I am fairly new to Sketchup, so please go easy. I am using Sketchup Go on WIndows 11.
I am drawing some cabinets for my wife. There will be two ‘side’ cabinets and one middle cabinet.
Am I right in thinking all the items listed below should be components, as they all have more than one instance?
All cabinet
Sides (6)
Vertical face frame parts (6)
Each side cabinet
Tops and bottoms (4).
Backs (2).
Top and bottom nailer strips (4).
Shelves (2)
Face frame
Tops (2)
Bottoms will be identical (2)
Bifold doors (4 doors per side cabinet)
Stiles (8)
Rails (8)
Panels (4)
Center cabinet
Shelves (3)
Vertical face frame parts (2)
Nailer strips (2)
Should the side cabinet itself also be a component?
Some of the components will be flipped copies; does that cause any problems?
There are some items that will not be repeated
I assume it would not be smart to put dimensions in the components?
I want to create printed copies of each component with dimensions for shop use. What is the best way to organize Labels, Scenes, and Outliner to achieve that?
When I model things like this all of the parts are components so they can be given names. This also means that if I need to make things like exploded views as well as two- or three-view scenes for dimensioning, later modifications are much simpler to manage than if there are groups.
I only create nested components for things like doors (if they are modeled as rails, stiles, and panels) and drawers if they are made up of their consituent parts. I rarely find it useful to make nested objects of entire cabinets. It’s important to not go too crazy with the nesting because that can make modeling more difficult and increase chances for errors.
Flipped copies of components shouldn’t be a problem. I do that for most furniture pieces because they have left-right symmetry or top-bottom symmetry.
There should be no reason to put dimensions inside of the components. That just creates more clutter.
When I am creating shop drawings for woodworking projects I lay out copies of the components to make two views or three views or the components for dimensioning. I place them all in generally the same area within the model space. In your case you might create scenes that show a couple or three components at a time.
I create a single scene in SketchUp for the 2D views of the parts. I use that to create the viewports for the parts in LayOut and I do my dimensioning there. You would obviously need to do your dimensioing in SketchUp Go so you would likely want to spread things out a little more than I have.
This shows dimensioning one of the parts for this model. With LayOut it’s a simple matter to create views with break lines without having to actually break the component.
I also create exploded view scenes such as this. At this point even for something like the top, of which there’s only one required, I now have multiple instances of it in the model so it makes sense to make that a component, too. By using only components I only have to edit in one place when there’s changes required.
Give your components logical tags so you can control visibility in the scenes. Outliner is really just a textual representation of the objects in your model.
I used an AutoCad knockoff for years until it got too expensive for me. I am finding SketchUp unintuitive by comparison. But that’s just the switch, I’m sure.
LayOut is a page layout application that works with SketchUp and is included with the Pro and Studio subscriptions. You won’t be able to use it with SketchUp Go.
I make a copy of the model over to one side and then manually move components away from each other to get the view I need. In the case of the example I showed, the tags for the drawers were turned off. The exploded views of the drawers are done in other scenes. There are a couple of extensions out there that can make exploded views in the desktop application of SketchUp however I’ve found they don’t make good exploded views and usually take more time than just making selections of components and moving them.
If you need to make shop drawings frequently you might find that it’s worth upgrading to SketchUp Pro so that you have LayOut and the ability to use extensions which can add capabilities. You might also find it useful to have a cutlist extension to generate materials lists for your projects.
BTW, you should edit your previous posts and remove your name, address, phone number, and email address.
Here’s an example shop drawing I did a while back for a woodworkers group in North Carolina. They have a program to expose people of varying abilities to woodworking and their members have made a number of these. All of the views come from the SketchUp model. Dimensions and labels are done in LayOut. The labels on the exploded view use auto-generated text from the model. There’s a dynamic connection from the SketchUp model to the LayOut project so updates to the model will be shown in the project with dimensions updating as needed.
