This article offers a detailed walkthrough of how to use Sketchup to model picnic table supports and a cross brace. It provides step-by-step instructions, from creating supports to using the divide and rotate tools, and finally, adding a cross brace.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to create supports for a picnic table using Sketchup, which entails hiding objects temporarily, utilizing the rectangle tool and the midpoint of the structure, and defining dimensions such as 18 inches long and 4 inches wide.
- It introduces the divide tool which can split a selected area into equal parts. In this context, the tool is used to accurately place an additional beam in the middle of the table.
- The walkthrough also covers how to add a cross brace using the rotate rectangle tool, push and pull tools to add thickness, and how to hide and unhide objects to facilitate easier modeling.
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Alright, welcome back. So in this video we're going to finish up our picnic table. So the last thing that we need to do is we need to build some supports underneath our tabletop.
So it's going to be a little bit challenging to model that if we have all of this in the way. So the best thing to do would be to temporarily hide objects, and to do that you would click the object you want to hide, right-click, Hide. So there you go, it just disappears.
It's there, it's just hidden. You know, you're not going to be able to get stuck on it or touch it. To bring it back, you need to go to Edit > Unhide, and then either Last or All.
All will unhide everything that you've hidden thus far in the entire project, and Last would just be your most recent hide. So I will unhide that and then let's do that again. Right-click, Hide.
So first let's make the support. What I'm going to do is go into my rectangle tool and get right into the midpoint here. I'm going to click this, and along my blue shape I want to make 18 inches this way, 4 inches wide.
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18 inches long, 4 inches wide. So I'll type in 18,4, enter. Now I'll do the same thing on the other side.
I'll do from here and then go into my blue rectangle. Instead of saying 18 inches, I'll do 1 foot 6 because SketchUp can utilize feet and inches interchangeably. 1 foot 6 comma 4. Now let's go to the eraser tool and erase that middle line, and then I'll go into the push-pull tool and pull this down to enter.
I'm going back to my select tool. I will triple click this, right-click, Make Group, and I will press CTRL+S to save my file. Now I would like to place a copy of this beam onto the other side of the leg, but I would also want to have one in the middle—dead center in the middle, right? I can measure it out and figure out exactly where I want it to go, or I can use the Divide tool.
So what I can do is go to the move tool, press CTRL which will get that plus symbol on the end of that, go to the point where you want to copy this. I'm going to copy this from the midpoint right here, click along the green axis, bring it over to that same point right there. Now I can use the Divide tool.
The Divide command, if you recall, is forward slash and then the number you want to divide that space by. If I want to divide that area in half, I can divide it by two. Now we have two spaces.
If I want to divide it by four, you get four spaces in between, right? You can do as many as you want. In this case, I just want to have one beam right in the middle, so I'm going to divide it by two. Alright, now let's go to our select command, exit out of that, and orbit around the model. We're going to zoom in here.
We're going to want to do a cross brace to span from here to here to help support this center beam. We're going to use the rotate rectangle tool again, so that's that tool right here. I'm going to click that.
We're going to select our midpoint where it's green and then we're going to move this two inches. So in our last, a few videos ago, we started entering angles and distances to do this, but we can also snap this right to the surface we want this angle to go at. So I'm going to snap it right to the top of this beam.
Then we have this line. We're going to push-pull and add some thickness to this brace. We want to make it two inches deep—so two, enter—and then we're going to add another two inches wide to make it a two by four, and there we have it.
But as you can see, this isn't cut off on the ends and there's a little bit of a gap hanging down here. So what I'm going to do is select this, this, and this, and I'm going to hide those three. So right-click, Hide.
Alright, now I'm going to draw a line down because I want to shave off this portion here. So I'm going to draw a line here, but I also want to extend this one out. So I'm going to draw a line down here.
We looked at the push-pull tool and we could cut this one off. But here, the other way we can do it is to push-pull, extend this out, and it will automatically close this end off. Then we can just shave that off by pushing and pulling that in.
Go to our erase tool, erase this line, erase this line. Go back to our select tool, triple click, right-click, Make Group. Now I want to unhide those beams and the leg supports that I just hid.
So I can go to Edit > Unhide > Last. Now we got all this back. Alright, next I would like to make a copy of this brace and put it on this side.
So what I can do is go to my move tool, press CTRL to get that plus, and then move it all the way to here within that green axis. I would like to rotate this board using the really cool built-in rotate with the move tool. If I'm in the move command and hover over this face, you see all these small red rectangles.
If I hover over one of these rectangles, it will automatically allow me to rotate around those specific angles—whether it's on this surface here to rotate in this direction, press Escape to exit that command, or here to rotate around the center. I will rotate around the center here.
Click this, then rotate all the way around and snap to right there. Alright, now we'll Zoom Extents and rotate around. We will select to exit all that, and go to Edit > Unhide > All.
And there we go. That's our picnic table. What I can do is select all, make this into one complete group, and there you have it.
That's one good-looking picnic table. Alright, so in the next video, we're going to make some trash cans and recycling cans. So see you next video.
