MakerFaire 2013

Matt Donley3D Printing, News

Back in September, I attended the 2013 World Maker Faire in New York. This was my second time going to the faire, only this time I received a personal invitation from the SketchUp team to join them in the SketchUp booth for the weekend! It gave me the opportunity to talk to a ton of people about SketchUp, and introduced them to a few open source projects that SketchUp partnered up with for the event.

What is MakerFaire?

Maker Faires are events organized by Make Magazine, a really cool company that is at the center of the Maker Movement. “Makers” are people just like yourself, who love to build, create, tinker, think, question, experiment, and MAKE all sorts of things.

Best 3D Printing Plugins for Sketchup

Matt Donley3D Printing, News, Sketchup Tutorials

Sketchup is a great tool for creating models for 3D printing. I recently built my own 3D printer and have been learning a lot about how to design printable models in Sketchup. These are the 3 plugins I can’t live without when modeling things for my printer.

NOTE: Depending upon which version of Sketchup you have on your computer, there are different methods of installing plugins. With Sketchup Make & Sketchup Pro 2013, they introduced the Sketchup extension warehouse which makes installing plugins much easier than before. The only problem is that they don’t have ALL of the plugins available. Some of the plugins I recommend below are not available through the extension warehouse, and must be downloaded from the Sketchucation forum. If you don’t have Sketchup 2013 or you are trying to install one of the plugins not hosted on the extension warehouse, I recommend checking out Installing the Sketchup STL Exporter Plugin for details on how to install these types of plugins.

Layout Pattern Fill & Hatching

Matt DonleyLayout Tutorials, News

With the release of Sketchup Pro 2013 came the new pattern fill feature in Layout. Not only is this a great solution for providing hatches in your Layout documents, but pattern fill can also be used for creating a number of unique effects. I’m going to show you how people have been creating hatches in Sketchup, as well as how to use the new Pattern Fill feature in Layout.

Why we need hatching

A Hatch is a symbolic pattern added to a drawing in order to help identify materials, objects, and spaces. They also help define section cut planes. Architects have been doing this for decades. Even before computer aided drafting they would draw in hatches by hand.

  • Most hatch patterns are standardized, which makes them universally understood by whomever is interpreting your drawing.
  • Hatches help visually identify areas that represent materials or objects from areas that are just empty space.
  • Hatches help differentiate between material types. For example, different types of wood look very similar to each other if rendered as a realistic material. However, if you use hatches to define the different types of material, the hatches are easily distinguishable. This ensures accurate interpretation of your drawings.
  • Hatches help define the plane of a section cut.
  • Hatches tend to communicate better when printed out on a black & white printer, as compared to printing out realistic materials applied from Sketchup. Plus, they save on ink.

Everything you need to know about Sketchup 2013

Matt DonleyNews, Uncategorized

It’s here! Sketchup 2013 was released on Tuesday, and you’re probably wondering what’s new! Well I’ve got you covered. I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about Sketchup 2013,

Before I jump into my overview of what’s new, I thought it would be helpful to share links to a number of important pages that will help you understand all the changes that are going on.

Official Sketchup Announcements

  • Introducing Sketchup 2013 This is the announcement from Sketchup explaining the overall picture of the release. In the article, John Bacus highlights the new Extensions Warehouse, improvements made to Layout, and the rebranding of the free Sketchup; Now called Sketchup Make.
  • (re)Introducing Sketchup Make
    This is more of a reflection on how Sketchup has grown, and how important it is to them to continue to offer a free modeling program. With Sketchup Make, they reaffirm their allegiance to always provide a version of Sketchup that is free. (Notice the backlink to my pinewood derby tutorial? Woo hoo!!)
  • A Closer Look at Layout
    Here’s an in depth look at the specific changes made to Layout. There are numerous performance upgrades, as well as many additional features added to Layout. Some features include pattern fill (hatching), new annotations, copy array, and increased zoom levels.

8 Tips for Scaling in Sketchup

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials

The scale tool is a great function in Sketchup, allowing quick resizing of objects while retaining proportions. Most of us use the scale tool on groups and components, but you can also scale anything in Sketchup, including any number of entities in a selection.

The Scale Tool

The most common way to manipulate shapes in Sketchup is to use the push/pull tool. By extruding faces, your model can start to take shape fairly quickly. But what if you wanted to stretch out something proportionally without having to manually place each object?

That’s where the Scale Tool comes in.

To use the Scale Tool, pre-select the object or objects you’d like to scale, then press (S) to activate the scale tool. You’ll notice a yellow box appears around the objects you selected and a bunch of green “handles” that you can click and drag to resize your object. Try dragging the different handles to learn the basic functions of the scale tool, then try some of these tricks.
Sketchup Center Scale Tool

Sketchup Layers vs. Groups & Components

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials

If you are used to working in a 2D program like AutoCAD or if you’ve ever used Photoshop, you probably understand the basic principles behind using layers. Most people start using Sketchup expecting layers to perform the same way, but quickly find out this is not the case. This article will help you understand how layers work in Sketchup, and also show you why groups & components may be a better way to organize your model.

I should use Layers, right?

When modeling, there are two main things you want to have control over: Organizing the structure, and toggling the visibility of the different entities in your model.

Structural organization in Sketchup is handled using Groups, Components and the Outliner window. Groups and components allow you to take any number of edges and faces and place them in an imaginary protective “shell”. This shell allows you to move and manipulate a collection of entities at the same time, and the contents of a group or component become protected from other entities outside of their group.

Traditionally, the term “layers” is used in 2D programs for both structural and visual organization. You can turn layers on or off to control visibility, but they also provide a way to separate objects from each other by assigning them to separate layers. So naturally, when someone comes into Sketchup for the first time, they expect Sketchup layers to behave the same way. Layers actually have a very specific purpose in Sketchup, but it has no effect on the STRUCTURE of your model.

Level of Detail Case Study: Rubik’s Cube

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials

Whenever you start a new Sketchup model, you make decisions about the level of detail (whether consciously or sub-consciously). What drives those decisions is usually a combination of the size of your model, the amount of time you have to create the model, and the overall purpose of your model. In this article, we’ll look at a Rubik’s Cube and a couple of different approaches to modeling one.

Rubik’s Cube Level of Detail

A Rubik’s Cube is a clever puzzle, popularized in the 80’s, that consist’s of 26 colored cubes that are interlocked with each other. You can rotate each of the 6 faces of the cube to rearrange the individual colors. Once scrambled, the point is to arrange the cubes so that each face of the cube has a unique color on it.

I thought it would be cool to model a Rubik’s cube in Sketchup, and it struck me that there were a number of different ways I could approach the project. They would all technically be a Rubik’s Cube, but the amount of detail put into each model would vary greatly.

With any Sketchup model, the objective is to create a digital representation of something that effectively communicates our ideas. In order to evaluate whether or not we are successful in our objective, we need to first define what it is exactly we are trying to communicate.

Using the Sketchup Inference System

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials

Creating accurate models in Sketchup is so easy with the built in Sketchup Inference System. You might not even notice it, but Sketchup will lock references to different points and lines in your model to help you align your geometry. In this post, you’ll not only learn the basics of the Sketchup inference system, but you’ll learn some advanced techniques for using the inference system as well.

What is the Inference System

It’s not something you can configure, or turn on and off. It’s a core part of the functionality of Sketchup that makes the program so easy to use. Learning how to use and interact with it is really easy. Learn a few of these tricks and take full advantage of the robust inference system built into Sketchup.

The inference system is basically a system that locks your cursor in inference to any point, edge, axis, face, guide or imaginary line.

10 Sketchup Tips Every Modeler Should Know

Matt DonleyNews, Sketchup Tutorials

Are you a Sketchup noob, looking to jump right in and start creating amazing 3D models? Before you skim over the help menu or spend hours watching video tutorials, learn these few tips and you’ll be modeling in no time.

Sketchup: No Instructions Needed

Most people know that Sketchup has the reputation of being the easiest way to learn 3D modeling. So easy, in fact, that a lot of people (including myself) jump right in without reading any sort of manual or help file and try to start modeling. We just choose a tool by looking at the icon and guessing at what it actually does.

Hmmm, this rectangle looking thing must create a rectangle… Clicking on the screen, you quickly discover how to draw something. Woo hoo! You then click on the button with the red arrow on it (push/pull) and extrude your first 3D shape in Sketchup…

To be able to jump right into a program like this and actually be successful at creating something is an incredible accomplishment for the developers who create and maintain Sketchup. But I’ve discovered that there are a lot of people out there who start out with Sketchup, but never take the next step and learn a few tricks that keep them on the right track. They quickly become frustrated when things don’t act the way we expect them to in Sketchup. We learn bad habits, or we spend so much time doing things that are actually really simple once you know a few tips.

Sketchup Smooth, Soft, and Hidden

Matt DonleyNews, Tips & Tricks

Have you ever been confused about the differences between Smooth, Soft and Hidden Edges? So have I! This article will give you a complete explanation of each edge type, and some examples of places to use them.

Sketchup Edges

An edge is any line segment in Sketchup. It can exist as a single element in a model, or it can be connected to other edges at intersecting points. When you have at least three edges connecting on the same plane, you can have a face. These are the core building blocks of every model in Sketchup.

Everything in Sketchup is either an edge or a face (Except for extra stuff like construction guides, floating text, dimensions, etc). I’m just talking about the geometry here. Even circles and arcs are actually made up of segmented lines (edges). There are no curved surfaces in Sketchup. But Sketchup does provide a few clever tools to give the illusion of a curved or smooth surface.

An edge can be in either one of three states

  1. Visible – This is the regular state of every edge. Self explanitory.
  2. Hidden – You can’t see the edge, and no edge styles will be applied to it while hidden.
  3. Soft – Same as Hidden, but adjoining faces will be selected as one

(If an edge is selected to be both Hidden and Soft, it will act as if it’s soft.)


But what about Smooth?? Smoothing technically doesn’t do anything to the edge, it affects the appearance of faces that are connected to the edge. We’ll talk about that in a little bit.