Have you watched the videos I told you to watch yet!?!? SketchUp official YouTube channel and the learn.sketchup.com fundamentals course. Take those now before you continue. You need to start at the beginning.
I just tried and it works, but the thing is, I still can’t have multiple walls that I pull up in one go. When I have two rectangles with offset to create rooms and I select both of them and group them, the pull tool becomes locked when hovering over it. I can edit the group, and select the faces individually but that’s not what I want. I want to pull everything in one go.
It’s this simple. About 5 seconds.
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Yes, but that’s one room/rectangle. What about two connected ones? I can’t shift click the faces with the pull tool.
Because you can’t pull a group, you can only pull on a face. Edit the group.
You can pull up any contiguous face. If it’s broken into separate faces, you pull them each separately. Once you pull one to a desired height, just double-click on the remaining faces to pull them up the same distance.
This explains a lot, thank you so much for the help! I was off the impression I could group all the walls to simply pull them all at once.
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Start by making a group of anything (like a floor surface or a rectangle). Then edit the group and draw your walls in the group, instead of drawing everything and trying to group it later.
If you lines are coplanar they should create a surface between the lines (the wall shape in 2d). You can then pull that up. If a discreet surface is not inside the lines (a surface that you can select with one click to highlight), then you haven’t completed all the wall edges.
You will also see that if you’ve drawn a wall plan with this surface between the lines correctly, you can also double click that surface and it will select all the wall edges that delineate the surface, as well (in case you still need to group them).
I’ve got most of it working so far and after watching tutorials on how to export from SketchUp to LayOut, I got my first floor plan printed! There are some weird things going on however. Two of my rooms are filled in black when using a section cut, even though the floor seems to be at the bottom. I have a screenshot of what it looks like in LayOut, but it’s similar in SketchUp. The two black filled rooms sit next to each other near the center of the building. When I disable Section Fill, it disappears. So it seems something is missing?
Maybe, if you delete all the faces you call floors in your ‘wall’ group, this will solve your problem. Then you if you want to show the floors, redraw the faces, or simply draw an outline of the whole building outside of the walls group and put it into a seperate ‘floor’ group, you can then push-pull this face down to provide a floor thickness if required.
It’s hard to say what is happening. Section cuts and fill need some practice and are affected by many things. One would have to see your model, how it’s made. to offer ideas. Unfortunately it’s not a cut and dry methodology, same for everyone’s experience. You need to create your own work flow in SketchUp to get anything. So please post the model. Agree with arch… only walls in wall group. Clean up the model.
Another “guess” do those rooms have openings?
I don’t think they have openings. The reason I have my floors inside the same group is because it was giving me the issue why I created this thread in the first place. That’s exactly what solved my issue, having the floors grouped together, else the inner part of the walls was not included in the group.
I have my model here: SketchUp.skp (412.7 KB)
Your model is mostly inside out - you can see this most easily in View/Face style/Monochrome.
You’d probably find it easier if your 3D View scene were changed from parallel to perspective (Camera/Perspective), although you want your first floor plan, as you have it, in Parallel projection.
The black rectangles are the parts of your model that are the right way out. Looks as though you coloured them black at some point (perhaps the section cut colour).
I don’t have any trouble with this version of the model in making a section cut.
Aside from the reversed faces, there’s one place where I can see Z-fighting - two faces in the same plane - and the OpenGL engine that renders the SU model can’t decide which to show in front of the other.
I see you have succeeded in making all the walls into a single face, so they all pushpull up together.
What if any other questions did you have about the model in its present form?
When are you planning to put in door openings in the walls?
I see some openings if I hide the larger white sections called Concrete, but the ends of the walls aren’t closed there and some rooms still have no openings.
After you have Reversed Faces and/or used Orient Faces on the walls, and reversed the floor faces, the usual way to cut openings in the walls is to draw a rectangle, then pushpull the opening through. But you need to be drawing your rectangle inside the wall group.
My own preference is to use Components instead of Groups because (a) you are prompted to give a component a name when you create it (get into the habit of doing that), and (b) you keep a copy of the original in the component browser, from which you can recover another copy if you accidentally delete the one in the model. But if you decide you no longer need it, then Purge the model to get rid of clutter that merely bloats the file size.
Thank you so much for this in depth look at my model. First off, I know about the z-fighting happening with that one wall, and it’s something I can easily fix. Thanks for noting that! What I can’t understand is you saying my model is “inside out”. What do you mean by that? Are the outer faces meant to be on the inside? When I make a cut halfway through my model, I still get the black rooms (not the black Concrete pillars in the walls).
White is the default colour for ‘outside’. Most of your model shows grey-blue, which is the ‘back’ or ‘inside’ face.
I’m on my way out for a few hours, but if there’s follow up (I see both you and Steve replying) I’ll look again this evening.
Also, why is it that when I draw a rectangle and pull it up, its bottom and top part are closed off. But when I connect two rectangles and pull them up, only their top is closed off, but not the bottom as seen in my model. All the walls are open on the bottom.
This leads me to suspect you don’t yet fully understand the concept of front and back sides of a face and their usage in models.
A SketchUp face is like a page of a book. It has a front side and a back side. In a book, by convention we refer to the visible side of a right-hand page as “front” and its non-visible other side as “back”. Similarly, in a 3D model by convention we orient the front side of a face toward “free air” or “outside” an object, and the back side toward the interior of an object where solid material would be if SketchUp supported true solids. Most other 3D modeling apps and renderers also follow this convention. In fact, many renderers will ignore back sides of faces because in principal there is no way to see them through the solid.
The SketchUp default material shows white on the front side of a face and a gray-blue on the back side. That’s why @john_mcclenahan concluded your model is inside-out. Many of us edit the style to use a more garish color on the back side because depending on shading the gray-blue can be hard to distinguish from a dimly shaded front face.
I did just that and edited my style to have plain white for the outside and a darker color for the inside (good tip btw!). And only a few of my walls seem to have outside faces (white), while most walls are all considered inside faces (even the outside of the wall). Any idea what I might have done wrong while drawing these walls?
SketchUp has some rules it follows as you create a face to decide which way the front and back should face. In some cases the rules make some sense. For example, when you draw a face on the z=0 plane, SketchUp thinks you will likely want to pull it up to create a solid, so it draws it with the back side facing upward, as it would be once the solid is formed. When you draw a face off z=0, SketchUp tends to orient the front side toward the camera.
Alas, in some cases the rules are inscrutable and you just have to notice and reverse faces when they come out the wrong way. For instance, what happens when you do a follow-me depends on which way the profile faced relative to the direction that SketchUp follows the path. Face orientation on solid tools operations also depends on the orientation in the solids. If you subract a hole through a solid, you might want the subtracting solid to be inside out so that they will face into the inside of the result after the operation.
That’s a strong reason for a) developing the model in monochrome mode without applying textures yet, and b) assigning a more noticeable color to the back face. It’s easier to fix issues right away than to deal with lots of them later!
I had to test this. When the substracting solid has back faces outwards, the resulting hole has visible back faces. When both solids are “correct” the result is “correct” also.
Your rule applies to using Intersect Faces, though.
Ok, so I’ve watch 2 more in-depth videos on how to create a floor plan (2D) of a house. I draw my first rectangle which is the outer most walls of the place. I select everything (including the floor) and make it a group. Everything is nicely grouped and on the Untagged tag.
Now when I try to pull up (I only really need 2D but I want to make sure my walls are not inside-out this time), I can only see the floor is black and all the pulled walls are white on both sides. You must know that following you recommendations, I changed my style that the front color is white and the back color is black.
Am I doing something wrong or is this the way it’s supposed to be? Also, do you recommend I do the whole thing in 2D first and then pull up all the walls?
EDIT: I know started adding inside walls using the rectangle tool. And when I then pull everything up, you can clearly see it’s all considered back faces (blue-ish color (yes, I switched back by accident by selecting a scene :D). Also, the outer walls are closed off on all sides (top and bottom), but these new inner walls are only closed off at the top. When I look from below they are open, is this a problem?
