version of Sketchup if you have it open, and then restart it.
I installed weld, so you can see in plugins there's this new tab that wasn't there before. Weld is in there.
Sometimes the plugins won't show up there depending on the plug-in,
and like if you select these
lines you'll be able to right-click and there might be an option in here.
That's pretty often but you should be able to look at some readme files for your plug-in,
and the author's should describe how to use their plug-in.
So we have this plug-in installed, but now we don't have the other extension, so the
manual way to do that is go to window preferences you'll see here there's this
extensions, to install extension you go down here, install extensions and then
you have to find where we saved that previous file. So if I go back to my
C Drive, my Sketchup folder
2014 I put it in tools, you'll see this file showing up and the other dot RB
files are not because they aren't extensions. So I'm going to hit open it's
going to put me through that same process that it did before when I
installed through the extension warehouse, you can see is it that it is complete.
If at any point you want to turn any plugins off, you just come in
here and you uncheck them, so if I didn't want my 101 bit tools,
I just come in here, and turn that off, and then you have to restart the SketchUp for it now to show up.
Well, I'm going to hit OK and you can see I have my tree extension in here.
I've never used this before, but there you go.
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Hope you guys have a good one,
and as always Happy Hacking!
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