Hey guys, Alex here from SketchUp School. Today, I'm going to show you how to model a house using SketchUp Free in 10 easy steps. We'll build this model from start to finish.
And when we're done, you'll have learned the essential steps that you can follow to build any project you have in mind using SketchUp Free. Plus, I'll share with you some critical tips along the way to help you avoid the biggest, most frustrating mistakes that often trip people up as they set off to model their own projects. Just know that this video isn't for complete beginners who've never used SketchUp Free before.
You'll want to at least be familiar with the fundamental drawing tools and features in SketchUp Free, and be sure that you've practiced using those tools the correct way. So if you haven't already, I recommend you watch our Getting Started with SketchUp Free video first to make sure you're comfortable with all the concepts we cover there. Oh, and I almost forgot!
This is going to be like one of those cooking shows, where if we've already covered how to do something, or there's a part of a step that may take us a while to complete, we may cut ahead to the end result or show you the process and fast forward. But I'll be sure to let you know when we're doing that, so it doesn't just seem like stuff is magically happening in SketchUp. Alright, let's bring up the 10 easy steps and jump right in with… Number 1. Draw accurate walls To begin, we'll go to app.sketchup.com to launch SketchUp Free and create a new file.
I'll pick the Feet and Inches template. Next, we can delete the scale figure, and as you'll remember from our Getting Started with SketchUp Free video, I always recommend starting from a top-down view from the scenes panel. Perfect! Now we've got a blank canvas and we're ready to model our house. Our first step will be to create our walls.
Now SketchUp is designed to be fast and flexible, allowing you to draw geometry in any shape and size with ease. But it can also be dead accurate when you need it to be. That's because whenever you draw or edit, you can always specify exact measurements.
Remember, when we created our new file, we selected feet and inches. If you need to check or adjust the unit of measurements you're using in your file, just open the Model Info panel, and under Length Units, you'll see the unit of measurement being used. Here, we've got fractional inches with a precision of 1 16th of an inch, but you're welcome to use whatever works best for you. Okay, I know we're going through some of these items pretty fast, but don't worry.
I've gone ahead and created a set of notes that will make it easy for you to review everything we're covering in this video, and to follow along with when you work on your own projects later. You'll find a link to download them in the cards. Now, let's create a shape that will serve as the basis for our walls.
We'll start by selecting the Line tool. Then, let's click and let go of the left mouse button and move the cursor to start drawing a line. You'll see SketchUp automatically infers that we're drawing this line along the same direction as the red axis. Now, Over on our keyboard, we can type in the dimension 20 feet and hit enter or return. When you do that, SketchUp creates a line that's precisely 20 feet long.
Next, let's start another line perpendicular to this one. You'll see SketchUp again automatically infer the direction we're drawing in, along the green axis this time. We can type 15 feet on the keyboard and again hit enter or return to create a line that's 15 feet long. Okay. Let's continue with the Line tool to complete the footprint of the house, which for our example will just be a 20 foot by 15 foot rectangle.
But you can use the Line tool to create any shape you need for your own project. Of course, we could have drawn the same footprint using the Rectangle tool. To do that, select the Rectangle tool, click once to begin drawing the rectangle, then use a comma to separate the two dimensions.
So 20 feet comma 15 feet, followed by enter or return on the keyboard. Keep in mind I'm using feet and inches in this file, but if you're using metric units, you'd enter meters, centimeters, or millimeters instead. And also, know that you can enter decimals or fractions here if you need them.
Even though the dimension area in SketchUp looks like a text field where you would click on it and then type, you don't want to ever do this. Clicking will inevitably mess up the tool operation you're trying to do, which can be super frustrating. The right way to enter a dimension is to simply click to start the tool operation, move your mouse in the direction you want to draw or edit in, then type the dimension on your keyboard and hit enter or return to complete the action.
And remember, SketchUp draws everything at a 1 to 1 scale. So if you've drawn a rectangle and entered the correct dimensions, but it looks too small, or the opposite happens and you can't see the whole thing, you just need to adjust your view by zooming and panning in the SketchUp drawing window. Alright, we've created a dimensionally accurate rectangle. Now let's use that to create our walls. To do that, let's select the Offset tool.
Then, we'll click once on the face of the rectangle and move the mouse to begin offsetting all four edges. Here, we'll want to move our cursor so the edges are offsetting inside our rectangle, so the exterior dimensions of our walls remain 20 feet by 15 feet. Then, we can enter the dimension for the thickness of the walls.
In our example, we'll just type 6 inches and press enter. Next, let's right-click on the middle face and pick the option for Erase. Alright, we're off to a great start and we've created the profile we'll need to make our 3D walls.
Let's orbit the model so we're in more of a bird's eye 3D view. Next, let's select the Push-Pull tool and then hover our mouse over the face. It will actively highlight, then click and let go, and move the mouse up in the blue axis direction to begin extruding the walls up in 3D. Again, we'll want the height of our walls to be dimensionally accurate.
So let's go ahead and type in 10 feet and press Enter or Return to finish the push-pull action. Alright, we've created dimensionally accurate walls for our house. Before we get too much further, let's be sure to save our file.
To do that, we'll just click on the Save button on the top left, then click on the Project folder, name it, and click Save. What's next? Perhaps the most important step of this whole video!
Number 2. Group early and often. As we covered in our Getting Started with SketchUp Free video, hands down one of the biggest and most costly mistakes that SketchUp users make is failing to use groups. In other words, they model away not realizing that everything they're drawing is getting stuck together.
And later, when they need to make changes, they end up with a tangled, uneditable mess. As we like to say, Group early and group often. Your future self will definitely thank you. Thanks.
So to protect something we draw, such as these walls, from getting stuck to other stuff, we need to turn it into a group. To do that, first let's pick the Select tool. Then we'll triple click on the walls to select them all. Then right click on that selection and pick the option for Make Group. Now anything we draw that touches the walls won't get stuck to them.
Practicing what we've learned so far, the next thing we'll want to do is create the floor and the roof. For the floor, let's orbit underneath the walls, then pick the Rectangle tool, and draw a rectangle from one corner of the walls to the opposite corner. Then we'll pick the Push-Pull tool and click on the face of the rectangle and begin to pull it down a bit, and on our keyboard type 4 inches and press Enter or Return.
Next, let's switch to the Select tool. and triple click on the floor to select the whole thing. Notice that we didn't select the walls.
They're protected by being a group. And we'll right click and make the floor a group as well. We'll follow the same process for creating the roof. It'll be easiest to make it flat now, and then we can come back and give it a slope later.
So we'll orbit to get a better view, then draw a rectangle, and use the push-pull tool to give it some thickness. This time we'll set it to 8 inches. Then let's also give our roof an overhang by using the push-pull tool again.
we'll say two feet, and press enter or return to complete the action. Again, let's not forget the most important step here and make the roof into a group. Okay, now that we have our floor, walls, and roof, we're ready to move on to step number three, edit groups to add detail. The next thing we'll want to do for our house model is start to add in more detail, such as window and door openings. As you know, the groups we've created are protected from getting stuck to one another, but they're also protected from us being able to edit them.
See how SketchUp won't let us push-pull any of the faces inside the groups? So how do we edit something we've already grouped? We'll need to enter Edit Group mode. Here's how.
First, let's orbit to get a good view for what we're trying to work on. In this case, we're going to add window and door openings to our walls group. Next, we'll right-click on the walls group and pick the option for Edit Group. Now we're inside the group container and are able to edit the geometry of the walls directly. In order to create our openings for the doors and windows, we first need to figure out exactly where they need to go.
To do that, I recommend using the Tape Measure tool to create guidelines. Let's set some up for a folding glass door. We'll pick the Tape Measure tool, then click and let go on the vertical edge of the right corner of the wall. Then we'll move our mouse to the left in the red direction to pull a guideline out from the edge of the wall.
We'll want our guideline to be three feet from the outside edge of the wall, so we'll type three feet and press Enter or Return on our keyboard, and the guideline will be placed 3 feet from the edge. Next, let's repeat those steps to create a guideline 3 feet from the left edge. Finally, we'll create a guideline for the height of the opening. Using the Tape Measure tool again, we'll click once and let go, this time from the bottom edge, and move our mouse up in the blue direction.
Then, we'll type in 8 feet, press Enter or Return on our keyboard, and the guideline will be placed 8 feet from the bottom edge. Now that we've created accurate guidelines for where the opening will go, We can use the rectangle and push-pull tools to quickly create it. First, let's pick the Rectangle tool.
Then draw a rectangle from the top left intersection where the guidelines meet to the bottom right intersection where the vertical guideline meets the bottom edge. This rectangle will be the shape of our opening. Next, let's pick Push-Pull.
Then we'll click once and let go on the face of the rectangle we just drew and push-pull towards the backside of the walls. We're looking for a blue inference dot that says On Face and may also notice that the white face flickers with blue splotches. When we have this On Face inference showing, We can click again to finish the push-pull, and SketchUp automatically punches out an opening.
That's because when we push-pull one face to another face, the two faces cancel each other out, making it easy to carve away or punch out openings. Let's repeat the same process to create the opening for the window on the side of the house. We'll start by orbiting to get a better view. We should still be in Edit Group mode for the walls group.
We can tell if we see the dotted bounding box around our walls. Again, we'll use the Tape Measure tool to create guidelines for our window opening. Let's set these 3 feet from each side, and the bottom of the window 3 feet from the floor.
Then let's create another guideline from that bottom guide, which we can set to 5 feet for the height of the window opening. And again, once the guidelines are in place, we can draw a rectangle, then use the push-pull tool to punch out the window opening. Great! Now that we're done editing our walls group, we'll want to exit Edit Group mode. To do that, let's hover our cursor in the space away from the group, right-click, and pick the option for Close Group.
Now, Now, to clean our view up, since we no longer need these guidelines, let's open the Display panel on the right and select Delete All Guides. Alright, we've got the basic shape of our house drawn accurately, and everything is safely grouped. We're ready for the next step.
Number 4. Stay organized with tags. As we create more detailed models in SketchUp, we'll end up with a lot of groups. And while groups won't get stuck together, sometimes they can get in the way of each other, making it hard for us to see or edit the part of the model we're trying to work on. Fortunately, we can use the Tags feature in SketchUp to turn the visibility of a group on and off.
Not only can this be helpful when we're working on our model and need to hide something in our way, but it's also useful later for controlling what options we want to see in our final model or presentation. So now that we have a few groups in our model, let's create and assign some tags to stay organized and make it easier to edit what we need to as we continue on. Let's start with the roof. First, let's open the Tags panel on the right side of the screen.
and click on the plus symbol to create a new tag. Then, double-click the tag name and rename it Roof. And on our keyboard, press Enter or Return to finish creating the tag.
Next, we'll need to assign that tag to a group. To do that, let's right-click on the Roof group and pick the option for Entity Info. In the Entity Info dialog box, we'll see that the current tag is Untagged.
We can click on Untagged and then select the Roof tag we just created. And now we've assigned that tag to the group. Now in the tags panel, we can click on the eye icon to the left of the roof tag to toggle on and off the visibility of that tag. Okay, let's repeat these same steps to create and assign tags to the walls group and the floor group. Great!
Now our model is organized and ready for the next step. Number five, use components. So far, everything we've created, we've turned into a group. But now let's talk about something called a component in SketchUp.
They work a lot like groups, but components have some extra functionality that can really come in handy, especially when it comes to things we plan to use more than once in our model. Let's take a look at what I mean by that by using a metal roof as an example. For a 3D representation of a metal roof, we'll want evenly spaced ribs running the length of the roof. To create those, we'll start by orbiting to a view above the roof and looking down on it. Next, we'll use the Rectangle tool and start by clicking on the outside corner endpoint, then drawing across to the other side, then type 2.5 inches comma 17 feet and press Enter or Return to create a skinny rectangle.
Then we'll use Push-Pull. to pull it up three quarters of an inch. Now, before we go any further, we want to protect this from getting stuck to anything we do next.
Based on what we've learned so far, your instinct might be to turn it into a group so it won't get stuck to anything. However, in this case, we're going to turn this roof rib into a component instead. And we'll talk about why in a minute. To make a component, let's follow the same process as making a group. Using the select tool, we can triple click on the rib to select it all.
Then right-click on that selection, only this time let's pick the option for Make Component. Then we can name the component and click OK. No need to worry about the other options.
Let's also take a second now to create a tag for our ribs. Okay, we're going to want a number of ribs evenly spaced out across our roof, but we don't have to draw them all individually. Let's talk about another trick instead. We can use the Move tool to create our copies.
So, we'll start by picking the Move tool, tap the Option key on your keyboard if you're on a Mac, or the Control key if you're on a PC, and notice that a plus symbol appears next to the Move tool cursor. This lets us know we've turned on the Copy function. Now, any object we click to move will create a copy of that object instead of moving it. Let's move a copy of the rib to the other side of the roof by hovering over the inside bottom corner point of the rib. We'll click and let go on that point, then move the cursor onto the far corner of the roof, then click and let go to set the copy in place.
But wait! If you're following along at home, take your hands off your mouse and keyboard and don't do anything else yet. We just moved a single copy of the rib.
But here's the trick. As soon as we move a copy, we have the ability to tell SketchUp that we want multiple copies instead. For example...
We can type 5 and the forward slash key and then press enter or return and we will end up creating five copies of the rib. Notice that there are six ribs. The first one is the original and the other five are the copies.
What we've just done is called a divide array. That means that we moved one copy the total distance and then told SketchUp to divide that distance equally for the five copies. But the best part is we don't have to get it right on the first try.
We can type 15 forward slash and hit enter or return. And now we've got 15 equally spaced copies, or 16 total ribs, including the original. And we can keep making changes until we move on or click to begin another task in SketchUp. Pretty cool, right?
If you like that little trick, make sure to give this video a like! Alright, we now have multiple copies of our roof rib, and remember how earlier I mentioned that components can really come in handy if we have multiple copies in our model? Well now I can show you what I mean. Let's say that we've done all this work.
But now we decide that the roof ribs would look better if we added some detail. With a component, we can right-click on a rib, it doesn't matter which one, and pick the option for Edit Component. Then, using the Move tool, we can click on the top edge and move it in, in the red direction, and type of an inch, and press Return or Enter. Then, we can do the same thing with the other top edge, moving it in of an inch. Notice that when you edit one component, all of the others are edited too.
This is a huge time saver! Okay, we're done editing our roof rib component. Let's right-click outside of the bounding box and pick the option for close component. Now, we're ready for the next step.
Number six, use nested groups and components. So far, we've covered making individual groups and individual components. But there might be times where you'll want to treat a collection of groups and or components as a unified object. For example, what if we want to rotate the roof and the ribs together as one object so that we can give the roof a slope? In that case, we can actually select more than one group or component and turn the entire selection into its own group or component.
Let's try it. Using the Select tool, let's click and drag a selection window around the roof and roof rib components. We just need to be careful not to select the walls group or the floor group.
Then, let's right-click on the selection and pick the option for Make Group. Now, this is one big group that we can think of as a parent group. Inside it are what we call nested groups and components. This can feel a little confusing at first, but one way to think about it is that groups or components are like containers for our geometry. We started out making some endpoints, edges, and faces in the shape of a roof, which we put into a roof group container.
Then we made a few more endpoints, edges, and faces in the shape of a roof rib and put those into a rib component container. Then we made a bunch of copies of that roof rib component container, and finally we took the roof group container and all of the roof rib component containers, and we put all of them inside a bigger parent group container. And now that we've got everything grouped in a parent container, we're ready to rotate the roof to give it a slope. To do that, let's pick the rotate tool.
Then hover the mouse over the bottom back corner of the roof. We can always zoom in or orbit if we need a better view. For this rotation, we'll want to rotate the cursor to be active in the red direction.
If it's flip-flopping around in the green or blue directions, We can try making a subtle move with the cursor, or even orbit a tiny bit, and then hover again until we get the red direction cursor. Once we do, click and let go. That sets our cursor down and creates the central pivot point for our rotation. Now we have two more clicks to use the rotate tool correctly. First, we'll need to select the initial leg of rotation, meaning the plane that we'll be rotating anchored on the central pivot point we've just set.
So we can move the mouse onto the horizontal roof edge and click anywhere along that edge. Then, move the mouse up to begin rotating the roof and ribs up, and we'll see that the roof rotates up and around the pivot point. In the bottom right of the browser window, notice that the measurements box is showing us the degrees of rotation. And remember, SketchUp can be dead accurate when we need it to be. Let's set our roof with a 212 pitch, or 9.5 degrees.
Type 9.5 and press Enter or Return. The rotation will be set at exactly 9.5 degrees. Alright, now we've set the pitch of our parent roof group.
But of course, now we'll see we've created a gap where the walls meet the roof. Let's talk about how to fix that with the next step. Number 7. Learn to edit existing 3D shapes.
So far, we've created the exact shapes we need, then turned them into groups or components. But in the real world, there are design changes and edits that need to be made along the way. This can get tricky the further we get into a model, as it can be harder to imagine how to best make the changes to the existing geometry. For example, we need to edit our walls so that they support the pitched roof. Of course, you'll run into any number of situations where you'll need to make edits that look different than this one.
But let's talk about how to approach this specific example using techniques you can apply to most situations. First and foremost, Remember that we'll need to be in Edit Group or Edit Component mode in order to make changes to the endpoints, edges, and faces contained in any group or component. And sometimes, as we discussed in the previous step, we may need to edit groups or components nested within other groups or components.
In those cases, we'll just need to continue to right-click and select Edit Group or Component as many times as needed until we're at the level of the underlying geometry. For our example, however, we'll only need to right-click and pick Edit Group once to be at the geometry level of the walls. Next, we'll need to consider what combination of tools will be most effective for what we're trying to do.
When you're new to SketchUp, you won't have the experience to know what the best approach for a given situation might be. But practice makes perfect, so your best bet is to just experiment and see what works. Remember, if you try one thing and end up getting stuck, you can always use the undo arrow as many times as you need to get back and experiment with a different approach.
Of course, there are also a number of ways to accomplish what we're trying to do, and there isn't necessarily a right or best way, but let's talk about one good way to approach this problem. First, let's orbit to the side of the house and pick the line tool. Then, let's start by drawing the triangle profile for the missing piece of the side wall.
We already have the top edge of the wall, which will be the bottom edge of the triangle. Using SketchUp's inferences to be sure our lines are snapping to the correct points, we can draw in the other two edges of the triangle. And when the triangle is complete, the face will automatically fill in. Now we can begin to push-pull that new face to the same thickness as the walls. Then we can orbit around to get a better view, and again use SketchUp's inferences to be sure we're extruding the triangle to the same thickness as the wall, and click again to complete the push-pull.
Then we can repeat the same process on the opposite wall. Now for the front wall piece, if we just push pull the top of the wall up, the top of the wall won't be angled correctly along the bottom of the roof. Instead, let's orbit so we can see the inside of the triangle shape and the top of the front wall.
Then, let's draw a line from the top inside corner of the wall, up along the blue axis, to the top edge of the triangle. SketchUp will split that triangle into two pieces. And now we can push pull that piece above the front wall all the way across the house to the other wall.
All right. Almost done! The final step is to erase the extra edges we don't need.
We can do that using the eraser tool. It's looking good! Now we can right-click outside the group and pick Close Group. Before moving on to our next major step, you can continue to edit the groups and components we've made using the same techniques we've covered to clean up any overlapping geometry or extra lines. Then we're ready for the next step.
Number 8. Use pre-made components from the 3D Warehouse When it comes time to add objects to your models, know that you don't have to model everything yourself. SketchUp Free comes with access to the 3D Warehouse, which is a vast library of components made by other people that are free to use in your projects. The 3D Warehouse makes it easy to find models of all kinds of different objects, from furniture to plants, appliances, you name it.
And many of them are made to the exact product specifications by product manufacturers themselves. Using these 3D components can save you a ton of time and can make your models look great. Let's learn and practice how to use the 3D warehouse on our example project. To access the 3D warehouse, click on the 3D warehouse icon on the right side of the screen. This will open a new window where we can browse by clicking on thumbnails for featured content or search for something more specific.
For our house, let's search for window in the search box and press the return key. The results are divided into categories. So above all the thumbnails we see products, models, collections, and catalogs. Products are components that are accurate representations of real-world products and have been verified by the company that makes the product.
Models are any other type of component. Note that many models can be extremely accurate representations of products, but if they haven't been made and verified by the company itself, they'll still fall under the Models category. Collections are like folders of models.
Any SketchUp user can save collections, like folders of their favorite models, to make it easier to access them later. Often, a good way to find nice models is looking at collections saved by other users. And lastly, catalogs are like collections, only they contain products instead of models. At this point, we could download any window we like, and it would be imported directly into our project.
But to make things easier for the purposes of this example, we've gone ahead and created an entire collection of components suited to our house example, including a window. To find it, type SketchUp School in the search box and press Return. Then, we can click on the Collections tab and click on the How to Model a House in SketchUp Free thumbnail. There, we'll see the window component.
Then we can click on the download icon in the lower right to download the window into our model. When we download something from the 3D warehouse, it comes into our project attached to the Move Tool cursor. Now let's hover over the bottom edge of the window opening and click on it to set the window down. Don't worry if it's not oriented properly yet. Now take note, when we click to set the window down on the bottom of the opening, this was intentional.
Our first click should be to set a component in a logical place relative to where it eventually needs to go. For something sitting on the floor, we would click to set it on the floor. In this case, the window is sitting on the opening, so that's where we set it down. Next, we'll need to rotate the window component to face the right way, in this case 90 degrees. Even though we're going to rotate and move it, we can actually do all of that with the move tool.
To do that, if we hover over the top of the window, four red plus symbols appear. Let's hover over one of the red pluses, it doesn't matter which one, and the cursor will turn into a compass or rotate icon. Once we see that, we can click and let go on that red plus, then move the mouse to begin rotating the window about its center point.
We can hover over the tick marks on the tool icon to rotate in 15 degree increments until we get to 90 degrees. Then, click and let go to end the rotation. Next, we'll move the window into the exact spot where it needs to sit. To do that, we need to be intentional about the point we click on the window so that we can then move that point onto a particular point in the opening. For this example, it's best to click on the...
bottom corner endpoint of the window and then move the cursor onto the bottom corner endpoint of the opening and click to finish moving the window to that exact point. Great! Now we can repeat the same steps to add the folding door.
So we'll open the 3D Warehouse, then find the folding door in the How to Model a House in SketchUp free collection, then download it, and finally we'll use the Move tool, being careful to click on exact points to move it into place. And as you probably saw from the collection, we've included all sorts of things for you to add to both the interior and exterior of the house. So now would be a great time to practice what you've learned and add various components to your model.
If you can't find something, or you have a question, or you just want to say hi, let us know in the comments below. Alright, there's one thing we should talk about related to using components from the 3D Warehouse. Sometimes you'll download something and it just won't work. The scale might be way off, or something about it isn't built in the way you'd like. Often, the best bet might be to just delete it and then go look for something else that will work.
On the other hand, if it's looking pretty good but just needs to be slightly altered to fit your design, it is possible to edit components that you download from the 3D Warehouse, just as if you'd made them yourself. Just know that depending on what we're trying to edit, the level of difficulty can range from fairly straightforward to quite difficult. Especially if whoever made the model didn't group their geometry.
Alright, there's one last piece to this step. And that's for us to remember that it's always a good idea to create tags for these components as we go. Of course, there's no right or wrong way to tag things, but we could, for instance, create a tag to assign all our furniture and fixtures to. That way it would be easy to toggle those on or off for different views that we might need.
Okay, now that we've added all these objects from the 3D warehouse, let's talk about the next step. Number nine, add colors and materials. As we've been adding components, you've probably noticed that they already have colors and materials applied to them.
But now, let's talk about how to add colors and materials to the elements we're creating ourselves. To do that, let's right-click on the Walls group and pick the option for Edit Group. Then, let's pick the Paint Bucket tool. Then we can click on the Browse icon in the panel on the right and pick Colors. Next, scroll down the list of color swatches and click on one to fill our paint bucket with that color.
Then, we can move the mouse onto the face of the wall and click to paint that color on that face. And what about materials like a wood floor? We can right-click outside the walls group and pick the option for Closed Group.
Then, right-click on the floor and pick Edit Group. Let's scroll down the list of color swatches on the right until we can see the other categories at the very bottom. Click on the Wood category to reveal a few wood material swatches.
Click on one of them to fill the paint bucket with that material, then move the cursor onto the face of the floor and click on it to paint that material onto the floor. That's right! Just like flat colors, we can paint materials onto any face in our model.
That's because the material swatches are actually actually images of real-world materials that are designed to tile or repeat across any face we paint. Okay, a couple of things to note here. First, the materials that are available in SketchUp Free are low resolution, so they may look a little blurry, especially when we zoom in close.
If you want to import higher quality materials, you can do that by going to the top menu and clicking Import. From there, select the file for the material you'd like to bring into SketchUp, and then select Material. You'll see the image attached to the Paint Bucket tool. Click to add it to the desired face and you'll see that you can then scale the material to whatever size you desire.
Click again and SketchUp will place the material and automatically tile it. Inserting your own images in this way can be great for things like rugs or artwork, as well as nicer materials than you'll get out of the box in SketchUp Free. I've made sure to add links to some of my favorite materials resources in the notes for this video. And the other minor thing to note...
If you want to customize the colors you specify, for example, picking an exact paint color rather than one of the default swatches, that's only available if you upgrade to the desktop version of SketchUp Pro. Okay, now that you know how to add colors and materials, this is a great time for you to practice what you've learned by repeating these steps and adding colors and materials to the rest of the house. Just remember that you need to get in and out of Edit Group or Component Mode to paint the individual faces.
Alright, Once we've got all our colors and materials set, we're ready for the last step. Number 10, create a final rendering. We've done a great job putting together our first house in SketchUp free. Now, it's time to show it off by creating a final image.
First, we'll want to navigate to find a nice view of the model. Then, we can try out some of SketchUp's predefined styles to see if we like any of them. To do that, let's click on the Styles icon to open the Styles panel.
There, we can see a bunch of options from standard colors to black and white to more artistic and sketchy styles. Feel free to try any of them out to see how they look by simply clicking on one of the thumbnails. For this example though, let's stick to a standard colored shaded with texture style.
And then let's talk about one more thing we can try. Let's open up the display panel on the right. Then let's check the box next to shadows on. Now we can slide the time and date sliders to see shadows cast across the model.
Alright, this is looking pretty good! And now that we have a view and style settings that we like, we need to save a scene. To do that, let's click on the Scenes icon to open the Scenes panel on the right. Then click the plus icon to save the scene.
If you get a warning, just pick the option for Save as a New Style. Now if we navigate anywhere else in the model, we can always get right back to the saved view by clicking on the scene thumbnail. We can also use the Scenes feature to set up other views of our model that we might need.
For instance, if we add a section cut using the Section Plane tool, we could switch to a top-down view, switch from perspective to parallel projection, open the Display panel and hide section planes, then use the Styles panel to set our view to black and white. And we've got a nice looking plan view, which we can save as a new scene. And again, if we want to get back to our first scene, we can click on the scene thumbnail and the style, visible tags, and camera will all go back to their settings for that saved scene. All right. Alright, now that we've got our scene set up and we're ready to export our final image, let's talk about what to do next.
First, it's always a good idea to save the file. Then we'll go to the menu in the upper left and pick Download PNG. If you need a different image file format, like a JPEG for example, you'll need to upgrade beyond SketchUp Free.
So for now, we'll stick with a PNG. In the export window, we can set our desired pixel dimensions and any other view options. And finally, click Export.
Let's know that PNG is a raster image. meaning it has a set pixel dimension. If you need the sort of image where the linework is crisp at any size, you'd need a vector format like a PDF, and you can only export vector formats using SketchUp Pro.
Also, be aware that any image you export out of SketchUp Free will have the SketchUp logo watermarked in the upper right corner. To export an image without the logo, you'll also need to upgrade. And there's one last thing we should discuss when it comes to exporting a final image.
There are a ton more options available to you if you upgrade beyond SketchUp Free. For instance, with SketchUp Pro, you can use a rendering extension or application that will allow you to create realistic lighting effects and add realistic materials to your model to create beautiful renderings or animations. And if you need to export other image or 3D file formats, CAD drawings like DWGs, create shop drawings, or even a full set of construction documents with detailed dimensions and annotations, you can only do that with a SketchUp Pro subscription.
We have comprehensive courses on all those topics on our website if you're ready to get serious. Or if you're not ready to get serious just yet, but you are interested in learning more about those topics, we have some great videos on our YouTube channel that will get you started down the right path. Okay, now that you've completed all 10 steps to building a house in SketchUp free, what's next? If you're not sure SketchUp Free has all the features you need, and you're wondering if it's worth upgrading to either SketchUp Shop or SketchUp Pro, then I recommend checking out this video, which compares all the features of the different versions of SketchUp.
Or, head over to this page on our website and send me a quick message about your particular situation, and I'd be happy to let you know which software I recommend for you. Until next time, happy sketching! Then... To uh, whisk that up, I always recommend We won't go ahead and set those there