and i created this video for people who are brand new to Sketchup or for those

who have tried it before and are thinking about getting it a second shot

so by the end of this video hope that you'll be able to create your first

model and Sketchup

so this is the welcome screen that you're gonna see when you first open

Sketchup

uh... they've got a couple of links here to

help you get started if you wanna

dig through some of these and usually they have like a featured article

uh... link here

but what you're gonna have to do is choose a templates so you're going to click "Choose Template"

and they have a bunch of preset

templates based on

what you what want to do

i personally like using the "Architectural Design - Feet and Inches"

so it's just click that and start using Sketchup

so this is your interface and by default there's a person

uh... that gets placed a little bit off-center here

and you're gonna probably want to delete her right away

so you click the select tool

and you just

click once to select her

and hit delete on your keyboard

so one thing i recommend for people who are just getting started with Sketchup

is to go to the window

menu and hit instructor

and what that does is it pops up this window

and it'll tell you

what whatever tool that you have currently selected

It will give you a little animation of what it does

and give you some descriptions

on the uh... the different options that you can do with those tools

with some links for advanced operations

with it so

it gives you a lot of

information and it's really great for people just starting out so

I really recommend having that

open

uh... but i'm gonna close it out here just so we have more

viewing area

so let's go ahead and select the rectangle tool

and for now let's just hover your mouse over

the intersection of the axes

you can see there's a yellow dot

that appears

and what that is the Sketchup inference system

uh... snapping

to

the axes

and if you drag your mouse up

it turns red and kind of runs along

that the blue axis

you know as long as you keep your mouse

relatively close to the axis if you go too far out it disappears but

you know when you get into the vicinity of something that

Sketchup can snap to

it's going to snap to it you can see here on the green axis

over here

it snapped to the red axis

so it it does that for you to help you be more precise

when you're modeling

and and it's very helpful it's something that you'll you find you'll use a lot

so let's go ahead back to the origin

and

click once to start the move

than just drag your mouse out

you don't have to hold down your mouse button, you just click once, then let go

that starts the activation of the tool or the execution of the tool

so as you drag your your mouse out look at the bottom corner here you can see

there's a window

that tells you

uh... the dimensions

of whatever you're

currently drawing

the great thing about Sketchup is you can be as precise as you want or you can

be as rough

as you want

so if i want to just right out here...to end the execution of the rectangle, you just

click the left mouse button again

and Sketchup

draws the rectangle for you

and you can see we landed at some arbitrary number

fourteen feet, and thirteen sixteenths of an inch

wide by nine feet four and three quarters

uh... long

or whichever way you want to think of it

but um...

if you wanted to define a specific dimension you can just type it into your

keyboard

uh... either before you finish the action or

uh... right after you finish the action so this case we just finished

the action of creating the rectangle and we can type in let's say

fifteen feet

comma

uh... ten feet

and then press enter

and you can see

that the rectangle

jogged out just a little bit

uh... since we were kinda close

and uh... so now this measurement from here here

is ten feet and this

is fifteen feet

now if you change your mind you can always

you can continue to type in

dimensions and press enter as many times as you want

uh... so like let's say we wanted to go four-feet by

five-feet

press enter it re-sizes

i'm gonna just go back to the fifteen

feet comma ten feet

so you can do that as many times you want

until

you start another action

so if I started another rectangle over here

now if i typed in

uh... some dimensions

it's going to go to that box that i just created not the original one

but that's okay because that's not the only way you can change the size of

uh... a shape

with the move tool you can move anything in sketchup

this rectangle for instance

is made up before edges

four points

you can see we snapped right to these

end points

and

a face

so in the center here

you can see a whole area got shaded

so if we want to move the this edge we just hover over it

until it turns blue

and then we can

click once to activate the move

and

you can see the inference system here

uh...

locking it into the red axis so it's staying parallel

with that red axis

and you can do the same thing with the blue axis

By moving the mouse up-and-down

and the green axis as well

you'll notice how

whatever is selected

does not uh...

change size or proportion

or uh...

everything else that's connected to it

does

so in order for

the selected

object to stay the same shape

and

for everything else to stay connected to it

everything else has to

scale around and move

that's important to remember that things that are touching each other in Sketchup

tend to stick to one another

unless they're isolated on a group or component

now i don't want to get into groups of components too much right now but

they're

probably the the most important concept to understand

in Sketchup

Now notice again how the window down here

tells us how far away we're moving from the origin where we started the move

so we could go along the red axis, click

and

type in four feet

and it'll automatically adjust to four feet from where we started the move

now you can move anything with the

move tool

if we hovered over the face

we could click on it

you can see the whole rectangle moved

and that's because all the edges

are connected to the face

so in order for the face to move the edges have to go with it

but another great feature of the move tool is the ability to make copies

so if we while we have this move activated we can just hit control

and that will tell Sketchup that we want to make a copy

not move the original

so we can just lock to the blue axis

come up here

and click again

and

will define five feet

That will be the the height

that we want that to be at

so the next tool we will us is the line tool

this tool creates edges in Sketchup so we can to start right here at this end point

bring it down to this end point

and you can see that it thinks we wanna keep drawing

but you can just hit escape

on your keyboard

and that'll cancel that out

then will create another one here

and whenever you have more than two

edges

there on the same plane that are connected

Sketchup will automatically creative a face in between those

and we'll create another one back here

you can see the same thing happen

now in order to get to the back of the box we're gonna have to orbit the camera

around

the box

in order to get a better perspective

so these are your camera tools up here

and primarily you'll use the orbit tool

and the zoom tool

to navigate in your model

but instead of clicking these buttons up here just

click and hold

the middle

mouse button

and then drag the mouse you can see how it

orbits the camera around to the other side

and the thing that's really nice about using the mouse button

instead of

clicking actually clicking these tool buttons

let's see

so we have the

line tool selected right now

but say we started

uh... let's go ahead and start this

final line

and let's say we wanted to get

a better perspective

we can actually come out here

click the middle mouse button and you can see changed to the orbit tool

we can orbit around here

and when we let go

the line tool it comes right back to us

uh... ready to uh... to go from where we left off

then we can come down here

and finish the

the line

execution

the other thing you can do is using the scroll wheel on a mouse you can zoom in

and out

so that with conjunction

uh... with the uh... in conjunction with the orbit tool

you can pretty much get

to wherever you want to go

so wherever you point your mouse and scroll

is going to be the center point from where

the zoom

happens

then you can orbit around

and zoom in to any any spot you want

so let's orbit to the underside of this box

grab the select tool

we'll select this face

now grab the move tool

when you pre-select something

and

then you go to the move tool

you don't have to hover over it

or grab one of the edges of whatever you have selected

in order to move it you can actually reference any point

in your model

uh... you can even reference somewhere arbitrary out here but

it's always good to reference