Your outer wall hasn’t any outside, just the inside.
And all your faces are reversed (back to front) - you should see the white faces on the insides of the rooms, not the insides of the walls.
To fix that, Select All (shortcut Ctrl+a or on Mac, Command + a), then right click and select Reverse Faces.
How did you draw your walls? The easiest way is usually to draw over the wallls of the plan with the Rectangle tool, then when you have a part of it done, say a whole room, delete the short ends of rectangles where they join or overlap, so you get one face for all the walls of a room. Then use the PushPull tool to pull the faces up to the height of the walls (type the height to get it exact). Select all that you have just drawn with a triple click, and make it into a Component (either R-click, Make Component, or press the keyboard letter g). Give the component a name, then move on to the next room.
Or you can draw two rectangles for a room - one for the outside, and one for the inside - and then delete the inside face.
Since none of your walls have any thickness, or tops, that can’t be how you did it. How did you draw them?
It might be quicker to delete all the vertical elements and start again by completing the rectangles on the ground plane.
I’ve started that process for you in the attached file (compressed to fit inside 3MB). SKUP_Testv2 JMcC.skp.zip (828.5 KB)
Hope that may help, and not just add to your frustrations.
You have paper thin walls, and so the inside of the walls is showing the darker shade, when ideally walls would have thickness, and each side of the wall would be the lighter shade.
Here’s some steps to try, to improve how it looks:
Hide the 001_Linework layer
Select All, and on any face right-click and choose Reverse Faces.
The outside of the walls is still there, as a line around the outside. Triple-Click on any part of that line.
Select the Move tool, press and release the Option key, so that you see a + as part of the cursor. Click and drag upwards any corner of the selected line. You can press the shift key to make it lock to the blue axis.
As you drag upwards, point to the top of any existing wall. That will make the duplicate outline snap to the right height.
Go around the outside and draw a line from each corner up to the same corner in the duplicate you just made.
That should get you close. Afterwards you could also draw lines at the top of the wall, to make those faces close in too. If any of the new wall faces show the darker shade on the outside, right-click it and Reverse Faces. If the ceiling fills in, making it harder to see, click on it and press Delete.
I knew it didn’t look right John, that’s why I wanted to post it. I think the problem there was there were 3 lines around the house and I chose the wrong lines to trace. As for the “reverse walls” none of the videos I’ve watched to-date said anything about needing to reverse walls (or why this needs to be done).
Thank you as well Colin. I will implement your points tomorrow. I’m beat. I’ve been at this since 8:30 this morning and it’s now 5:50 pm. I have made more progress today than all last winter thanks to the help offered here on the Forum. Thanx everyone. I’ll get back to it tomorrow. Cheers.
Hopefully you’ll notice the model I uploaded before you do the steps I gave!
When you make a wall using the rectangle tool approach, and you raise it to the height you need, all the outside faces will be correct. That’s why you don’t normally have to fix it. It’s when doing just one face that one side or the other is bound to be a back face and not a front face.
For some purposes, it doesn’t matter. But getting it right means that:
renderers will display the outside faces properly: some ignore reversed faces altogether, so parts of your model wouldn’t show at all in a model rendered with an external application
Sketchup won’t treat as Solid anything with reversed faces, or (in the Pro version) handle solid intersection, union, or outer shell properly
3d printers usually won’t work properly, or at all, if what they are printing isn’t solid, or has reversed faces
you drawing looks neater, and as if you know what you are doing!
It takes a lot of time to sit here and watch videos (and not be productive). What I am noticing watching some of these videos is that, for example, one will say you “can” outline your exterior walls then use the offset tool to bring it in and pull your walls up and then make a “group” out of them. Then you can work on your interior walls. BUT we are going to do it like this…draw everything out with the rectangle box, then go back and erase all non-essential lines and there you have it. But when I did that you saw the outcome. Colin said using the rectangle method will give me walls that didn’t need to be reversed, which wasn’t the case for me. Obviously I did something wrong. I’m going to have to print out everyone’s good suggestions here and go through them one by one. Thanks everyone.
And, I am getting ready to download the “fixed” file you created for me Colin. Hopefully I will see my errors.
He’s right if you draw rectangles round just a single run of wall - SU places a face on the ground planew ith its reverse side up, and when you PushPull that, you get the outsides of the walls ‘front face (white side) out’.
But it doesn’t always work that way, if there is other connected geometry in the same drawing context.
I’m mostly following you John, but the point of modeling a floor plan is to have connected rooms (geometry). So HOW do I make sure I’ll create walls that are facing the proper direction? Or must I just go through and manually select and change them with he revers command if I find any out of turn?
Colin fixed the reverse issue on my walls, but my walls still look hollow. I can see down through them. Shouldn’t they look solid? It’s looking more and more like I’m going to have to do another re-draw until I know (and understand) how to get the basic wall structure up properly. I realize I am trying to run before I’ve learned to crawl with this floor plan, but it’s our floor plan that is currently being built, (we would have had the foundation completed if it weren’t for all this rain from hurricane Harvey!) So you understand my reason for wanting to do this particular floor plan.
Ha-ha. I’m sure. While I have you John. Here is a screen grab shot of something I just did. I tried am trying another way of doing the walls by creating the outer walls first and then trying to go back in and work the interior walls, but after I grouped the outer walls I couldn’t use the push/pull tool to bring the walls back down. And when I Exploded the group and tried to push the walls back down they kept disappearing under the floor plan. In other words it wouldn’t sit flush on the floor so that I could see them and work from the new frame work. Do you have any idea why that might be?
Read up about Groups and Components in the Help files.
If you explode the outer walls group and pushpull the top down, it will either go exactly to the floor (if you tell it to stop there) and then disappear completely as the top meets the bottom, or you’ll have to go under the floor, then you’ll get what you describe.
If you want to have just the plan lines (the bottom face of the group) on the floor again, then open the group for editing, look from underneath and select the bottom face (double click it) Copy it to the clipboard, close the group, and use Edit/Paste in place.
That will leave a copy, ungrouped, on the floor plane. Hide the outer walls, and work from there.
I’ve also just realised that Colin’s walls may not have been based on the right outer line for the floor - you said there were three lines on all the outer walls.
You could try to pushpull my outer walls to the outside line, or better, to a know dimension for the wall thickness in different places (use the Tape Measure tool to create a guide at the right thickness for the outside, then pushpull to snap to the guide).
A quick test suggests that most of the walls are 5 1/2" too thin, or at least are that much inside the outer yellow line in the plan.
I read the components and groups page. It sometimes takes things awhile to sink in for me, as there is SO much to learn/remember, and as you said, several different ways to get to the same endpoint. Thanks John.
I started over again, just so I could try to figure out how to do this correctly, but somehow I’ve created a new problem and I’m not sure what to do to correct it. Some of the walls are fine and some are solid even though it appears (to me) their walls are correct. I didn’t know what to do with the east closet wall as it connects to an outer wall. Also the center room was always a problem back when I tried learning this last winter and I’m not sure why. It doesn’t appear to have a floor. Any thoughts? Should I post this in a new thread?
To your original question, there have been some good suggestions, so also making sure you’ve seen the Trainers area of the SketchUp website where you may be able to find someone fairly local or many online options, looks like you are making good progress though.
Hi TysonK. There is only one “trainer” on the list and they are in Fairfax, VA about 4-5 hrs from where I live. So I’m stuck with the DIY method of learning. Thank you.
Ah, bummer. Many of them do online options- ie- via Skype or hangouts, but the effectiveness of that option varies, so ya, DIY maybe what you are left with. Sorry.
Hi Faux, I’m kind of like you, being self taught at SketchUp. Might I direct you to a couple of resources that I’ve found quite useful.
Take a look at the “SketchUp for Professionals” course from Michael Brightman, with Brightman Designs. It teaches best practices for working with SU.
Nick Sonder and Matt Donley have a great book out called “SketchUp and Layout for Architecture”. This book covers a complete project for modeling a single family residence.
Matt Donley also has a number of very helpful videos on his “Master SketchUp” web site.
Thanks for these references Chip. I did order SketchUp for Dummies from Amazon and it should arrive today. I am making some progress and it’s actually starting to look like a house. It’s starting to get exciting!
I will check out all these recommendations as you can never have too much useful information! Thanx again.
