Top 10 Tips for Interior Design Modeling in SketchUp

What's up guys? Justin here with TheSketchupEssentials.com back with another Sketchup Tips video for you. So in this video, I'm going to go through 10 tips that I think are very helpful for interior designers that are modeling using Sketchup. So let's go ahead and just jump into it. So before I get started, I just want to take a second and thank my supporters on Patreon. You guys are what makes it possible for me to expand what I'm doing to afford new extensions and plugins and do new things with the channel. So thank you very much for that. Thank you to my new supporter, Heisenstein. I apologize if I got your name wrong. I appreciate your support. And also to Jim Pell for upgrading the amount of support that you're giving me every month. I really do appreciate that. All right. So tip number one is use groups and components. I know I say this in almost every single tip trick video that I make, but it's just so important. This is like the biggest thing you can do to make your model easy to manage. So using groups allows you to keep faces and everything else are merging with each other. And it also allows you to keep everything organized in the outliner, which we'll talk about in just a minute. So by grouping geometry, so all you would do is you would just create geometry, select it, right click, make it a group, and now none of the faces are going to merge. And it'll also show up in your outliner. So groups is important to keep geometry from merging. Components is important because it allows you to make changes in the future. Like let's say, for example, I've got these three chairs in here and these are all copies of the same component. Well, now if I decide to make a copy or make a change to one of these chairs, like if I give these a back, you can see how all three of those options will change. So that can keep you from having to go back and remodel the same thing three or four different times. So use groups and components in your model. Start grouping everything as soon as you start modeling to make it easier for you in the future. And model credit for this, this is the Contemporary European Red Kitchen with Bar by arca3d.ch. So these are models that I've downloaded from the 3D Warehouse. So tip number two, put geometry heavy furniture objects on their own layer and turn them off when you don't need them. So credit for this model is this is the Adamstown J3 Apartment by Tommy Jean. So a lot of the time when you download a bunch of furniture and other things from a 3D Warehouse, they contain a whole lot of extra faces. They can be pretty big models. And so what you can do in order to keep your model from slowing down is you can put those all on a layer and turn it off when you're not using it. So like for example, I could come into this model and I could take all of my furniture. So my sinks, my washer dryer, my beds, all of that different stuff. And if you wanted to, you could put all of that in a group. But either way, you could take those and you could put those on a layer and call it furniture. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to group these and we'll talk about the outliner in a minute, but we'll call this furniture. And then what we'll do is we'll take that group that has all the furniture in it and I'll create a layer and we'll call it furniture. And then we'll just select the group, put it on the furniture layer, and then you can turn it all on and off with a single click. So when you turn your furniture on and off, what that'll do is that'll mean SketchUp won't have to come in here and render all of those objects, meaning your model will run a lot faster. So that way you can come in here and you can kind of get your views and everything else set up, and then you can turn your furniture back on. So SketchUp's not trying to render all of that stuff while you're moving around. So that can really speed your model up. So tip three, adjust your camera field of view to see more. So a lot of the time when you start getting into interiors, what'll happen is you'll get into a certain view and you won't be able to see very much because the camera's field of view isn't very wide. And so what you can do is you can use the zoom tool to adjust your field of view by holding the shift key and clicking and dragging. And you can see how when I click and drag, I can see more of my object. So you can adjust your field of view in order to see more stuff and get better shots of your interiors. And one thing to note with that, you don't want to adjust your field of view too wide because you start getting distortion. So choose wisely what you're doing with that field of view, but you can use this to get better interior shots in order to be able to see more. And that'll also save with your scene. So when you add a scene, your field of view gets saved with it. So tip number four, use furnishings from the 3D Warehouse. So obviously SketchUp is a great program where you could come in and you could model everything if you wanted to. You could model all of your furniture and everything else, but what you can do instead is you can save a lot of time by just going to the 3D Warehouse, clicking Get Models, and then searching for what you're looking for. So a lot of the time, different manufacturers will have different furniture available, that sort of thing. But by searching for what you're looking for, you can bring in all of this furniture just by clicking on it. So let's say I wanted to bring in this sofa. I would just click Download. I would click Yes to bring this directly into my model, and then I would click to place this object. So you can use this to quickly and easily furnish a building without having to come through and model all of this different stuff. Now, quick note for that, be aware of the size of the model that you're bringing in, because a lot of these models have a whole lot of polygons in them, and they can really slow down your model. So be aware when you're downloading things in your model of how big the model is, and that'll show up over here. So you can see how many polygons is in here, and also your file size. So you can see how these two sofas just by themselves are about 5.3 MB. So just be aware that you can be slowing your model down, and that's partially why the tip I talked about before of putting things on layers is so important. So I could just throw this on the furniture layer, and I can turn that off, so I can work and navigate without having that slowing down my model. All right, so tip five is one of my favorites. Tip five, you can use the outliner in your tray in order to organize your model. Like for example, I had at least two models in here. I had the European red kitchen model, and I've also got this other model in here. And you can see how I can easily get in here, and I can hide one or the other. And I can also use this to kind of organize where things are. Like you can see this couch that I brought in didn't get hidden because it's not in that group. Well, I can just rename that, and then I can drag it inside the apartment group, and now it's hidden. But then when I unhide my model, it's no longer hidden. So you can use this to manage everything from your furniture to different walls with different colors, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So if you use this in order to keep your model organized, then you can save yourself a lot of time in the future. So, and it's best when you're modeling to try to keep everything organized as you go. So don't come back later and try to group everything and put it all together. Just do it as you go. That way you don't have to come back and try to fight with all your geometry and that sort of thing to get it where you need it to be. So, and you can also set these objects on their own layers as well. So like I gave this furniture object a layer of furniture. So you don't just have to do individual objects and faces. You can also put groups on different layers using the outliner. And you don't have to use the outliner to do that, but this is easily the easiest way to come in here and work with this stuff. So tip six is downloading materials from the 3D warehouse. So a great function that got added in SketchUp 2017 is the ability to easily download materials from the 3D warehouse. So in the past, in order to get a material out of a 3D warehouse model, what you'd have to do is you would have to basically download the model into your model and then kind of pull the material that way. Well now what you can do is you can just search for something. Like let's say I look for wood flooring and you can find a bunch of these different wood floors and that sort of thing. And instead of having to bring in this little template, all you need to do is you just need to click on materials and you can just go to download and you can bring that into your model. And you do need to be careful with this because you can see how this is definitely not a seamless texture. So like you can see how this is not tiling very well. Whoever made this didn't set it up so that it would tile quite right. So you do need to be careful that you're actually bringing things in that tile properly so that things look realistic. And usually what you can do is you can look for seamless and then your material type. And even some of the ones that say that they're seamless aren't always seamless. But in this case, this one looks like it is. It looks like it came in here really good. And so you can see how I was easily able to pull this material in here. And you may have to resize them a little bit. So you might have to come into the materials section and edit those so that they look a little bit better. But you can see how easy it is to bring in those materials just by using this new function. Alright, so tip number seven is using styles for your presentation. So a lot of the time you're going to want to present, especially if you're working as an interior designer, you're going to want to present your model in a way that you can kind of explain what you're doing, what things are going to look like. A lot of people use photorealistic rendering software in order to do this. And that's definitely a great way to do that. That takes a lot of customizing and working with the lighting and that sort of thing. Well, sometimes what you can do is you can use SketchUp styles in order to create kind of a presentation view that conveys this without you actually having to go in and create a high level rendering. So what you can do is you can go to the styles section of your tray and pick different styles in order to kind of convey how things look and that sort of thing. So you can adjust the way that your lines look. You can adjust your background. You can adjust all this different stuff. You can adjust your profiles, your lines, your edges, all these different things in order to kind of convey something without having to do it in kind of a photorealistic way. You can also export this view to something like Photoshop to do more work with it, that sort of thing. But you can definitely use these styles to create a presentation without having to export this to a 3D rendering, without having to export this to a rendering software. So tip number eight, purge unused. So when you're working with interiors, you're going to bring a lot of things in from the 3D warehouse. And a lot of the time they bring a lot of unused junk along with them. So like leftover textures, those can really fill up your model pretty quick. Or a lot of unused layers or groups, a lot of stuff that had geometry in it originally that no longer does. And so what you can do is you can go up to window, model info, statistics. And what you can do is you can click purge unused to get rid of a bunch of that extra stuff. So if you have like textures that you're no longer using, that sort of thing, if you click purge unused, then all that stuff will get removed from your model. So nothing that gets deleted out of this model is anything that you're using anyway. So it's literally you just getting rid of a bunch of stuff that's slowing down your model for no reason. So and you're going to want to make sure you have this box for show nested components checked. You know, so you can actually see all of this, all the faces and everything else that's actually inside groups and components, but you're just going to click this purge unused. And it'll delete out a lot of this stuff like some component definitions got deleted, I think some materials got deleted. But when you have a whole lot of stuff in the 3d warehouse, you're going to want to make sure that you do this. Otherwise, your models can get really slow, really cumbersome, really fast. Alright, so tip nine is grouping objects by their color or by their material. So a lot of the time what you're going to want to do when you're working with an interior model is you're going to want to be able to change colors and look at a bunch of different options really quickly. Well, the way that you can do this is, or one way that you can do this is a lot of the time you know that there's going to be different walls that are going to be a certain color. Like for example, I might want this wall to be kind of an accent color, but I might know that this wall, this wall and this wall are going to be a different color. And so what I could do is I could take these walls and I could double click on them to select them. I could put them all in a group and I could name this main walls. And then I could group this object and I could call it accent wall. So what you can do is you can come inside this group of your main walls. You can just double click on that and then you can just select all your walls by doing a control A and you can color those up really easily. So then I could double click on my accent wall and I could give that a different color. And I realized for all the interior designers out there, I'm not necessarily a color guy, but I mean, this is a principle that you can use in order to group everything so that you can color things up really easily. And you can see how this wall here didn't get added to that group. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to right click and I'm going to group that. You can see that added a group and I'm just going to drag it inside accent wall and then I'm going to explode it. So now all of that geometry is inside accent wall and I could color it up really quickly and easily. So if you manage everything using groups and components or if you manage everything in your outliner properly, then it makes it really easy for you to come in and make changes. So, so much of working in SketchUp is just kind of planning ahead so that you can make quick changes. And again, I apologize for my color selections. So then the last tip I want to talk about is using scenes to save your views. So a lot of the time what's going to happen is you're going to have a whole bunch of different views that you want to be able to see and you want to be able to save them and go back to them really quickly, really easily. So in this case, I'm going to go back to my apartment and I'm probably going to want a series of different views. I'm probably going to want one in this living room where I'm kind of looking at this bookcase. I'm probably going to want another one up here. That's kind of my working view. So a view that I'm using in order to, in order to actually work on this model. So what I can do is I can go to view animation and I can click add scene. And as soon as I add a scene, it's going to save my current view to that scene. So in this case, no matter where I navigate, if I want to go back to my working view, I can click on that scene and you can adjust the names of these by going to the scene section of your tray. And like, let's say I have a second, let's say I have a second view where I'm looking towards this bookcase and I'm going to adjust my eye height a little bit and click and drag. So let's say I have a scene right here where I'm looking this way and I want to save that as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click. I'm going to click add scene. Well, now I have two scenes in here. I have scene one and scene two, and you can see how they show up in my scene manager. And so what I can call this one is I can call this one living room standing, and then I can go to scene number one and I can call that working view. So now I can adjust between the two of them really quickly. So let's say I wanted another one in my living room where I was looking the other direction. So let's say I was looking into this kind of weird little kitchen. I would just click and drag this way. I'm going to set my eye height and I'm setting my eye height by just typing in a height and hitting enter by the way. And then I'm just going to right click and I'm going to add a scene. So I can take that scene and I could call that living room standing towards kitchen or whatever you want to name that. You may not want to name them something quite that long if you have a bunch of these. But you can see how now I'm able to save these. And like for example, if I was to adjust my field of view so that it was a little bit tighter by holding the shift key and clicking and dragging with the zoom tool like we talked about before, I could just right click and I could update this view. And so now it updates that view with my new field of view. So you can see how that's the same. So you can save field of views, you can save styles, you can save a whole bunch of different stuff by working with these. Leave a comment below and let me know what you thought. Did I leave anything off the list that you would like to see here? I just love having that SketchUp conversation with you guys. If you like this video, please remember to click that like button down below. If you're new around here, remember to click that subscribe button for new SketchUp content every week. If you like what I'm doing on this channel, please consider supporting me on Patreon. My supporters on Patreon are what make it possible for me to buy new extensions and make new videos and do new things on the channel. So if you're interested in that, please make sure you check out that link below. But in any case, thank you so much for taking the time to watch this. I really appreciate it, and I will catch you in the next video. Thanks, guys.