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Derek McFarland/5 min read

Getting Started with SketchUp: File Downloads and Interface Overview

First-Day SketchUp Checklist

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This SketchUp tutorial walks through getting started with sketchup: file downloads and interface overview, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Welcome to the VDCI course Introduction to SketchUp. Before we get started with our course, we want to make sure that we have downloaded our course files so that we can work on the course datasets. You should already have downloaded the zip file called skp-101-filedownloads from the VDCI portal.

You can see it here—I have saved it on my C drive. To extract the zip, right-click, then select "Extract Files." You can now see I have the newly extracted folder skp-101-filedownloads, and if I open this, you can see all of the files I will be using in this course.

Now we are ready to begin using SketchUp. Open up SketchUp. When you first open SketchUp, it will prompt you to sign in.

I will sign in now by clicking the blue Sign In button. It will automatically open a browser window where you’ll be asked to sign in with your username. I will sign in with my username here.

Next, I will minimize my browser window, and now you can see the Welcome to SketchUp dialog box. If you were already logged in, you would have already been signed in. In this dialog box, we can do things like choose a template, open a recent file, or add a license. If I click Licensing, you can see my current active subscription.

Let's go back to Files. In this course, we will be using the Architectural Inches template. Select the Architectural Inches template to open SketchUp.

Before we begin drawing and using SketchUp, let's take a look at the user interface. At the top of the screen, you will see the title bar. The title bar has drop-down menus for File, Edit, View, Camera, Draw, and so on.

We will be using these drop-down menus throughout the course. Below the title bar is the menu bar, which houses SketchUp’s toolbars. These toolbars can be added and removed depending on which ones you want to have active.

If I right-click the menu bar, we can see the list of all available toolbars. The toolbars that are active have a yellow check mark next to them. You can see Getting Started is active.

When you first open up SketchUp, the Getting Started toolbar will be the only active toolbar. We will leave that toolbar active and also click on the Large Tool Set to activate that one as well. As you can see, the Large Tool Set appears on the left of your screen.

Let's go back and right-click the menu bar again and activate the Standard toolbar at the bottom of the list. I will click this. You can now see the Standard toolbar appear at the top.

I would like to move this Standard toolbar to the right. To do that, I can click and hold the small dots on the left side and drag and release. In the middle of the screen is SketchUp’s drawing area, which is a single-view 3D space.

This is where we will draw and build all of our 3D objects and models. To the right of the screen is the Default Tray, which houses various dialog boxes. By clicking the arrow next to each section, you can expand or collapse it.

This is really useful when you have many trays open. If you do not see your Default Tray, you can go to Window > Default Tray > Show Tray. My tray is already docked on the right, so I can only hide it.

I will choose Hide Tray and then go back to Window > Default Tray > Show Tray. My tray is currently docked on the right side of my screen. If your tray is not docked and is floating, you can click and drag the top to dock it in one of the available sections—top, bottom, left, or right—depending on your preference.

I prefer the right side, and it will automatically dock there. Next, at the bottom of your screen is the status bar. The status bar has three main elements: the identifier information in the bottom-left, the tooltip section in the center, and the measurement box in the bottom-right.

The identifier information includes geolocation and model information. The tooltip section will display helpful tips about the tools as you are using them. As I slide my cursor over the various tools, you can see the information tooltip at the bottom text change to describe what each tool does.

This is very helpful for quickly understanding what each tool does. The measurement box will display your current measurements as you draw and also allow you to type in specific values. For example, if I draw a line, you’ll see the length automatically change in the bottom-right corner as I stretch the line out.

If I type in 15’, then press ENTER, it will automatically create a line that is exactly 15 feet long. To review, we should have our Getting Started toolbar at the top, our Large Tool Set on the left, our Standard toolbar also at the top, the Default Tray docked to the right, and we should see a gray background since we are using the Architectural Inches template.

Welcome to this Introduction to SketchUp course. We are going to have a ton of fun exploring all that this amazing program can do. I’ll see you in the next video.