This article provides a detailed walkthrough on how to add furniture and people to your main clubhouse room using SketchUp. It offers tips and best practices for using SketchUp models, managing polygon sizes, and working with textures and materials.
Key Insights
- The tutorial guides you through the process of populating a clubhouse room with furniture using SketchUp models, emphasizing the importance of managing the polygon sizes of your 3D models to keep file sizes manageable.
- Materials for items like carpets and furniture can be modified to suit individual preferences. The article includes a step-by-step guide on modifying colors and textures, and applying them to various components of the furniture setup.
- Creating a grouping for items in the same area, such as a couch and coffee table, is recommended for smoother operations. This not only makes it easier to move and arrange items together, but also simplifies the process of modifying the materials for grouped items.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Alright, in this video, we are going to add some entourage of furniture and people into our main clubhouse room. So let's first turn off our Roof's tag so we can see the interior of our space.
We want to populate the interior with furniture. I want to follow and teach you kind of the SketchUp models that they provided, but feel free to download and use whatever models you like. Keep in mind that you want to keep the polygon sizes of your 3D models as small as possible.
The SketchUp-made models have already been modeled cleanly and concisely, so I recommend using those in your model. However, if you are downloading from another model or a user, keep in mind that you might run into extremely large file sizes that can become cumbersome to work with. So let's start off.
In the second half of our course, we're going to model a fireplace and a hearth over on this end of the wall. So let's create a nice seating area in the middle that will look into this fireplace, and then let's throw in a couple of dining chairs adjacent to the kitchen. For the dining seating or the lounge seating, couches and love seats arrangement, let's throw in a nice area rug.
We'll use the Tape Measure tool to dimension six feet off this wall, and then six feet off of this side wall, and then four feet off of the main hearth wall, and then eight feet. This will be the shape of our area rug. I will draw in a rectangle, and then I will use my Push-Pull tool, and I'll push this up 0.5 inches.
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I will triple-click, make group, edit, delete guides. And now I will apply a material to this area rug. If you go into Carpet, Fabrics, Leathers, and Textiles, there's a wide variety of SketchUp pre-loaded carpet patterns and textures.
We can modify the colors. So I will use this Carpet Diamond Yellow, and I don't like the bright yellow color. So what I'll do is I'll rename this as "Clubhouse Area Rug, " and then I'll go to Edit, and I'll modify the color.
I want this color to be almost like a grayish color. And now let's download from the 3D SketchUp Warehouse some couches and furniture for our space. So open up the 3D Warehouse, and let's search for SketchUp Seating.
Now, if you notice, if you open up SketchUp Seating, there are lots of these models. These are products from specific manufacturers, and then there are models that a lot of people have modeled. And like I was saying, these can be very cumbersome to use.
So let's go over to Catalogs, and let's use where we see SketchUp who is creative. We know SketchUp is going to be really concise and clean in how they modeled. We'll open up Seating High Poly, and then choose whatever couch and love seat you prefer.
I'm going to download this rectangular love seat. If you notice, the file size is 790 kilobytes and only 655 polygons, and only two materials. This is extremely low and manageable to work with.
We'll download this and load it directly into my model. And then we will place this right over here. We don't have to be exact when modeling this furniture.
We can be a little bit approximate, placing it where we think it fits best on the carpet. Let's hit the Control key, and let's copy this over nine feet, and let's right-click, Flip Along Green Axis. And now let's add a larger couch on this end.
Let's go back to my 3D Warehouse, scroll down to Rectangular Couch, and let's load this directly into my model. And let's put this right here, and rotate it 90 degrees. Let's find the center point, and let's move along the green axis, and let's hold down Shift to lock the green axis, and match the center point of the rug.
Let's pull this all the way to the edge of our love seat, and then let's pull it back 16 inches. Alright, now we have our couch and area rug layout. Now let's put in a coffee table.
So let's go into the SketchUp Warehouse again. And this time, instead of typing in SketchUp Seating, let's type in SketchUp Tables. And likewise, let's go under Catalogs, and go into Tables High Poly.
And here we can see a wide variety of tables. If we scroll down, we can see some small dining tables to coffee tables. I would like to download "Coffee Table Modern 30 inches by 60 inches Detailed."
We'll download this directly into my model, and I'll put it over here. I want to put it somewhere where it aligns in this direction. Put it right over here, and then I want to select this midpoint, and holding Shift to lock the green axis, find the midpoint of the area rug.
And then on this side, let's find the midpoint of the table, and along the red axis, let's find the midpoint of the couch. Now we have our table and our coffee table, and our couch is centered on this. What I'll do is I will go to my Select tool, select all five of these objects, and right-click, Make Group, so they're all grouped together as one.
We can go ahead and modify these materials. We can use our Eyedropper tool to select this material, and we can call this "Coffee Table Wood, " and we can modify this. I don't like how bright and orange this wood is, so I want to bring down the colors a little bit to match some of the wood that we're using elsewhere.
And then likewise, with the other materials we have, I'm going to call this material "Couch Leather One, " and I would bring down this more gray color. And then I want to make sure that this material is the same color as this. So I'll double-click into this material, and I'll right-click, Select All with Same Material.
And now that I have "Couch Leather One, " I'll go to my Paint Bucket tool and paint that. Then I'll click out, and I'll do the same thing with the light color here. I will select this white leather, and I will type in "Couch Leather Two, " and then I will make this material maybe a slightly gray color.
And then I will go into this couch, and triple-click into it, where I can start selecting the faces, and select, right-click, Select All with Same Material. And then Paint Bucket, since I have this "Couch Leather Two" still selected, paint that. If you do not have your "Couch Leather Two" selected, you can go into Select, and Home, and if you scroll down to where it's at, you can find it here.
And then I'll Escape to close out, and there we have our furniture.
