SketchUp for Woodworkers: bring your designs to life in 3D

This lecture is to welcome new students,  and to give a quick introduction to some of the main features of the course, which is divided into 3 main parts: Design and Drawing; Build; and Output and Presentation. The project in the Build section is a small toolbox, designed and made originally by the British furniture maker David Barron,.

SketchUp is a brilliant tool to help you design your own woodworking projects, but before putting (virtual) pen to paper, it is always worth taking a look at how other makers have gone about tackling similar designs.

Being able to move around the screen quickly and easily is a big part of the drawing and design process. This lecture has tips on how to do this more effectively.

SketchUp has a tendency to stick lines and faces together, so to create separate objects in a model we need to make them into either a group or a component. This lecture discusses which is best for woodworking projects

Another essential skill when you are drawing in 3D is the ability to position the parts of your model quickly and accurately. This lecture will help you do this.

Another great feature of SketchUp is it's ability to quickly change the appearance of models. This can include changes in colour and also applying wood grain. Additionally, it is easy to create and edit Arrays, which are regular, multiple copies of objects, to test out spacing and frequency in your design.

A quick run through of the construction of the toolbox which features in the build section of the course.

SketchUp is perfect for quickly evaluating different design ideas. Its very quick to draw outlines of things, but even better than that, making edits to those initial ideas is really easy! Once you are happy with the overall design idea, you can start to refine the details, and then use this to build the components!

There is a PDF file to download with this lecture, which has all the dimensions of the toolbox on it, as well as an annotated 3D exploded perspective.

Building the toolbox in SketchUp is similar in many ways to actually constructing it in the workshop, in that you can use finished components to size and add details to other components. This also applies to your outline design, which you can begin to use as a template to construct the outer carcass of the toolbox. Also learn how and why using Layers is so important when using the in situ method of building a model.

A summary of the "Use your outline design as a template" video lecture, using text and images.

Learn how to set up dovetail in SketchUp, using the Tape measure tool to create guidelines, and the Move tool to create an array of the dovetails.

A summary of the "Setting up dovetails" video lecture, using text and images.

Use the outlines of the dovetails you have already drawn to cut them in the front and side components. Use Flip Along to speed up the drawing process.

Its easy to model things in SketchUp by using bits and pieces of one component to make another. Learn how in this lecture!

Using the side and front of the toolbox to size the top with the Rectangle tool, and the Push/Pull tool to create thickness, its a simple job to then edit the top and create a tongue around the bottom edge.

There are lots of ways to do the same thing in SketchUp, and here I show you the first method to use for cutting out grooves using a component, the top, that you have already drawn.

Learn how easy it is to "mirror" things from one part of a model to another, and create new features, using Flip Along. This really is a great time saver.

Following the basic first principle of computer drawing, which is: draw something once and use it again and again, its a simple thing to make a bottom out of a top with a bit of editing! Save even more time and effort here.

Unfortunately no virtual saws were found for this lecture, so instead I edited the side to create two parts, a top and bottom, to start creating the lid and base of the toolbox.

Copying the process of splitting the side, and this time you're a bit more on your own, and instead of a voiceover, there's some background music ( and captions of course)!.

This lecture wraps up the construction of the main part of the toolbox with the construction of a couple of mitred linings. Sizing things is easy from your model, and use the Clipboard again here to save a bit more drawing time.

Computer drawing of any kind is all about looking or thinking ahead, and asking yourself if you can re-use this bit of drawing somewhere, or do you need to draw this whole piece...so a simple thing like only drawing half the tray sides is an important part of learning to draw efficiently!

This is the second set of dovetails you construct in the course, so this lecture focuses on a few extra things, like keyboard shortcuts, and also gives you a rest from constant talking, with a bit of music!

Introducing an important new technique in this lecture; Intersect Faces....which is a powerful modelling tool, similar to some of the solid modelling tools in other software. It's possible to create some very complex shapes with this tool in SketchUp, although I'm just starting with a couple of grooves in the tray sides here!

In this lecture I'm introducing you to tangent arcs...okay, I'm not really sure what these are either (I'm kidding, but its tricky defining them!) Sufficient to say that they are a great tool to use, once you know how (and what they are!)

This is a basic exercise in layout using guidelines to create a grid, and then the sides of the small tray. I also have to own up to not doing this as efficiently as I could have done, so maybe you can do better!

Yet more dovetails! One small variation is the use of the Midpoint to establish the inner lines, as there are only two tails here. Its really a good revision exercise though, and set to music with captions, since I'm hopeful that you won't need me telling you what to do by this point.

Finishing off the small tray (almost) by completing the sides and adding the bottom and grooves. I also discuss the advantages of window selection versus triple clicking, fascinating stuff!

This lecture includes an alternative method of editing a component, in situations where hiding lots of stuff isn't necessary or desirable. Very useful to remember this one, and I use it again when chamfering the top.

The end (nearly) of all your hard work, where the finished toolbox takes shape. Half-built until now, the missing components are filled in by copying and flipping existing ones.

Hopefully, showing you more than one way to put a small chamfer on the top won't be confusing, but will instead add to your growing range of drawing techniques.

Its pretty easy to create a roundover in SketchUp, and its even possible to do two at the same time. How? Well, you see the answer in this lecture, using the Follow Me tool.

This doesn't sound like a big deal, making a finger pull for the toolbox. Well, its actually the trickiest bit of modelling in the whole thing, and these two lectures take you through a range of techniques which are pretty useful, and will get you out of trouble when all else fails. I also show you the really surprising and amazing SCALE trick in SketchUp. I don't know why it works, but it does, time after time!

Really using the Intersect Faces command to its maximum effect in this final bit of model building.

Looking at ways you can add non-standard lines or edges to your model using the Mix tab in the Styles editor

An introduction to applying materials to models and how to edit them to suit the size and scale of your project. There are also some graduated fill textures to download with this lecture.

A look at how to add and edit wood grain to your model. This lecture includes some sample wood grain JPEGs for you to download and use yourself.

Scenes are a great way to save individual settings and can be used to create different image alternatives to display your model, but can also be used to create very effective animations which can be uploaded to YouTube, a website or any other platform.

This lecture outlines how to make the most of SketchUp dimensions, including setting up elevation type drawings and linking them to scenes.

SketchUp has all sorts of great presentation tools and this lecture looks at the best of them, from PDF prints of dimensioned views to animations of saved scenes which can be turned into Mp4 files and uploaded to YouTube.