Common SketchUp Styles Misconceptions

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials, Tips & Tricks

SketchUp Styles are what affect the visual appearance and representation of your models. In this article, I’ll address some of the most common misconceptions with how styles work.

In SketchUp, you can make your model look hand drawn, painted, light or bold, and anywhere in between. Styles are what transform your model into something more than a bunch of edges and faces. SketchUp wouldn’t be SketchUp without them.

But have you ever had the refresh symbol appear over the thumbnail in the Styles window? Or, have you ever gone to save a scene, and had a pop up appear asking if you want to save changes to your style? You probably got sick of it and checked off the “Do not show me this again” checkbox.

Until you understand some fundamental characteristics of how styles work, you’ll swear that they change settings randomly, don’t save changes after you’ve updated them, and don’t stick to your scenes when you save them. I want to clear up some of the confusion around how styles work.

Styles are copied to the current SketchUp model file.

When you browse through the Style window, you are looking at a list of styles that are saved on your computer, whether they are the default SketchUp styles, or ones you’ve customized or downloaded.

Pulling data into LayOut from your SketchUp model using Dynamic Components & Labels

Matt DonleyLayout Tutorials, News, Sketchup Tutorials

In 2015, LayOut’s label tool got a lot smarter. It unlocked an enormous amount of data from your model, allowing you to read classification data and dynamic component attributes. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use dynamic components to add text data to your model, then read it from within LayOut. One of the most exciting new features in SketchUp Pro …

Migrating plugins, materials, components and other settings to SketchUp 2016

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials, Tips & Tricks

Any time there is a new major release of SketchUp, a rush of fear and panic overcomes you at the thought of having to reinstall plugins, reconfigure settings, and just get everything up to speed on the new version without missing a beat. In this article, I’ll show you how to to make upgrading painless.

One important thing to note about upgrading to a new version of SketchUp, is that you can install it along side of any existing installations of SketchUp you may have. This allows you to test drive the new version, and get all your settings configured at your leisure, but still go back to your previous version to continue working if you’ve got projects that you’re currently working on.

SketchUp 2014 and SketchUp 2015 can be installed at the same time on your computer.

When you install SketchUp 2015, there are actually many settings that will be migrated over from 2014 automatically. Things like keyboard shortcuts, folder preferences, and system preferences will transfer over to 2015.

Migrating to a new version

This is a long article, so I’ve broken it down into sections. For most people, you’ll want to know how to migrate your plugins. If you haven’t done any customizing of materials, components, styles, templates, or scrapbooks, that’s all you need to do. The installation will take care of installing the default libraries, and you’ll be good to go.

But, if you have custom files you need to migrate over, you’ll want to check out the other sections as well.

Everything you need to know about SketchUp 2015

Matt DonleyNews

SketchUp 2015 has been released, with it comes some great performance improvements as well as some additional tools. Here’s everything you need to know about SketchUp 2015.

NOTE: If you’re upgrading from a previous version of SketchUp PRO, go here to find out how to upgrade 

New Features in SketchUp 2015

  • 64-bit versions of SketchUp & LayOut – SketchUp and LayOut are now available in 64-bit, which means they will now take advantage of your multi-core processor.
  • New drawing tools in SketchUp – The 3 Point Arc tool and the Rotated Rectangle tool have been added to the default toolset in SketchUp.
  • IFC Importer – SketchUp Pro now has the ability to import IFC files directly, further enhancing its BIM capabilities, and helping it communicate with other software within your BIM workflow. The classifier tools has been upgraded as well.
  • Two-segmented labels – The label tool can create two-segmented leader labels, giving you more freedom over the look of your labels.
  • Label Auto-Text – Label autotext took a huge leap forward, unlocking a whole treasure of data from your model, making your labels even smarter. You can access IFC data and dynamic component attributes from within LayOut!
  • Fast Styles badge – Styles have a big effect on how SketchUp performs under pressure. Some styles perform better than others. You’ll now see a special badge next to high performance styles when browsing through the Styles window.
  • New Licensing System – Enterprise and network licenses will now be a lot easier to manage, and you’ll now get a 30 day trial to SketchUp Pro, instead of the previous 8 hour trial.

SketchUp Rotated Rectangle Tutorial (New tool in SketchUp 2015)

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials, Tools

New in SketchUp 2015, the Rotated Rectangle tool gives you more control over the way you can draw rectangles in SketchUp. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to get oriented with it.

One of the challenges you’ve probably experienced with the basic Rectangle tool, is that the orientation of the rectangle is highly dependent upon the orientation of the camera. It’s sort of hard to get the rectangle to draw vertically, for example, unless you’re view is aligned almost perfectly with the plane you’re drawing on.

It’s also impossible to draw a rectangle off-axis. You’re only able to draw rectangles that have edges aligned to the blue, red, or green axis. The Rotated Rectangle tool solves all of these issues.

Color by layer for alternative material assignments

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials

Did you know that there’s a way to assign an alternate material to the SAME object in SketchUp? In this article, I’ll show you how to use Color By Layer to display materials according to the layer an object is assigned to.

When applying textures to your model, most people take the approach of assigning realistic textures that represent the look of the object in real life. But there are other ways you can approach material selection to provide visual information about the objects in your model. With Color By Layer, you can have the best of both worlds by assigning a second set of materials to your model, according to the layer objects are assigned to.

8 tips for creating dimensions in LayOut

Matt DonleyLayout Tutorials, News

LayOut’s Dimension tool allows you to easily add dimensions to your model. Here are eight tips to help you become even more efficient at adding dimensions to your LayOut documents.

LayOut Dimension Tool Basics

In its simplest form, the Dimension tool is used to measure the distance between two points on a page by doing the following:

  1. Activate the Linear Dimension tool.
  2. Click on the first point you’d like to measure.
  3. Click on the second point you’d like to measure.
  4. Drag your mouse out to where you want to place the dimension line, and click to set position.

That is the basic way to insert a dimension in LayOut, but there are some other things you should be aware of. Style, leaders, and alignment are all important if you want to create accurate and clear dimensions. LayOut also has some built in shortcuts to increase your speed while inserting dimensions.

Quick Document Creation in LayOut

Matt DonleyLayout Tutorials, News

While I’m a big advocate for taking the time to set up scenes in SketchUp ahead of time for the viewports you’d like to create in LayOut, there are actually many tools built right into LayOut that let you insert and orient viewports on the fly. In this article, we’ll go over how to create a basic LayOut document without any preparation in SketchUp.

If you’ve got a lot of section cuts in your model that you’d like to create viewports of in LayOut, then you really need to take the time to save scenes in SketchUp ahead of time to assign to viewports in LayOut.

But what if you’re looking to create a few simple perspectives of your model in LayOut to get it out the door quickly? There are many tools built into LayOut that allow you to insert any SketchUp model and control the perspective and style without any preparations ahead of time.

Inserting a model into LayOut

In this tutorial, I’m going to use a model I found on Formfonts. Formfonts is a premium model library full of high quality models that are professionally made to reduce file size while maintaining a high visual standard. If you’re in need of professional models to add detail to your own models, I highly recommend you check out their membership. Click here.

You could go straight to LayOut with your model, but it’s worth noting a few things to save you from frustration down the road:

  • If you have a lot of guides (from the Tape Measure tool) you’ll probably want to delete them so they don’t end up in your viewports. Go to Edit -> Delete Guides to delete all guides in your model. (If you’re editing a group/component while you do this, it will only delete the guides in that group/component.)
  • If you DO have section cuts in your model that you don’t want showing up in your viewports, you need to make sure you have a custom style created that hides section cuts or section planes.
  • If there are certain objects in your model that you don’t want displayed in any viewports, you must hide them. Either assign them to a hidden layer (Go to Window -> Entity Info -> Select the layer you want to assign it to. Then go to Window -> Layers, and uncheck that layer visibility.) Or, hide the objects by right clicking them and selecting Hide. (You can unhide them from the Outliner Window)

Design Considerations for 3D printing

Matt Donley3D Printing, Fabrication, News, Tips & Tricks

When creating a model for 3D printing, there are several things you must keep in mind in order to be able to print successfully, especially when using a desktop printer. This article highlights some of the things to look out for. As in any type of manufacturing, there are certain limitations to the materials and manufacturing processes that dictate how …

Soften/Smooth Selection

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials

In SketchUp, you can soften/smooth edges in order to create the illusion of a curved surface. In this article, I’ll show you how to soften/smooth selectively over a large selection of entities. To understand what soften/smooth does to your model, you have to understand one important fact about EVERYTHING in SketchUp. There is no such thing as a curved surface …