Discover the essentials of incorporating 3D components into your digital floor plans as we guide you through the process of utilizing the 3D warehouse to populate your building model. Learn to effectively add features like fixtures and furniture, whilst ensuring they match perfectly with your design.
Key Insights
- The process begins by unchecking roofs and floors in the tags dialog box, granting visibility to floor plan details. From there, pre-uploaded 3D components from the 3D warehouse such as fixtures are added to the building model.
- Proper positioning of the components is crucial. Once placed, components like the VDCI clubhouse restroom can be exploded into multiple smaller components. However, one must be careful of 'jitters', which occur when two planes are in the exact same location.
- It's essential to maintain good modeling practices during the process. This includes ensuring that the components brought in from the 3D warehouse are named appropriately for easy identification and management in the future.
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In this video, I would like to start bringing in some fixtures for our building. Let's go to our Tags dialog box here and uncheck Roofs and Floor so we can access and see some of the floor plan details. Let's make sure that we have Floor Plan Scene selected so that we can view the floor plan details.
I have pre-uploaded many 3D components into the 3D Warehouse, so let's go into the 3D Warehouse by clicking this icon at the top and search for "VDCI SKP 201." Let's go to Collections and click "VDCI SKP 201." You can see here that we’ve included a few items that we’ll be populating our model with. The first item we want to add is the "VDCI Clubhouse Restroom."
This includes all of the fixtures, so let's download it and load it directly into our SketchUp model. Yes. We see that the origin is in this corner right here, so let's place it right here where it seems like it’ll match perfectly. Click, and now let's explode this component.
Right now, we see that we have just one component called "VDCI Clubhouse Restroom, " but once we explode it, we will have multiple components. As we zoom into the drinking fountain, we can see that we have some visual artifacts. This is because there are two planes occupying the exact same location.
We need to remove one of them. We can either delete the drinking fountain, but since that’s a metal plate, let’s remove the actual wall. Double-click this.
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We want to either press H or go to "Hide Rest of Model" so we can see clearly. Then draw a rectangle from here to here, then use the Select tool to delete this face. Now, when we turn off Hide Rest of Model, we can see that we’ve basically created a hole in our wall. All right, great—let's place a few more components into our model.
As we pan over to the other side of our clubhouse, we can see that we have a storage room with a mop sink. If we go to our SketchUp Warehouse, we can also find a "VDCI Mop Sink." Let's bring this into our model.
Download and load directly into the model. We can see that the orientation is not quite correct, so let’s just place it in the middle for now. Hover over the model and click one of the red squares. As we rotate, we can see that it will snap to the green axis, and the angle in the bottom right corner reads -90, because it’s rotating 90 degrees counterclockwise.
If we typed in 90, it would rotate in the opposite direction, which is not what we want. So let’s just drag it in this direction here and click. Then move this corner to right there. Again, we see a similar situation with visual artifacts on these two planes.
We want to keep the tile, so let's delete some of these wall faces. Double-click into the wall group and go to View > Component > Hide Rest of Model so we can see what’s happening. Draw a rectangle from this point here to this point, then from this point to this point. Now go to View > Component > Hide Rest of Model again or press H. That’s why we create a shortcut for that—because we use it often. Then delete this line in the corner. When we press H again and deselect our group, we can see that we now have a really clean mop sink in our storage room. Be careful not to delete any of the other bottom wall portions while doing this.
So let’s save our file. Next, let’s look at our kitchen, just adjacent to the storage room. You can see that we have a floor plan showing cabinets, a range, a sink, a refrigerator, and a storage cabinet.
We’re going to start adding in these components. Again, let’s go to the 3D Warehouse and click "VDCI Kitchen Corner" and download this into our model. We can try to snap it right here, but to make sure we’re snapping to the correct point, let’s orbit down under our building so we can snap it to this corner. Now let’s place some upper cabinets, but to determine the height, let’s draw a reference guide.
Click on the bottom here with our Tape Measure tool, then go up in the blue direction and type 7 feet 6 inches. Now go back to the 3D Warehouse and click "VDCI Kitchen Upper" and download it. We want to place this right on the intersection point. Then go to Edit > Delete Guides and let’s save our file.
Now let’s go into our Components and see if we need to rename anything brought in from the 3D Warehouse. It is good practice and good modeling etiquette to make sure things are named appropriately—for example, Toilet, Final, Urinal, VDCI Clubhouse Restrooms. All of these seem to be named well. Right, so I think we’re okay. Let’s save our file one last time, zoom extents, then save our file again. In the next video, we’re going to bring in more kitchen cabinets and furniture for our kitchen. I’ll see you in the next video.
