Sketchup course. Building a strong foundations

Why this SketchUp course

My name is Manuel Pallarés, I live in Bali, Indonesia, and I have been using SketchUp for over more than ten years. I am a freelance architect and I use to collaborate with diferent architectural firms to model and render their projects.

Futhermore, I have been teaching SketchUp for several years in different creative schools and this course is the resault of that acumulated knowldge. I have experienced face to face the problems that you encounter in the program. They are always the same. So in this course I will try to resolve all of them step by step.

This course is well thought out, carefully planned to teach you exactly what you need to know, without any fluff. In addition to using my own experience with SketchUp, many tutorials require hours of research and experimentation. The result is an easy to follow tutorial to get you modeling quickly and having fun during the process.

SketchUp is a powerful, flexible, affordable, easy to use 3D modeling software.

My goal is to enable you to effortlessly take your ideas and bring them to life in 3D. SketchUp is the best tool for communicating and visualizing ideas, because its simplicity encourages creativity. The tool doesn’t get in the way of the creative process.

If you’ve never used CAD or any other 3D modeling program, you are at an advantage because you will not have habits ingrained from other software. You’ll be able to learn the fundamentals quickly, and you’ll be encouraged by the quick progress you are making. Don’t be intimidated if you’ve tried other complicated CAD software, only to become overwhelmed. SketchUp is one of the easiest 3D modeling programs to get started with, and I will help you learn the basics.

If you’re experienced with CAD, or are looking for an alternative 3D modeling program from what you’re currently using, you’ll find SketchUp to be refreshing. The simple interface does not inhibit your creativity. You will no longer need to conform to complicated tools or procedures. Create whatever you can imagine. SketchUp is 100% accurate, works with nearly any unit of measurement, with precision up to 0.000001″. Enhance SketchUp with thousands of 3rd party extensions, and use LayOut to create construction documents from your SketchUp Pro models.

The free course consists on two different blocks:

• Workspace block. We will start with a presentation of the program, we will see how to install it correctly, we will adjust our preferences as well as the units and we will begin to familiarize ourselves with the workspace. We will learn how to navigate in the three-dimensional environment of Sketchup, how to move using the different views, we will see the selection tools and the keyboard shortcuts that will make our workflow much faster.

• Theory and concepts . We will begin to learn important and slightly more complex concepts such as the difference between lines, surfaces, groups and components within Sketchup. We will also see the importance of inverting faces at specific moments

This second block is specially important because we will learn about the key concepts to understand how to draw correctly in Sketchup in the future. Understanding how the program thinks will help us in a very important way to be able to draw correctly and solve any problem that arises.

In this way we will begin by looking at the two key types of geometry in Sketchup: lines and surfaces. These two types of geometry are the building blocks with which Sketchup builds any element within it. Understanding how they work and how they relate to each other will provide us with the possibility of drawing super fast and in a much simpler way. Knowing at all times why things happen and how to modify them in our favor.

Next we will see the two ways that Sketchup has to group geometry: groups and components. This part is crucial to be able to draw in Sketchup. Each group has things in common and particularities. Being able to intelligently use both at the right times will make our drawing an organized and easily modifiable structure. Likewise, it will allow us to easily interpret and modify other people's models when they fall into our hands.

The third episode will be about the tool: the outliner. It is one of the tools least valued by users and has a great utility. Actually it is a map of the geometry of our drawing. It will allow us to understand the model at a glance and we can also modify it from the Outliner, without having to touch a single line.

The fourth episode deals with a very particular aspect of Sketchup. Reverse faces in Sketchup. In this class we will understand why we should do this and how to prevent it from causing us problems in the future if we want to export our model to a 3D printer or to a rendering program where we can apply textures and lights.

I hope this short course helps to clarify these concepts, which in my opinion are the most important to understand if we want to handle Sketchup with ease and mastery.

A cordial greeting,

Architect

Manuel García Pallarés