Create two-sided window components - SketchUp Tutorial

- [George] Hi, I'm George Maestri, and today we're going to take a look at how to create windows that cut through both sides of a wall. Now, if you are drawing your buildings with thick walls, you'll understand very quickly that windows don't always cut through both sides of the wall. I'm going to show you how to create a nested component that will do exactly that. So, first thing I need to do is create a simple wall. So I'm going to just draw out a simple rectangle. Let's go ahead and make that, say, 12 feet by five inches. Now, five inches is going to be the thickness of my wall, and I need to remember that. And then, I'm just going to go ahead and pull that up to make a wall. I'm going to make that, maybe, 10 feet high. Now that we have this, I'm going to draw a simple window. Now, I'm going to show you the problem first, and then we'll go ahead and solve it. First thing I'm going to do is just go ahead and draw a simple rectangle. And then, I'm going to select this face, and push it in five inches. What does that do? That cuts a hole in the wall, and that's wonderful. If we turn this into a component, by selecting all of these inside edges, and going Edit, Make Component, you could actually make it so that it glues to any side. We could cut the opening. And then we could set the component axis by left-clicking and dragging here, and then dragging that green axis up. We could just hit Create. What that does is it creates a very nice component here. If I drag that in, you'll see that it cuts through, but it only cuts through half the wall. Don't have the other side cut through. This is just a feature of SketchUp, or maybe a bug, we don't really know. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and just undo my way out of that. Let's go ahead and create something a little bit different. This is where you can start to follow along. What we're going to do is, instead of creating one component on one side that's supposed to cut through both, we're going to actually create a component on each side so each component is responsible for its own side of the wall. So, before I do this I want to make sure that everything lines up. So I'm going to draw some guidelines here. Take my Tape-Measure Tool, and I'm just going to go ahead and bring that in, say, 12 inches on this side, and then just kind of drag down another 12 inches. Then I'm going to do the same on the other side. I'm going to go ahead and drag this in 12 inches here and 12 inches there. And so, what I've got is I've just got a set of guidelines that give me a common corner, so that way I can line both components up. So, let's go ahead and draw a window. I'm going to go ahead and left-click and drag. Let's go ahead and make this, say, 24 inches by 24 inches. Just make a small window there. I'm going to go ahead and create this first window before I do anything else. Now I'm going to go ahead and push in my window. I'm going to go ahead and just hit p for push, and push that in three inches. When I do that, it creates an inset but not all the way. Now, I'm going to actually put a material on this so we can actually see this window. So I'm going to go into Materials. And then, under Glass and Mirrors there should be a Translucent Glass Safety. I'm going to go ahead and apply that Translucent Glass Safety. What we've got here is now we've got a window that doesn't go all the way in. But, I'm going to go ahead and select that center face, and then select all connected faces, which should select everything. And then let's go ahead and make it into a component. So, I'm going to go ahead and make it into a component. Make sure we have glue and cut opening. And then we can replace the selection with the component. I'm going to go ahead and hit Create. What that does is creates this nice component that allows me to drag it in. But, notice how it doesn't cut all the way through the wall. Well, we can fix that by drawing another component. So I'm going to go over to the other side, and let's do the same thing. I'm going to go ahead and left-click and drag. Let's do 24 by 24. This time, I'm going to push this one in two inches. Remember, the other one was three. Three plus two is five, which is the depth of the wall. And then I'm going to go ahead and select that face, and just go ahead and delete it. So now I have two sides here. The first one is, this one's the component. And then, the other side we're going to turn into a component, as well. So, I'm going to go ahead and just select all four of these faces that bound that window, and again, Make Component. Cut opening. Glue to any. Replace selection. Hit Create. So now I've got two components here. So, can go ahead and delete one. The other one will be there. I can select that, and delete it. If I wanted to bring those back in, I could go into my Components window. Component#1's that front window. I can align it with that corner. Component#2 is the backside of that window. Again, I can use my Move Tool to align it. Now I've got these two components, when used together, can create a window that cuts all the way through. As you can see, it cuts through. But we want to be able to make these so that we can align them as well as bring them in as a component. So, one of the first things I want to do is understand how to move these. If I select, say, the front of this window, and I move it, notice how it just moves off of the other one. I'm not selecting what's behind it. Even if I were to go like this, a lot of times, it's kind of hard to select because now I'm selecting my guidelines. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a handle on each window with which to select. So, going to select this first component, double-click on it to open up, and then I'm just going to use the Circle Tool, and I'm going to go ahead and go somewhere around the center of that window, and I'm just going to drag out a circle. Then I'm going to double-click off of that. Now we've got this circle here, and I can select that to select this front component. Now I'm going to create a matching one on the opposite side. I'm going to select this component, which is Component#2. Double-click to open it. Again, I'm going to draw another circle that's, basically, or exactly, the same size as the other one. Now, this one actually puts in a face, but I'm going to go ahead and highlight that face, and delete it. When I click off of this, now we have this circle in the middle of this window. Now all I have to do is select that circle, and it selects the entire window. So all I have to do is just click and drag on that, it selects both sides of the window. That's pretty cool. Now that I have this, I can now start to drag in these components again. So if I drag this one in, you'll see that, again, it's got that window on one side. I can drag this one here. It's got, again, that component. If I wanted to, I could move them to line them up. But this is actually going to be a little complicated. So I'm going to actually do something a little bit more efficient. I'm going to go ahead and make two of these components into another one. I'm going to go ahead and select both of these components, and then we're going to do Edit, Make Component. This time, I still want to glue to any. When we do that, notice how these axes come in. But we want to go ahead and set those. So I'm going to go ahead and left-click and drag along the red axis here, and then drag up, and snap to that endpoint. That should create this plane that's parallel to the face it's on. Then I want to make sure I do cut opening and replace selection with component, and do Create. What that does is it takes that first component, and it turns off the windows for that. I'm going to go ahead and just hit delete, and that gets rid of it. But now we have a third component that we created called Component#3. Drag it in, and there we go. So now I can move this around, and it moves as a single component. But we have one little problem, and that's that this component is still not cutting through the backside of the wall. We can fix that by just right-clicking on this, and hitting Explode. When I do, it puts it back to two separate components, and now I can see through. So this is kind of a little workaround. But now I can drag this one in, align it, right-click, Explode, and now I've got windows that are clear. I'm going to go ahead and select these components and delete them. These handles are still a little bit of a problem because they're in the middle of the window and they're not supposed to be there. But, we can fix this by creating a layer. I'm going to go down to my Layers panel here, and we're just going to create a new layer. I'm going to call it Handles. That's for these handles. I'm going to go ahead and double-click on this first component, select just this edge, go into Entity Info, and select the two handles. Click off of this. Now go to the other side. Click on this component. Double-click to open it. Again, select that circle. Turn it on to the Handles layer. Again, click off. Now when I turn off handles, I can just turn off all the handles by clicking on this layer. So now I've got a pretty nice little system here. I go into Components, select Component#3, drag it in, drag in another one, and maybe drag in a third one. Notice how these three are not fully transparent. But I can Shift + Select them, right-click, do Explode, and now they're all transparent. If I want to, I can now highlight all of the handles, use my Move Tool, move 'em around. I can still snap. And then, when I'm done and I'm ready to present, all I have to do is switch off those handles, and those are bonafide double-sided windows. Hopefully, this method will give you a little bit more flexibility in how you create your window components.