Creating a Plan With SketchUp and LayOut

SketchUp is a useful gizmo for designing your woodworking initiatives. Once you’ve bought your designs and all the main points labored out you possibly can then use the fashions to create plans for your self or for others. LayOut, which is a part of the SketchUp Pro bundle, affords a simple method to create these plans out of your SketchUp mannequin. In this video I’ll undergo a few issues I do in SketchUp to organize for creating a plan and then present you an outline of setting issues up in LayOut. This video is by no means meant to be a complete tutorial concerning the usage of LayOut however hopefully it’ll provide you with some concepts.

The mannequin I’ve used right here is one I truly created greater than a decade in the past based mostly on the drafting desk designed and constructed by L.Francis Herreshoff, a well-known boat designed from the early a part of the 1900’s.

Here are the fundamental steps I am going by in SketchUp and LayOut.

• All of the elements that have to be created within the store are made as elements in SketchUp.
• The elements are given tags in order that their visibility might be managed within the scenes.
• And then scenes are created to indicate the mannequin and the main points.
• Within the identical mannequin house I create copies of the elements for exploded views in addition to the 2D views for dimensioning.

After saving the SketchUp file it’s off to LayOut. For most initiatives I’ve templates already established however for this one, I didn’t so I did the next:

• Select the specified paper measurement in Document Setup>Paper.
• Create layers for the several types of entities I’ll have within the doc. In this case there’s a layer for the web page borders and title block stuff, a number of for the SketchUp viewports and then breaklines, dimensions and textual content. Layer order is vital in LayOut. Things on layers greater within the listing might be displayed on prime of these decrease within the listing.
• Make the web page borders and add the title textual content.
• Insert the SketchUp mannequin which creates the primary viewport on the web page. After the primary viewport is created, it may be copied across the web page and the specified scenes might be chosen for every copy.
• Add pages as wanted to indicate the entire required content material.
• Dimensions and textual content and different content material similar to spreadsheets, photos, or textual content recordsdata are added.
• When it’s all completed,  the file is exported to a PDF file which is able to be printed.

Although I don’t present it within the video, there’s a dynamic hyperlink from SketchUp to LayOut. That means in case you have some cause to return and edit the SketchUp mannequin, these adjustments can seem robotically within the LayOut doc. The dimensions will replace robotically, too.

If this kind of factor appears like one thing you should use and you don’t presently have SketchUp Pro, there’s a 30-day trial interval obtainable. go to SketchUp.com to get began.

-Dave