Learning SketchUp

Sat, Mar 10, 2018

I’ve mentioned SketchUp a few times. This is a free CAD software (Computer Assisted Drawing) that has become very popular in the DIY space for lots of things from building parts (that can be 3D printed) to furniture design to professionals using it develop construction documents. I’ve found it to be extremely user friendly and there are a lot of really good resources out there for getting started. But I was running into a major challenge. Lots of the resources were ‘how to get started’ and very few resources were going into depth of how a professional would use SketchUp to model a residential home for construction documentation.

I knew that part of the equation involved using Layout. It seemed that the expected workflow is you would develop a 3D model of the home in SketchUp, and then somehow export that to Layout to produce your 2D blueprints. Layout was part of the Professional version of SketchUp, so I did not have a whole lot of visibility into how this part of the process worked. Layout is included in your free trial of SketchUp (you get Pro free for 30 days), but my trial had long since expired.

This article is not going to be a how-to, but instead I will tell you that it is possible to generate professional-looking construction documentation with SketchUp/Layout, and I will share the resources I used to learn how to do so.

If you’ve already spent some time in this area, you’ve probably heard of Nick Sonder. He is a professional architect who now uses SketchUp/Layout to produce his documents. He has a great set of Youtube videos that walk through his process. He’ll help you move to the next level. It looks like the videos were produced with some kind of collaboration with SketchUp, so they are actually on the SketchUp channel. Here is the first one to get you started. There are four in the series. I must have watched these a dozen times each.

Nick has his own book, which I was going to pick up, but my local library, had a copy of The SketchUp Workflow for Architecture: Modeling Buildings, Visualizing Design, and Creating Construction Documents with SketchUp Pro and LayOut instead, so I checked out a copy of that. This book got me to where I needed to be, but from reading the descriptions, both seem pretty comparable. I would get whichever is more accessible to you.

I read the book cover to cover and I recommend you do the same. At times it will feel like you’re reading about something you wont need, but more often than not, those ended up being things I needed later. You just don’t know what you will need later on.

And finally, Justin at The SketchUp Essentials, was a huge help in piecing everything together. Nick’s videos move pretty quick and I found Justin’s videos to compliment a lot of the topics really well. Justin focuses in on one topic and really gives you the step-by-step how-to.

As far as applying what I was learning, I just kept building and rebuilding the cabin model. I went through about 4 rewrites before I really had it down and had things organized just right. I recommend reading the book while you’re building a model, but be prepared to throw everything away and start over once you learn more. Refactoring the model is possible, but I found I wasn’t able to do this very well until I was doing a lot of the fundamentals the right way. Early mistakes in organizing the geometry would make it almost impossible to refactor later. However, I am now able to refactor a model rather easily.

Becoming fluent in SketchUp took a few weeks of pretty intense study, but its been well-worth it. Not only were we able to generate our own construction documents (you’ll need PRO to do so), but I’ve been able to use it to design various wood-working projects too. If you are a DIY’er, its a really good tool to have.

As far as purchasing the PRO version, I delayed this for as long as possible. I had a solid 3D model that was ready for 2D slicing, and confidence that I could do so, before I pulled the trigger and spent the money on PRO.

Looking back, the choice to do design the house completely on our own has been the most important to me. We’ve continued to make modifications to the design, mostly minor, during the months leading up to submitting for a permit, and if we had to rely on a professional designer, these may have been too costly (in terms of time or money) to do, and likely would have led to regrets later. If someone else was designing the house, I don’t think it’d feel as much ours as it does now.

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