SKETCHUP + LAYOUT & Learn Sketchup in a professional way

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.

My Background

My first experience with Sketchup was during the last years of my architecture degree in Madrid. I was in my last year and I decided to use the program to represent my project in a three-dimensional way. I started self-taught, but even so, the program completely seduced me and I enjoyed making my 3D model . The truth is that I would have liked to know this powerful tool from the first year of my degree and not in the last. Accustomed to using Autocad, Sketchup was a breath of fresh air. I began to enjoy graphic representation. That is why for all those university students I think it is the perfect tool.

After the degree, I started working in different architecture studios in Lujbljana, Slovenia. Always in charge of the 3D representation of the different projects and their rendering. In this way I began to specialize in the use of Sketchup at a professional level. A program that seemed simple turned out to be more and more complex and powerful while maintaining that fresh air. That intuitive ability.

In this way, the next step consisted of working as a teacher in different creative schools. In this way I began to carry out a study program. I gradually polished this program over the years learning from the difficulties my students encountered.

And here came the pandemic. At that moment, I decided to transform my face-to-face course into an online course. In a constant learning process thanks to keeping professional collaborations open, this course tries to synthesize all that knowledge accumulated over the last ten years in a professional and rigorous way, but also honoring the spirit of Sketchup, and proposing a way to learn fun and enjoyable.

Sketchup course

In this Sketchup course we will start from an initiation level to end up mastering the program at an expert level. We will learn all the Sketchup tools such as: materials, styles, scenes, animations, sunlight, connection to Google-Earth, photomatch, dynamic components, terrains, plugins and much more.

It is a very complete course equivalent to 30 teaching hours where theory and practice go hand in hand through numerous exercises that will increase in complexity as more knowledge is acquired. It is designed to end with expert knowledge about the program that will allow us to face any project successfully, no matter how complex it may be.

The course consists of 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

• Drawing in 2D. We will explore all the drawing tools in 2D.

• Drawing in 3D . It will be time to delve into the most complex tools of the program such as the extrusion tools, move, copy, rotate, scale, follow me or equidistance. In this block we will also see  operations between solids.

• Measure and text. Which will focus on the use of other types of tools more focused on measurement, such as dimensioning tools, distance and angle measurement, change of position of the coordinate axes or the text tools and of section.

• Defaut trays. We will see the so-called ¨default trays¨. We will learn how to use the material tray, entity information, components, layers, styles, scenes or sunshine.

• Special tools. We will see some other Sketchup tools of special importance. We will study the use of the wharehouse library, the creation of terrains, the geolocation of our projects through the use of Google Earth, the very interesting photomatch tool, the creation of animations, dynamic components and the use of plugins that extend the capabilities of Sketchup to be able to model everything that is in our imagination.

• Utilities. Will deal with functional aspects of the program such as: importing dwg files, exporting images in different formats, as well as useful tips to improve our workflow based on my experience. Finally, the last chapter will make a comparison between Lumion and Vray, the two main rendering software that the market offers us to obtain photorealistic images from our models made in Sketchup.

  
  

• Layout. We will learn a new software attached with Sketchup. Layout is connected in real time with Sketchup and will allow us to make professional presentations of our 3D model.

Each of these blocks will be accompanied by practical exercises at the end of each block to establish the theory explained with specific exercises on those specific topics.

Also to consolidate knowledge, at the end of all the blocks, a 30-question multiple choice questionnaire is proposed, where the student will test their theoretical knowledge of the program.

• Updates block. The course is made in the 2021-2022 version.The truth is that there are hardly any differences with the previous versions. In this block I will update a new class every year explaining the most important improvements in the latest Sketchup version.

  
  

• New Plugins and Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we work. In this section we will focus on the main plugins that emerge in this topic.

To complete the course, the 3D modeling of the iconic Barcelona Pavilion by the German architect Mies Van der Rohe is proposed as a WORK PROJECT. We will work on it during all the course using the tools that we learnt in the previous block.

Through this project you will learn:

Control the scale of the model, correct use of groups and components, using dynamic components, model order through the use of tags, correct use of materials, correct use of furniture and elements outside SKP, correct placement of the north and sunlight of the scene, artistic use of styles, use of sections, dimensions and text and making animations in mp4 format from our scenes.

Finally you should know that you will have my guidance during the course. Any doubt you have, you can ask me and in less than 48h I will respond you with the answer. 

Thank you for enrolling in This SketchUp course!

Best regards,

Manuel Pallarés