Getting Started Guide and Reference Sugestions

SketchUp
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I’m looking for resources to get started with Sketchup. I have a Pro subscription running on Windows 10. I am mainly looking for design support for woodworking and creating dimensioned layouts. Sketchup seems to be a relevant tool but I am wondering if it is good for this purpose and I need to find a clear learning path. I used Sketchup about 15 years ago to make a few drawings for furniture and fell out of the habit because it took way more time than drawing a layout by hand. I want to try again because while time consuming, it really is useful to use a tool like this to avoid design mistakes that show up later in a project. There are also useful tools like Golden Ratio function and creating bills of materials that can save significant cost.

The problem is there is so much noise out there that I’m looking for help getting on a useful learning curve. I like the book concept so I can jump around easily. I started out on YouTube and that is not an option for me. Videos go too fast and skip basic steps. Many times, you are instructed to select “X” tool but it does not say where that tool is or what it looks like. David Heim of Fine Woodworking uses Sketchup for everything and seems to imply Sketchup can do what I’m looking for. However, he does graphic drawings of woodworking projects for a living and I don’t know if he builds anything or if Sketchup is useful to him in that process. He has a Sketchup book for woodworkers but it is not a get started guide and it is five years old at this point. I can’t use Sketchup if it is a full-time job to learn and use. My ultimate goal is a quality piece of furniture, not a cool graphic of a quality piece of furniture.

I have tried the Help Center “Getting Started in Sketchup” and walking through the basics of drawing. That is pretty good but there are many graphics and pictures missing and many of the hyperlinks to other concepts are broken. I think I simply need to walk through that guide step by step (probably multiple times) and that will ground me in the basics. I have spent five chunks of several hours going through the getting started guide in the last week and I see it is going to be very time consuming. As good as the guide is, it has to cover many versions of the tool and cover all parts of the application. Many of the pictures and links to other topics are broken leading me think it is quite outdated. To be honest, the age of many of the support topics here in the community is a little concerning.

I started walking through Getting Started with a simple project that I thought would be great for learning. I’m building a wall of Euro Crates for storage. A Euro Crate is a 60cm x 40cm poly box in heights from 7.5cm to 42cm in 5cm increments. Creating a bunch of sized boxes, duplicating them and laying them out within the space I have is a perfect training tool for Sketchup basics. This process highlights the issue of basic application learning and conceptual understanding. I learned how to create the box and size it during drawing then how to make it a component, replicate it and move it about. Learned how to measure distance between the boxes and set the distance. Did not know setting the distance between the boxes also changes the size of all the boxes. Had to start again. There is no real good way of aligning objects. I found cubic align, downloaded that, could not install. Found I need to download it within the application, did that but can’t find it on the tool bar. I’m sure I will find it at some point. So lots of trial and error and I would like to get to basic use before my frustration kills the process. My wall of Euro Crates would be done by now if I had just started building it. I also could have bought all of the crates themselves for the cost of the Sketchup subscription.

After days of doing this and controlling my emotional rage of how time consuming it is to do easy things, I want to know if it is worth the time to get a grip on the tool’s use. I would like to get a refund ASAP if this is not a good use and don’t want to buy a book(s) if they are a waste of time like the YouTube stuff. It just seems like I’m spinning my wheels and that I would have found a useful training path by now.
I’m asking for recommendations on:
The best legitimate training path. I would spend money to do so but not college tuition money.

Honest advice if Sketchup is still a viable application to do what I want or if this is more of a really accurate cool picture drawing and 3D modeling tool.

If anyone wants to recommend an alternative, that would be great.

I have read plenty of snide comments that are backhand jabs at Sketchup. That is not my intent. This is obviously a wonderful, best in class piece of software but I don’t know if it is the best for what I need. It’s complexity is perfect for people who need a vehicle for thier YouTube fame delusions. I want a tool that can help me design woodwork projects. If that is Sketchup great, if not, I need to go find that tool.

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Two great resources:

SketchUp YouTube channel
SketchUP Campus Learning

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I would start with the links given by @RLGL.

My primary professional use for SketchUp and LayOut is for woodworking. I’ve been using them for designing furniture as well as creating plans and other documentation for more than 20 years. This includes 15 years of creating woodworking plans, as well as instructional materials for SketchUp and LayOut, for one of the largest woodworking magazines in the US. With that said, you will need to take the time to learn to use the tools. It probably won’t come in a just a week or a month. It’s a lot like doing woodworking in the shop. You need to develop the experience with the tools through practice. Be patient. It’ll come.

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Thanks Dave, I’m pretty sure I mention you in my question and I looked at your book. I have read a lot of your work and content from the magazine. But do you make projects from your plans? I understand you do or did use SketchUp at the magazine to illustrate concepts and create graphics. I want to use it to create dimensional plans to build from and I don’t really care if they look cool. From someone who has experience with Sketchup, is the learning curve worth the plans it can output or is it overkill to create dimensional drawings? I’m not a professional and don’t do production work. I have a few projects going at any one time and a design to printed layout tool would be really helpful in creating higher quality and more complex work. Sketchup is the type of application where it actually won’t come without actively working on learning it and regular use. I need a design and layout tool and it feels like Sketchup may have progressed way beyond that. I wouldn’t hesitate to go through the brain damage of designing in Sketchup if I was going to make and refine something many times. But patience runs thin with occasional use, a non-intuitive interface and consistent starting over from scratch. I think you are saying it is going to take a very long time before I see progress and value. I’m trying to figure out the best way to learn, what the cost and time of doing so will be and determine if it is worth it. I have used it in the past and it seems way more “feature rich” now. I think if I can get the basics, it will improve and shorten the design process. I just don’t know how to get there or if I have the time to do so.

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I have built numerous pieces from plans I created in SketchUp and LayOut. My original reason for starting with SketchUp 21 years ago was to design my own projects to build in my shop.

I’m not the David you mentioned in your first post.

As to whether or not the learning curve is worth it, you’ll have to answer that question yourself. For me it was definitely worth it. The first project I designed in SketchUp and then built in my shop was a huge shop cabinet made from leftovers from building a garden shed the previous summer. With SketchUp I was able to design the cabinet in a way that let me “see” every step in the process. When I went to the shop I had a very clear idea of the steps I needed to follow and the machine setups I needed to make so that I didn’t have to try to set a machine up the same way a second time because I’d forgotten a step. I started cutting wood at about 9:00 am on Saturday and I was starting to fill it by 3:30 the next day. (And I had time on Saturday evening to take my bride to dinner and a movie.)

I’ve done extremely detailed plans for projects but also some very simplistic ones. This is the entirety of the plan I made for a rack for my wife’s skis. I made it while waiting for a cup of coffee to brew. Wrote down the dimensions I needed on the back of an envelope and went to the shop to make it.

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For that project for me any more of a model would have been overkill.

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I design and build items to build in my shop and items to be 3d printed. Let your minds creative side loose.

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For about 15 years I ran a one-man shop building custom furniture and cabinets. I designed all of what I built (well over a hundred projects) using SketchUp, and found it to be much easier to use than the alternatives I had done earlier. If there were features I didn’t need or use, I found they didn’t get in my way: I could ignore them. But I also didn’t do highly stylistic stuff, which might have needed other features.

I learned mainly by doing, but also by reading or watching everything about SketchUp I could find and by hanging around both this forum and SketchUcation. I also learned by writing several extensions, first for my own use, and later published. They forced me to learn how SketchUp works internally, which helped my to understand how and why the GUI is the way it is.

Since my models served two purposes - proposal to a client and shop drawings for myself - I didn’t do much with Layout or renderers but I often did multiple scenes to illustrate joinery details and assembly processes. As DaveR noted, the imaginary action of assembling the pieces in the model greatly facilitated actual fabrication and assembly.

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