From the course: SketchUp Pro 2024 Essential Training

Importing and prepping floor plans for drawings - SketchUp Pro Tutorial

From the course: SketchUp Pro 2024 Essential Training

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Importing and prepping floor plans for drawings

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- [Instructor] Sometimes we have a set of plans to work from and we need to transcribe those into SketchUp so that we can build a 3D model from those plans. A handy way to do that is to import a plan and trace over it to scale. To do this, I like to use a plan view template because it starts in top view, which is helpful for starting out in 2D, which is what we're doing. So first, let's import the file and then we'll draw it. Let's go to File, Import. We'll be using the practice file called FloorPlanImage. If it's grayed out, change the format to All Supported Types. Select FloorPlanImage, and then be sure that Use As Image is selected, not Use As Texture. If you're on a Windows computer, this may be a radial button instead of a dropdown. Then click Import. Now it's attached to my cursor, and I need to click somewhere to set it down. If I tap any other key before I click, then I will lose the floor plan. I'll need to go back to Import and find the image once again. Let's go ahead and just hover over the origin here and then double-click to set this down. Some plans may appear blurrier than others depending on the quality of image. It can help to change the texture size. So let's go to our Settings window. SketchUp, Settings, or if you're on a Windows computer, it's going to be under Window Settings. Here, we can go to Graphics and then be sure that Use maximum texture size is checked. Let's make sure that our entire drawing is in view. So hit zoom extents or Shift + Z as a keyboard shortcut. Now that we've brought our image into the drawing, we need to scale it first so that whatever we draw over it will appear to scale. And to do that, we're going to use the tape measure tool. Tap T for tape or this icon here. It usually helps to find the largest dimension to reference. So we're going to use this 23 foot too. Let's zoom in there. And now we're going to use this to resize it. I'm going to zoom in as much as I can on this leader line. Click release towards the middle of the edge, and then come straight across that red axis and then click release. And I need to remember, it's going to be 23 feet. So click release here. And you can see, currently, it's at 129 and some change. So it's going to shrink significantly. We can simply override that by typing 23 feet, Enter. Do we want to resize the model? Yes. And now it's shrunk out of view. So we can't really see anything because it is shrunk. So let's hit zoom extents again, and that brings everything into view. Let's check that width. Using our tape measure tool, can zoom in, click release, and then hover for a moment. And we are pretty darn close to 23 feet. I'm happy with that. So I'm going to hit space bar, zoom extents, and now we're ready to trace over this.

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