Grouping Wall Elements to add doors in 2D - Sorry I'm new and struggling

Hi there,

I am using Sketch Book Make 2013. I’m on a MacBook Pro. I need to draw a floor plan (with furniture layout) in 2D first but want to be able to make it 3D following Client layout approval so have done it in ketch Up rather than Layout. I am completely new.

I have managed to draw up the walls of the room but have these problems-

  1. The sketch plan that I imported to use as a basis - how do I now delete it from the page?
  2. I now need to add door and windows in plan. I believe from looking at tutorials that to do this I need to group the exterior walls and interior walls separately. Firstly is that right? Secondly I have followed tutorials so that I click on the appropriate walls with the edit tool and Alt so I can select all the necessary walls. I have then gone Edit - Make Group, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. Am I right in assuming that if it has created a group when I click back on any of the lines that should be in the group, the whole group would then be highlighted blue. If so it isn’t working and I’m stumped.

I need to finish this plan quite urgently so my other option would be to do it in layout if perhaps this is easier/quicker Two questions though please.

  1. Having a look at layout it looks quite self explanatory except I can’t find the equivalent Tape Measure in it. How do you define the line length?

  2. Also the file type that Layout saves as - is it compatible with Sketch Up so I could open it up in Sketch Up to develop it in 3D later?

Thank you so much for your assistance.

Ok, the vogue way to approach things is to draw in Sketchup and then forward that model to LayOut for annotating and dimensions.

Layout basically “looks into” the Sketchup model. If you change the model in Sketchup the changes are reflected in Layout.

That I know of, not many people draw plans in LayOut, it is more of a presentation tool.

Sounds like you have a bit of a hill to climb, I thought I would try to explain the Sketchup/Layout part to make you understand that a bit better hopefully.

Edit
Not sure how you have LayOut if you are using the “Make” version. Only the “Pro” version has the LayOut software.

Thanks so much for your response. That headed me in the right direction. I continued on my limited way in Sketch Up. Result was as follows

At least I managed some sort of result. If anyone can still help me with the following I would appreciate it.

  1. I don’t seem to be able to get rid off the ‘dots’ at the end points, so they remain when printing
  2. As you can see I struggled with the adding of doors and windows. I just attempted to draw them with the pencil and arc. As the tools always want to snap to end points and mid points though I found I couldn’t add small detail eg I wanted to add thickness to the door and window frames , and wanted to add window glass in plan. How do you add detail like that with the snapping tendency?

…I can see I’ve got a long way to go. I’m an interior designer who has worked in the field for over 20 years but have had the luxury of working for large companies, doing a lot of the conceptual work and handing it over to our CAD guys to draw up from my sketches. I’ve just started working on my own though and can see I’ve got a steep learning curve to be able to do all the drawing work myself!!! Any help much appreciated.

The dots my be the style you have selected, you can change it using the styles window, to make lines(edges), faces etc look the way you want.

I appreciate you are new to all this, but it sounds like you are trying to draw in traditional “2d cad style”, which is fine. However you would probably be better off drawing everything 3D that’s what Sketchup does best, you can still get these plan views from the 3D model.

Open the Styles window, activate the edit tab, and within it the edges panel (first icon in the row at the top). Turn off or reduce the size of extensions and endpoints.

[quote] 2. As you can see I struggled with the adding of doors and windows. I just attempted to draw them with the pencil and arc. As the tools always want to snap to end points and mid points though I found I couldn’t add small detail eg I wanted to add thickness to the door and window frames , and wanted to add window glass in plan. How do you add detail like that with the snapping tendency?
[/quote]

There are two things going on that you may be fighting. First, there is a small invisible “capture zone” around the cursor’s point, and you need to zoom in close enough that it is clear to SU that only what you want is within that zone. Second, SketchUp’s inference engine has an intentional behavior that if you hover over something it concludes you want an inference related to that something, so it keeps going back to that snap. This is a really useful feature much of the time. For example, it lets you draw an edge that ends at the same length as another existing one. But sometimes the engine stubbornly finds or holds onto one that you didn’t want. Usually some mousing around will convince it to let go.