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, if we use this textile rug to explore the carpet, it stays in our 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 where these are used, 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 understanding what materials you have in your model so your bank of materials doesn't get too overpopulated, making it 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 small dining tables 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 a 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, 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 it. 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 metals 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 surfaces and then paint. 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 for SketchUp seating and go into Catalogs, Seating High Poly, and we will find down here any of these small individual chairs.
I’ll choose a 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’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 the 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 them a 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 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 in this direction. There you go. Alright, 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, 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 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 sitting this way versus this way. So sometimes 3D people could work, but for the sake of this model, we’ll 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 scale for the space. Alright, 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 over 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 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 would like to group all these bathroom components all together so that way 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 were to eventually explode this, this no longer 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 turn it on and off, and it’ll all go away. And now let’s turn back on our roof and let’s save the file, and I will see you in the next video.
