Sketchup Session 1: Getting Started

Welcome to SketchUp for woodworkers for WoodWorkers Guild of America. SketchUp is a great tool that you're gonna enjoy using. What I'd recommend though is to go ahead watch the tutorial all the way through from the beginning to the end. That way it'll probably answer some of the questions that you might have if you just start enjoying. Another cool thing is, is you can have a second device. If you have something like that and you'll be able to watch the tutorial on there and then click along and actually build the project as you go, you can stop, start, stop and start until you get familiar with it. And like all new tools that you might get there's a learning curve to it I'll admit it it's gonna take you hours but practice, practice, practice it's actually quite fun. So you might ask yourself, why do I wanna use SketchUp? Well, lemmie open up a project here that I've designed in SketchUp and I made this without cutting a piece of wood. So I was able to get the proportions just the way I wanted them and as you can see if I grab this tool and move things apart you can see how you can pick out every part of your project. Take a look at it individually. You can see how it all goes together. And then to get a little better look let's go ahead and take off that texture. Now you can see all these lines and this is a really helpful thing. You can see how your joinery goes together. It all fits exactly right and you could actually take your finished product like we were looking at just a little while ago and email it if you're building a project for a friend or someone you know you can email them a photo that you can print right off of this and save it as a PDF or a JPEG so they can get a good look at it before you even started and they could recommend changes. Another cool thing about this is the dimensioning aspect of a tool because since you're creating this in three-dimensional space, it actually exists so it's got measurements that you can go ahead and take off you can go this way from any part of your drawing you can get detailed measurements which is gonna save you time in the shop figuring out cut lists and exact sizes of pieces it's very handy. So this is SketchUp. We're gonna learn how to do this project as well as several other projects. So in no time you should be up running with SketchUp and learning as we go. To start using SketchUp you'll have to download it first. So let's open up our browser. I'm gonna type in SketchUp and as we see the page that'll come up here is SketchUp 3D for everyone. So we're gonna take SketchUp make that's the free version. Now up here, we can just simply click on download SketchUp and then it'll say, I plan to use it for and the best thing to put in is personal projects 'cause that's what you're gonna use SketchUp for. If you're gonna be a professional, sell your items you're gonna have to use SketchUp Pro. Put in your email address and professional interest you can put other or woodworking, whatever you plan to do. And then it's very important here to go Windows or Mac, I'm using a Mac so I've got that clicked and then I have to click agree and then I can download it. And before you download it just go down here and you can click on here hardware and software requirements. It'll tell you what kind of hardware you need. If your computer is able to handle it and if you need any software upgrades. So with that, go ahead download it and then you can install it on your computer and then we'll be ready to go. I've already done that in mine so let's get started. With SketchUp installed on my computer I'm gonna go ahead and open it up. So you'll notice up here mind says SketchUp Pro, well I have the Pro edition, but what I'm gonna be showing you is everything that you have on SketchUp make I won't use any of the Pro functions. So with that in mind you'll get a box that looks like this it'll just say SketchUp make so I'm gonna open it up so we can start using SketchUp. Now, before we get going, drawing anything we've got to kind of get it set up for woodworking. So if I go up here to preferences, now this is on a Mac and I'll show you some other windows applications later that you can do. Let's go down here to template. So I've opened up preferences and I'm now open up the template. Now in here you'll find all sorts of different templates and that's because SketchUp is good for construction it's good for architects landscapers and as we scroll down we'll see woodworking in inches that's the kind of templates you'd like to use. So if you go ahead and left click on that, it'll get highlighted and then we can simply go up and close that. Now it's set for woodworking. So everything would be in inches. Now up here on the toolbar we've got these tools. Now there's other tools that I'd like to use in woodworking that aren't up here. So I'm gonna change them out and I'll explain that as we go. So I'm gonna go to view and it says tool palettes. Now what I'm gonna do right away is grab the large tool set. So I left clicked on tool set. Now I've got all of these tools. Some of these I'm not gonna use in woodworking. Some of them are just for architects like these down here, but up above now you can see that all of these tools with the exception of these at the end, they're all found right here so I don't need them. So I could fill this space with other tools that will help us out in woodworking. So to do that I'll open a view again, left click on that and go down to customized toolbar and left click on there then I get all of these different tools. Now what I wanna do is take some of these outta here and install tools that I wanna use, 'cause what we have up here, we've already got down here. So I'm gonna just start dumping some of these outta here and I'll do it really quickly. I'm left clicking and just pulling them into my workspace and they just disappear. So I just gotta few more to do here and then I'm gonna save those we'll talk about those later. But in my toolbar standard views is very important because but wanna change our view in SketchUp of how we look at things on the screen. So I'm gonna just grab this, drag it up and put it up there. Now it's ready for us to use, another one is style and this has x-ray and it has different styles that we'd see our model in. Some have textures with it. Some are just plain. We'll get more into that as we use it so grab that one and that one you can put in as well. Here's another one that you really will use all the time it's undo and redo. So if you've make a drawing and you can go undo whatever you did, or you can redo if you decided that you wanted to keep it. A real good friend to have. So let's go ahead and drag that one up. And then we're also gonna be talking about shadows later and this would be a handy one to put up and have ready. Now there's all sorts of other tools that we're not gonna even get into. So I'm just gonna say for right now that's the way I'd like this done. So with my Mac all set to go I'm gonna show you how to do this on a PC with windows. I've opened up SketchUp on my PC and so let's go ahead and take a look at getting it set up for drawing. If I go up here on this menu and I see window I'm gonna click there and I'm gonna scroll down till I find preferences. Now on the Mac, the preferences was located up over here, but on here, it's down here so let's go ahead and click on that. Now there's templates up here and we've got a lot of other things, drawing, extensions files let's not pay attention to any of that. We'll just go to template and if we go ahead and scroll around we'll see all sorts of different architectural, landscaping or urban planning, interior design here's woodworking for inches that's what we're gonna use so I'll go ahead and click on that and okay. So now it's all set up whatever we do is gonna read out here in the measurements as inches. Now let's go ahead and change our workspace so that our tools are easy to get at. If I open up view and I go to toolbars we'll see this getting started so I can unclick that and that gets rid of everything up there. Then I can go down here to large tools and I'm gonna click that it puts them conveniently on the left so they're easy to grab. Now up on the top, I also wanna put some tools that will help with woodworking so we'll go ahead and put our standard tools up there so you can see there's a box to check for that. Now we've got to stick them up where they belong so we grew up here and then they'll just snap in place. Now we have cut and paste do and undo, print things that we'll use all the time then we'll also select some others styles is another one that we're gonna select and this lets us look at our model in different ways. There's an x-ray where we can actually see through the surfaces and get to all the lines. There's a monochrome where we can get rid of it and textures we'll get more into that later. Then we'll also select views and views is nice too lets us look at our model from an isometric point, top view, front, couple of side views in a back and a left very nice to use in a woodworking so we can get all sorts of angles. And then we'll go to warehouse and warehouse is nice because we can click on warehouse and we can get models of things like screws, biscuits, all sorts of things that we don't want to draw but somebody else has been kind enough to post them and we can grab them for free but we'll get more into that as we start using SketchUp. So our PC is ready to go.