How to Turn a Floorplan Into a 3D Model Using SketchUp!

hello welcome back to the channel and today's video is going to be how to make your first sketchup 3d model from a basic 2d floor plan complete with textures and 3d modeling in just a few minutes [Music] okay so this is a pretty good um introduction to sketchup if this is your first video and you just want to use the free online 3d modeling software sketchup to create a basic layout then you're in the perfect place to start a lot of tutorial videos want to take you through like understanding how it works and what extrusion is and how to use the measurement tool and i think you came looking for sketchup because there is something you actually want to model and so i'm going to get you modeling as soon as possible and then we can start talking more in depth about the various tools and the way it works in future videos so for example let's say you have a basic hand-drawn rough footprint of a room this is one that i kind of threw up of a bedroom in my house and you can see it's very rough it's hand-drawn and anyone can put something together like this with a tape measure in just a few minutes and so today we're going to take a look at how to get that into three dimensions so let's start modeling the first thing in sketchup is create your outline or your footprint so this is a standard practice anytime you're doing a room or a house and things will get a little different if you're here specifically for like woodworking or fine tuning modeling but in general always start with a container that's large enough for your whole model so in this case the room is 10 foot by 12 foot so what we're going to start is in two dimensions we're going to take the 10 foot by 12 foot rectangle of the room and all you have to do to do that is select the rectangle tool from the side panel it's one of sketchup's default tools hit at your origin which is the point where the three colored lines meet it's where the three axes that we'll be using in 3d modeling meet and just click on it and then with the pencil tool drag it in a direction where it can use two of the three axes and it's going to automatically snap to your x dimension in your y dimension and if you're using feet and inches which i am here you can actually type in dimensions to make sure that you get the right size so while i have this rectangle that i'm dragging out here i'm going to type in 12 and then the single apostrophe because that's shorthand for feet and then i'm going to do comma 10 and then the single apostrophe and so i'm saying i want 10 feet by 12 feet and i'll hit enter and what you'll see is it makes a rectangle in my dimensions just like that but say you had entered it and you wanted one specific dimension to be the long dimension and the other one to be the short dimension as long as that's the last thing you defined you can enter dimensions again and you can change them so there what i did is i went from 12 comma 10 to 10 comma 12 and i didn't have to click on the object or anything it was the last thing i defined so sketchup automatically resizes it and this is actually what i want because i want it to look just like this drawing that i made with the long axis kind of pushing away from us but so this is cool but it's really just a rectangle and you could have made it in powerpoint so the really powerful thing about sketchup is when you begin modeling three dimensions and here you're going to use push pull pull these are going to give you different methods of extrusion extrusion is just a fancy word for making something 3d so if you just click on the push pull tool and use the one that just looks like a rectangle getting yanked upward you just click on the rectangle that you just made and you start pulling it and again you can pull it and there will be a little tool in the bottom right showing you how long it's being made but assuming you have a dimension like your ceiling height is nine feet then you just enter a nine you enter the single apostrophe and then you hit enter and you now have a block that you can use the measuring tape if you want this block is 12 feet by ten feet by nine feet tall which if we click back real quick to our floor plan okay we have nine foot ceiling height ten feet by twelve feet and we just made a 3d model of the outline of that room in a few clicks so this is obviously a really powerful tool a few quick notes about navigating sketchup if you hold down shift and click the mouse key that is how you get the hands to pop up in windows and if you don't hold down shift and you click the mouse key that's how you get the rotate tool and anytime if you you can scroll in and out by scrolling your mouse sorry i said mouse key it's the scroll key um so the main ways you're gonna get around by navigating are gonna be scrolling in and out with the scroll wheel holding shift to just move around in the plane that you're viewing and then holding the mouse key to scroll around and rotate without holding shift down um the scroll wheel is how you'll get that navigation so um obviously this room is cool but we can't see inside we can't add things to the inside of it and if you're creating a model sometimes you do want to actually place furniture and make sure that stuff fits inside so what you're going to do is grab either like the ceiling and delete it out or grab one of your walls and all you have to do you can also use ctrl z just like pretty much anything in windows to undo your most recent action but whenever you highlight a surface you'll notice it changes appearance so i click on this wall and it gets the uh like speckled blue all over it telling me what i have selected and you can just hit delete and now you can see inside of your holo room and don't worry if you just want to drop stuff in and model it now and then get that wall back later so that it looks like a completed room again the easiest way to do that is you can just take like a line and on any of the lines that border that wall if you draw the line that's already in existence you just draw the line again you're saying okay now close off any object that that may have been closing so you get that wall back so for this tutorial i'm going to delete the ceiling in one wall just so we can see inside the room really easily and we might add those back at the end so that's a useful tidbit now the next thing in our model we had a door on one side and we had a window on the other side so let's go ahead and drop that in and so it's a 32 inch wide door and it's got 80 inch height and what we're going to see actually one dimension that's missing from here that the window has is how far away from the wall it is so since it's just roughly drawn in here i'm going to say like a foot and a half like 18 inches but that would be a dimension to actually measure if it wasn't just a tutorial so when you have an object that's in the middle of the room and actually let's start with the window because i think it's a little bit clearer since we do have that dimension um there are a whole bunch of ways to measure out a distance from a wall but so we have here it is 30 say 42 inches um and then it's three feet wide so in a 10 foot wall that's actually going to be right in the middle and you can see the marks here we have our it's a 36 inch window and that doesn't tell us exactly what it is but because we were given the height and how high off the ground it was separately we can assume that's height so let's say we want to go 42 inches from the wall and we want to be on the face so an important thing when you're drawing a line in sketchup is to try to get it to snap to unless you're in non-right angle space which you're already at more of an advanced model but typically you have a wall or a surface that you're trying to connect to and sketchup is pretty good about snapping to it so in this case i want to draw something just a measuring stick that's 42 inches from this wall when i see that red line and the text pop-up that says on on face i know that i'm on the face so i'm going to go 42 inches from that wall and i'm going to use the double parentheses and it's going to draw in a line for me so we can see there like you don't want this line but you do need to know how far from the wall you are to start modeling the window so i'm going to draw that line in until i get the window in then i'll come back and delete the line out but then this gives us a really useful thing which is this end point because now i can go down from that end point and my mouse is automatically snapping to a right angle from it so you see the dash blue line which is useful because we want to go at a right angle and we want to go four feet off the ground because that's where the window starts so what i just did is i did a four foot vertical measuring stick and a three and a half foot horizontal measuring stick to get the corner at which the window starts so there are a ton of different ways that you can get your starting position this is my typical one is i just use an x position and a y position to get the start and then the end point here it's another rectangle and it's a three foot by three foot window so we're gonna do three foot comma three foot hit enter and now we've got the window in place and so i'm gonna start by clicking inside that rectangle and deleting it but we'll come back in a little bit when we're looking at adding textures and we'll see how we can actually make that glass so it's a solid but it's transparent inside sketchup we'll do that in just a little bit so you can see here we got our window you can see it from both sides which is really useful if you were using three dimensional um walls where obviously a real wall isn't paper thin it's you know four and a half inches minimum you would need to use the extrusion tool as well once you made your rectangle and you would pull it through the surface and that would create a hole through the whole object okay so we've got the window in let's go ahead and add the door and then we'll take a look at adding like texture to the surfaces so it's a 32 inch wide door 80 inches tall and i think we said we'll just go 18 inches off of the edge so again i'm looking for that red line and the on edge so that it snaps into the right place and i'm going to just type in 18 and then the double parenthesis the quotation mark because that's inches and you'll see when you draw a line that's along a line already it doesn't look like it shows up initially but if you start going along that line it's going to snap to and it's going to tell you end point and that means actually that line did draw in and you can still grab it so even though we could do another rectangle for the door i'm gonna do it with three lines just to show how easy that is so we go to the end point which is where the door starts at 18 inches and it we want it to be 80 inches tall so as long as you have the blue line which means it's going up at a 90 degree in in our frame of reference it could be any color depending on what two you used for the floor but i'm going to type in 80 and then the inches and i have the first line and then i'm going to go along the red red axis to go back in towards the corner and i'm going to make it 32 inches and then i'm just going to draw down along the blue line and connect these and what's cool is because we already had the floor we drew our three lines we still have this distinct rectangle which i can go ahead and delete out and now we've made our door as well so in just around 10 minutes we took a two-dimensional floor plan learned a brand new 3d modeling software and made a model of our room so this is great but if you're making 3d models especially of houses and and spaces like interior design an important thing is seeing it as you would actually want to model it so like you would want to see it with a specific floor or a specific color of wall paint um so this brings us to the next really useful thing about sketchup which is um they have a whole bunch of default textures and then if you really get into this you can actually import textures as well for more professional looking renders but they really give you a number of great tools so on the right side toolbar if you have it collapsed like this the textures um are the one that's uh you click materials and it's probably by default it's gonna put you on home which if this is your first model might not have anything but some basic colors but if you click over to the browse it shows you everything that's in here by default and they really do give you a lot of default things so let's say you have a wood floor you might not have a wood floor that looks exactly like this but they give you enough options that you can get the general idea in and if you're a very beginner to modeling getting pretty close is already a great start so let's say we've got this wood planking floor which looks pretty good and then let's go ahead and just do basic colors for two of our walls i'll grab this light pink because it's uh it's in the beginning and you can see you just get a paint can like you're in a paint program and it actually responds to light changes as well you can see while you scroll around by default the light is kind of where the viewer is out here and so as you scroll in and out and turn it around you can kind of see how shifting light hits it as well um changing lighting where it's coming in from is something that you can do but that's definitely uh slightly more advanced so we're not gonna do that now but okay so let's say you also want just to shake it up here let's say um we want to put some wallpaper in there as well do like a fancy featured wallpaper wall you can see you can start mixing textures and really starting to play around with elements of the room so this is something you might actually do in a kitchen you might want to do one little wallpaper section and this is a really great way to test a few different basic designs and see what works so that's that now let's say we want this window because we talked about that before to be glass and see-through so i go ahead and draw just like we talked about i draw in that window i drew a line along one side of it to get to be a solid surface again and now i'm going to go down to the section that says glass and mirrors and you can see you have all these options of glass and so i'm just going to pick like a basic one when they have this two-tone shader that's telling you that it is partly see-through and so you can go ahead and select those and it'll give you a color so it may just look like i changed the color to blue because there's nothing on the other side of it but you can come around and see actually if we're outside the house and looking into the window we can play around with the model and we can actually see inside the room it's just slightly darker because we added glass so there are a few different colors of glass there are a few mirror options so if you're modeling a bathroom you could actually grab like a mirror and it is going to be reflective in sketchup it's just it looks kind of silly on a wall but that's another useful thing to know and they have exteriors as well so if this was let's go ahead and get the ceiling back in here um if let's say this was a room that had two exterior walls um and they were brick let's go ahead and grab a brick and we have the ability to make it like okay well you're in this brick you probably don't have a brick flat roof but for sake of this model you can see it it looks pretty good right there it already looks like an actual room so you can play around with finishes and textures and colors as much as you want and what you can clearly see is you can even make the two sides of an object different textures so inside that room you might have wallpaper and on the outside you might have brick so this is just a really quick introduction to a lot of the tools with sketchup and a lot of the basics of using this 3d modeling platform it is crazy powerful for something that you can get for free and use on the internet they give you a ton of free content and you never have to install anything on your personal computer you can even save the models to an online drive and you own all the content so sketchup's super useful for 3d modeling and this is the first video i've done on this sort of content so if you'd like to see more sketchup tutorials on the channel just let me know about in the comments below be sure to subscribe to the channel to stay up to date on all new content that comes out from the channel and i hope you found this useful let me know with any specifics that you want to see in the future in the comments and i'll be sure to get back to you as soon as i can good luck with your models and thanks for watching thanks bye