Building Wood Trusses for a Clubhouse in SketchUp: Step-by-Step Guide

Alright, in this next lesson we are going to build wood trusses for our clubhouse. Let's save our previous file and then let's go make a new file.

File, new from template. We always want to choose architectural inches template and then let's erase the man. Select that hit deleting your keyboard or use the erase key and click.

Now if you go back to your file downloads folder in your SKP 201 file downloads, you'll notice that I've also provided structural truss drawings in both PDF and in JPEG format. Let's open up this PDF. You can see that this is something typically what a structural engineer could provide you with basic shop drawings of the truss layout, general angles, dimensions.

Your first page you have the general overview and then on the second page we have more detailed drawings of the metal plates of how it's going to be constructed. So how can we model this in SketchUp? So unfortunately SketchUp will not allow you to import a PDF. So what you would need to do if you're doing this on your own is to save this PDF as a JPEG.

There's multiple ways to do that. One, you can take a screenshot. Another could be certain PDF viewers such as Bluebeam or Acrobat or even Preview on a Mac.

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You can actually export or save as a JPEG file. For this class, we have provided you two already exported JPEGs that we would use for this class. So let's go back into SketchUp and let's File, Import.

You can do File, Import or you can also click and drag this into the model. However, if you click and drag into the model, you don't have enough flexibility in laying this out. So I'm going to delete this and I'm going to File, Import.

Select your Structural Trust Drawings 1. You can see that JPEG is not one of the options. So I will click the Structural Trust Drawings 1.JPEG as an image. You can also import as a texture or a matched photo.

For this project, we'll do it as an image. Select Import. Then we'll select the origin.

And then as you move your mouse around, you can actually scale it. You can see in the bottom right hand corner, it shows roughly the width of what this is. You can see that the width is, you know, we want to drag it out so we're not cropping this image.

So bring it to about roughly right around here. Now I will save my file, File, Save As. I'll save it in my SketchUp 201 file downloads folder.

I will call this file clubhouse-structural-trust.skp. And I will save. So to resize this dimension so that way it is accurately. If I was to measure this dimension right here, it says it's at 12 feet.

Currently in the model, it is roughly 9 feet 9 inches. So to get this to be the correct dimension, we can actually scale our entire drawing. So for this, let's draw a line from this intersection of the dimension line right in the middle.

You might have to zoom in to get to the middle. Click right in the middle. And again, this doesn't have to be perfect.

Just very close enough to here. We know that's going to be 12 feet, but currently that's at 9 feet 9 1⁄2 inches. So I'll click.

And we want to basically draw this shape. We want this portion to be scaled. We don't want this area to be scaled here.

We want to scale this. So I will hit Escape from my keyboard to cancel that line tool. And now I will go to my Tape Measure tool.

And I will click that point that I drew on that line. And then the second point. Now without doing anything else, I can actually type in the length that I want that to be.

And I want that to be 12 feet. So I'll do 12 feet and hit ENTER. Now you'll get this warning box that will ask you, do you want to resize the model? So what this will do, it will actually resize everything in the model to that scale or that dimension that you chose.

If you have other things in this file such as a person or even other components, it will scale everything. So it's good if you were to do this method, make sure this is in a clean model with nothing in there. So I'll hit Yes to scale that.

And now if I was to measure this again, I can see now that this is 12 feet. So I'll go back to my arrow and then select this line and hit Delete on my keyboard. So let's first start drawing this freehand on this element here.

We can start from this corner here. We can see the dimensions, 1 foot 2 inches. So along the green we can type in 1 foot 2. And then we can go along in the red direction, type in 12.

We want to stop right around here. So type in 12 feet, Enter. And then we'll go up to again 1 foot 2 and then back.

Now we'll go back to our arrow key. You can see that this has auto-healed and created a shape in this dimension. We can triple-click, right-click, Make Groups.

Now we lock this shape in. Now let's create some guidelines. We can see that we have a dimension going up in the vertical direction.

We can go to our Tape Measure tool and click our top edge, actually our bottom edge, that's where it starts down here. And we'll go up and type in 7 foot 5 space 1 forward slash 4 inches, Enter. Now we have our guideline for the top right here.

We'll also make a guideline on the side, on that side, and then on this side. And now you can see that we have a slope angle in this direction. So let's create a guideline going from this corner at this angle.

We know that the slope is 612. If we go to our Protractor tool and click this corner, and click our first line, and now we want to establish what angle this is going to be. We can type in an actual degrees or we can type in 6 colon 12 for the angle.

And now if you were to go to your line or your Tape Measure tool and click this line right here, it'll automatically snap perpendicular. We don't know what this dimension of this beam is as there's no call outs. We can just kind of hover over this and we can see in our bottom right corner that this is at 5 and 15 sixteenths.

We know that a standard lumber dimension is 6 inches. We'll make this 6 and hit ENTER. And because we can also do the same thing over on this direction, we know that we already have a grid line or a guideline on the center point.

We know that this is half of this beam right here. We'll click the center point and we'll drag in the red direction and type in 3, enter. The next set of guidelines that I want to create is this angle from this point to right to here.

So the dimension is going from here to here, but that's the same angle as this to this. We'll click from this point right here and go into our Protractor tool again, click this point in the vertical direction in the green axes, click once, and then move and type 45. Now you can see that we have a line right here in the center.

And again, we can do some offset guidelines from this point and do 3 and 3. And now let's create a guideline for this middle point. We know we have a dimension right here, so we can click this edge along the red axes, type in 7 feet, 9,1, 4 slash 4 for 1 fourth inches, enter. And now we know that this is again 3 inches on that side, 3 inches on this side.

And now we can do the same thing to determine this angle over here. We know that this is a typical angle, 45 degrees. This is also going to match that same angle, so we want to go back to our Protractor tool, click this point, click along the green axes and move along here.

It'll snap at 45 and we'll click. And then go back to our Tape Measure tool and do 3 and 3. And now we have all of our guidelines for essentially all of our pieces of lumber. We can go ahead and start drawing and tracing along these intersection points to create each individual piece.

So I'll go to my Line tool and I'll click from this point to this point to this intersection, to this intersection, to this intersection, to here. And then I'll go to my Arrow tool, double-click, right-click, Make Group. And now I'll go back to my Line tool and I will do from here to here, to this intersection, down along the green, click that, go back to my Arrow tool, double-click, Make Group.

We always want to make sure that we're making each of these components or each of these shapes into groups so that way they don't get stuck together. Go back to our Line tool and we'll go from here to here, to here, to here. I'm going to zoom into here and we can see that this dimension does not line up with this.

So let's go erase this portion of our model. Let's make sure that we are snapping from this intersection point up to this point right here along the green axis and then across. Now we will zoom out with the scroll wheel, double-click, right-click, Make Group.

And again, I will go from this intersection point along the green axis making sure that I snap to this point. And then we'll zoom out again, go to here, zoom out some more, and go down making sure we're on the green axis and across. Double-click, right-click, Make Group.

And then our final shape will be this member right here. We'll go from any one of these points and then double-click, right-click, Make Group. And I'll save my file.

And now I will hold down Shift and I will select all of the members together making sure I have all one, two, three, four, five, six members and right-click, Make Group. I will go to Edit and Delete Guides. And now I want to go into this group and start modifying some of the members.

If I double-click this group, and remember we created that shortcut for Hide Rest of Model, which is H. That will turn on and off this. If you do not have that shortcut saved, remember you can go into View, Component Edit, Hide Rest of Model.