Learn how to manage and utilize materials, components, and tags effectively in SketchUp in this article. It provides comprehensive guidelines on cleaning up models, modifying components, adding furniture, and grouping elements for easy management.
Key Insights
- The article highlights the importance of keeping track of materials used in your model to prevent overpopulation and difficulty in locating specific materials. It demonstrates how to purge unused materials, reducing the number from 48 to 44 in the example.
- Dynamic components from the 3D warehouse, such as furniture, can be modified in various ways including changing base style, tabletop materials, and dimensions. These components also import tags which need to be managed and grouped for better organization within the model.
- The addition of entourage, such as 2D or 3D people, enhances the realism of the model and provides a sense of scale. The article also underscores the necessity of cleaning up imported tags and assigning them to relevant groups for easy toggling and better model management.
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One thing to note, as we start adding materials and importing components from the warehouse, any material that's loaded in that component will load into our model, but also any material that we have painted, like for example we use this textile rug to explore the carpet, it stays in our in model. This is the same way with components until we actually purge out our materials.
So to clean things up we can actually go to our window and model info, statistics and purge unused. We can scroll down and we can see that there are currently 48 materials loaded into our model. We can purge unused and we can see as we scroll down again that now there are 44 materials used in the model.
We can continue to look to see what materials are in here and we can see that there are some of these bright yellows and bright greens. Now I'm not sure what where these are used at but they are currently in the model. We do have all of our sightings and our various colors that we've used.
It's a good idea to keep to keep understanding what materials you have in your model so this your bank of materials doesn't get too overpopulated and it's really hard to find the specific material that you want. Okay I'm going to go in here and I see that I want to change this little trim piece on the door and I want this to be painted the same color as the door trim. So I'll select my door trim and paint that and now let's add a few dining small dining tables in this in this area over here.
So in this case we'll go to our 3D warehouse and we'll type in dc furniture. Dc like we looked at with the kitchen cabinets stands for dynamic components. We'll go into catalogs and select dc furniture under SketchUp and let's find cafe table and let's download this into our model.
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This is a dynamic component so it has options on how we want to model this. So let's put this in a general location right over here. We don't need to be precise on where we want this to be located but a good idea is to kind of fit it within the tiles on the ground kind of centered around that and centered around the center tile.
If we click our component options we can see that this specific table has a few different options on how to modify. Certain components that you can download with dynamic components give you these options or we can change the base style to be round instead of square or change the tabletop from different materials and then also change the tabletop shape to be a circle or a square. I'll keep it at square and I would like my base to also be square and I want my table to actually be 33 × 33.
I'll hit apply. Again if you don't like this material you can apply a different material in its place. You can double click into this component and find the material that you like.
You can apply the door wood grain material to this the same wood as the door and also you can apply various metal if you want to apply the same metal that's in the door handles we can do that as well. I think I would like my wood to match this one so I would use my eyedropper tool to see what that is. That's coffee table wood.
I'll triple click all of the all the surfaces and then paint. If you want to if you want your grains to go in different directions you can modify that you can rotate this tabletop and now let's add some seating some chairs next to our little small dining table. We will open our 3D warehouse and we will search again SketchUp seating and go into catalogs seating high poly and we will find down here any of these kind of small individual chairs.
I'll choose cushion dining chair and I'll load this into my model. Again whenever I bring this in it's also bringing in this same material. I would I'm going to rotate this chair to be 90 degrees and I'll position this chair to be centered around the table and then I will also rotate this chair to be on the opposite side.
So with that I'll go to my rotate tool and I'll hover over the center point and then I'll have intersection in base square and then I'll rotate around and click the CTRL key to make a copy right there. Now I will go to my selection window and select these three objects and make group. Now I have a small dining table and I would like to make a copy of this.
Go to my move tool hit CTRL to make a copy let's say eight feet. There we have we have our two dining tables and you know you can play around if you would like to make three of them or be in different orientations. It's all up to you and your imagination.
I want to see some creative designs understanding that we do have a kitchen over here so people are going to want to walk around. If you select all three of these you want this to be centered around the couch. All those are kind of good rules of thumb.
I've decided that I think I just want this one table and I want to do one five feet over here and then I want to make a copy of this do five feet this direction. There you go. All right so we've added some furniture into our dining room.
It is starting to come alive. The last thing that we'll do with kind of bringing this space is add some entourage. If you go into our components if you go into our components and click this drop down menu you can see that we have some options of favorites but this does not include all of SketchUp's things that they have.
You can see your recent things that we were looking at DC cabinets however let's go under people and we can see the SketchUp people who they have pre-loaded they have 2D face me's 3D people and 2D people and dynamic components. Let's go to people 2D and this will open up SketchUp in here so we can use a combination of silhouettes or we can use real people as we scroll further down. These are people who SketchUp has been added throughout the years so you can populate your scene with as many people as you want.
So I'll put in 2D woman standing I'll place this person right here and I'll go back into my 3D warehouse and I'll go down and I'll see I want to put in a let me I'll put in this casual looking man and he's going to be kind of standing over here and you know these people are always facing the camera right so you can't really position a face me person sitting in a chair because if you're facing this direction then he'll be like sitting this way versus this way so sometimes 3D people could work but for the sake of for sake of this model we will just stick with 2D people. Have fun choosing whoever you would like we're really just kind of adding some people in there to give you a sense of a scale of the space. All right so now one last thing is as we started importing these components we realized that these components also imported tags base square base round layer one we don't have control of what gets imported when we do that so we always got to constantly be able to clean things up so let's select top square and hold down control top round top flower layer one base square and base round we don't want to physically delete these because they're inside of these components so what we need to do is we need to right click delete tags and let's assign these to untagged and now let's add a new tag and let's call this one furniture enter and then we'll add an additional one and we'll call this one people so let's select the people and let's add those two people and let's select the furniture and our kitchen and our bathroom elements i will like to group all these bathroom components all together so that way we don't i don't have to keep on clicking it so i will group those now i have all the furniture all in one group and then i will select everything in this and put it under furniture when you select groups inside furniture if i was to eventually explode this no longer this now becomes furniture but inside of the group these are not under the furniture tag so it's best to kind of have on the outside of everything be furniture because then you know that you can you can turn it on and off and it'll all go away and now let's turn back on our roof and let's uh save the file and i will see you in the next video
