tutorial

and we're going to go over groups and components and how to use the outliner

window

to

stay organized in your model

which is really important. I think this is

probably the most important thing to learn

when you're using sketchup.

so groups and components are used whenever you want to isolate

geometry from another part of your model so

you know if you're making anything beyond a simple box

you're going to want to use groups or components

so here you can see this simple birdhouse I created

and I have each part of it separated into either a group or a component

so you can see when i click on

any one of these parts

it selects this entire set of geometry

so you can tell that it's within a group.

You know if none of this was in a group, I would click it and it would just select

the face or

I'd click it and it would just select the edge

and you can open up any group really easily, you just double click.

Now it activates that group and you can see that very easily

with this dotted line

that's around it

and anything that's not

in that group

is kind of like grayed out a little bit which is awesome because you know

exactly what's in the group

and you don't

really get confused with you know all the other parts of your model

when you try to just work on this one part.

so it's a great way to stay organized and it also just keeps things from

sticking to one another.

so a lot of times like

you know if i want to move

this

this roof up, if it wasn't in a group

all of these here would stick to it and it would make it really

hard to

to move around so

it's just a really good way to

uh...

to keep everything in order.

Now the other great thing about sketchup is the outliner window

and i'll pull that up real quick. You just go to window

and outliner

and this

is like

I always keep this window open because this shows me everything

uh... that's in my model

anything that's in a group that's within my model

so typically in sketchup when you create something

it tends to stick to anything else.

I'll just create a couple of boxes here

and if I select this box

and move it over here and snap it

if I then try to move it

it's now stuck to

the other box that I just snapped it to

and you know that might be what you were trying to do but most of the time you

want things to kind of be independent of each other.

Let me show you how to make a group.

All you have to do is

triple click

whatever you want

to select- all of it or you could also drag a selection box

and then you right click

and click make group

and you can see right here in the outliner

it has made

this group and we'll call it box

box A

and then we'll do the same thing over here

we'll make a group

on that one and call it box B

so now if we move

this box

and snap it to

box B

if we wanna move it

it's not stuck to

the other box.

In fact you can actually

you can put it right in the middle here

of the other box and

you know they're both independent of each other

you know these groups do not affect each other as far as they're concerned

the other one doesn't exist

so it's

a great way to isolate

geometry from one another.

so you can see by default it names all these different groups

named group and you can leave it like that but what I like to do

is right click and rename it something that makes sense so

you know I'll name that top

uh... name this front

um...

what's this one here

the bottom

you know can right click rename that bottom

and

these components the wall components

uh... are already named

wall

and I have the back

and so you can see I just kind of click through my outliner

you know it automatically selects the appropriate group or component

inside

the model

just by clicking the name from the outliner

and just to tell you what the difference between a component and a group

is

components

are identical to each other

so this wall on the left side

and the wall on the right side

are the same thing.

so whenever you have something in your model that is going to be

duplicated

and you know that they're going to be identical

you're going to want to use a component

and the reason for that is watch what happens when I

go ahead and

open up this component

and

try to

edit.

Let's say I'm using the push pull tool

to push

this

front out, you can see the other component

is being edited at the same time

so that's a huge time saver

when you are working on you know

things at are identical to each other

uh... throughout your model

so you create it once, you duplicate it as many times as you want and you still

retain the ability to make changes to that component

and it will propagate throughout your model

and all of those components

will change as well.

so here's another great way to use groups

um... you can see we have this tree here and let's say we wanted to put this bird

house

and hang it up on the tree

now

what we would have to do is

select each

part of this birdhouse by holding down control

and clicking all the different components

and then moving it

to the tree

or

what we could do

is

once we build something

and select all the parts that make

make it up

you can right click and make that a group

so you can have groups within a group and you can see over here on the

outliner

we'll just rename this birdhouse

and you can expand and collapse that

you know as much as you want and that's

that's really

great to do you know you really want to try to organize your model as much as

you can.

That way instead of just having a huge list of all the different parts in your model

you can kind of group them together

and

you know make it so it's not a bird and try to

uh...

you know organize and figure out where stuff is

and check this out, so now that we have this all

this birdhouse altogether we just click once

and it selects all of those things that were

in that, that make up that birdhouse

and we can grab the move tool

and come over here

and hang that birdhouse

on the tree

so lets say I make a copy of this birdhouse

keep in mind

each of these bird houses are groups. They're not components.

so you can see right here

the outliner has created a copy

and if I wanted to

edit

one of these bird houses

the other one is not going to change.

Alright so let's say

I am

deleting the roof

for whatever reason I'm deleting the roof

off of that birdhouse.

The other one

hasn't changed at all

so when you create a group it's completely unique to itself

and changes do not

uh... propagate through any other groups that are similar

now on the other hand if we take this group, right click it

and select make component

now

this has become a component you can see

the differentiater

you know it's got four little squares that means it's a component

solid square means it's a group

so now that this is a component we can do the same thing.

Make a copy of it, bring it down

and I'll just pull it out a little bit

now

when I open up this component up here

you can see the changes are being made

down there

okay so if we wanted to delete that

roof

both components

are going to be the same thing and it doesn't matter which one you select

or edit

you know I could take this one

and edit it and it's going to

make the changes to all

components that are

identical

so the decision to use you know either a group or a component is up to you

I personally use groups more often than components because I've had times

where

I've been making stuff that at first I thought I was going to be

you know that I was going to have unique

copies

throughout my model

and I make a component

and then a

couple hours later I go and change one and forget that I have copies of it

somewhere else

and I end up

changing an original component that I

that I didn't intend to.

I tend to stick with the groups

but one trick, I'll show you one more trick

so we have this component here

we'll make a copy of it

and pull it

pull it out

and um... let's say

you know we we put this bird house here and we know it's going to stay there

we can right click it and

click lock

that will protect you from accidentally

you know making changes down here

because watch what happens if you try to edit this

it'll give you a warning and say

some of the selected components are locked

would you like to unlock the components

or leave them locked and make this selected component unique, so this kind

of gives you a warning letting you know hey wait a minute you know you have other

components that match this one if you make changes to it

you're gonna have to unlock the other ones. Are you sure you

want to do that or do you want to make this one unique? So

that's kind of nice you know if you want to get in the habbit of doing that

you can make

once you get something set

you can lock it really easily right-click and lock and then you can also

unlock it very easily