Learn to construct detailed door models with intricacies like door knobs and trims in this step-by-step sketch-up tutorial. The article will guide you through creating door panels, making door trims and knobs, copying door models, and finally, flipping and placing the doors correctly in your designs.
Key insights
- The article provides a detailed guide on creating door panels using rectangle tool and push-pull tool for adding thickness to the door model.
- The tutorial demonstrates how to make door trims using rectangle tool and offset function, and doorknobs by importing from SketchUp’s pre-loaded components, placing them correctly using guides and modifying component axes to ensure accurate placement.
- The guide explains how to copy, flip, and accurately place door models using move tool, flip along function, and component axes, without having to redraw the interior trims and other features.
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Let's begin to build our doors for our model. Let's orbit over to our restrooms on this side and we're going to build these two doors right here.
So let's go first and let's draw a rectangle right in this opening. Go to our rectangle tool, click this point to this point. We don't need a B inside of our wall group because we don't want this face to be attached to here so we're going to have it separate.
Now let's push pull this to add some thickness. You want to click and it's not and don't pull out, pull in. You may not be able to see it if it's through that but you can go to a certain thickness so that way you know it's going in and type 1.5 for one and a half inches.
I will triple click this door, right click make group. Now I will hide this door so I can make some trim for this door. So I will right click, hide and now let's make some trim.
We can do the same thing we did before, the rectangle tool, our door opening and then let's offset the trim four inches. We'll type in four, enter and now there's a couple ways to clean up this bottom trim piece, right? We could draw a line and then delete the following pieces or we can go to our move tool and we can actually move this up and that will delete a lot of those extra edges so I'll save some time. I want to hide my floor so we're not getting, we're not going to actually delete that so I'll uncheck the eye for floor and now I want to delete this bottom edge.
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So I will select it and then hit the delete key and now I have this trim piece. I want to add some thickness to this trim so I'll go into my push pull tool and click this trim and drag out one, type one, hit ENTER. Now I will triple click this trim, right click, make group.
Now I don't need to redraw the interior trim. I can actually copy this group that I just made. I can go into my move tool, select control for copy, select this outside face and now this is going to be the inside face.
We're going to drag it to this point right here and point in group and now I want to go to edit, unhide last, bring back my door. The final thing that we need to do is add a doorknob to this door. We can see that the door is swinging in this direction so the doorknob should be over here.
Let's add some guides so we know exactly where to drop this doorknob. I will go to the tape measure tool, making sure that I have my plus on to create guides. I will go up 36 inches for the height of the doorknob and then on the right, on the left side of this door, I will click, not this point, I'm going to escape, click the line below it to draw a guide this direction in the green axes and type three inches, enter.
This is the center point of the doorknob that we want to add. To add a doorknob we'll go to the components dialog box in the default tray right here. Let's close our tags, close our styles, and let's open components.
We can click this little triangle navigation to go down into construction. SketchUp has pre-loaded a lot of simple and clean components that could be used into this model. We want to click doors load poly.
This will open the 3D warehouse. You can see that there's a lot of panel doors that we can add, other pre-made doors so instead of having to fully draw a door you can actually import a door itself. We want to click doorknob round and click this little download arrow button to load this directly into our SketchUp model.
We'll click yes and then we'll click right on the intersection to drop it in. When I zoom in we can see that this doorknob is not perfectly placed on this door panel itself. So what I want to do is I want to edit the actual axes of this component.
You can see that the box is straight however the doorknob itself is kind of canted and crooked and that's an error in SketchUp's 3D model that they have on their website. So what I can do is I can edit this component. If I was to double click this component I will go in there however I'm unable to see the inside very easily due to the actual building walls that are in the way.
So I can go to this very handy tool. If you go to view component edit hide rest of model this will only show the component or the nested group that you're in. If you so if I zoom in here you can see that this red axis is not parallel to the face of this.
So I want to edit that axis and so I can go to my axis tool and click the center point. First step is red and so I want to make sure that I'm going right here and then I want to go vertically up to here in the green and then my blue is forward. Now this looks really good.
Now if I can escape it'll say would you like to update your component axes to match your modified sketch axes. Yes I would. Now if I was to go back into this you can see that I now have the axes in the correct location.
So I will close this out and now you can see that that this is aligned correctly but this doorknob is not. So what I want to do is I want to go to home to see the components that I have loaded into my model. I will delete this and then click this doorknob again and now we attach it to the door by hovering over the intersection and now that should be on there.
Very clean. Let's remove these guides edit delete guides and now let's make a copy of this door to bring it on the inside copy of the doorknob. So let's go to our move tool and click here and you can see that I'm moving.
I want to hover over I want to click control to make a copy and along the red axis somewhere in space let's click here. So there's a few ways to inverse this. We learned in SketchUp 101 that we can do the scale command and then click on the blue scale and bring inward and type in negative one to make a one inverse.
The other way to do it I will do control z is understanding what the model's component axis is. If I double click into this component I can see that the axis is in the blue direction and I want to make a copy or flip this model about that specific axis. So I can right click right click flip along components blue and that'll exactly flip that.
Then I can go into my move tool and click the end and move it along the red axis to on facing group. If you're having trouble snapping to that red you can hover once you get to red you can hold down shift and it'll lock it on that axis that you wanted to hold it on and select your doorframe. And now I will orbit around and I want to make this into a component.
So I will go to my select tool and create a selection window and select the doorframe on either side the door panel and the two doorknobs. There should be five groups that's being selected. If I go to entity info you can see that I have five components in groups.
I can right click and this time we want to make this into a component. Now this gives us options on certain descriptions and names that we can apply to this. Let's call this door dash 3068.
This is the common naming convention for doors and windows. 30 stands for three feet zero inches and 68 stands for six feet eight inches. And now I'll give my door a description of door 3068.
I will click glue to none and then we will set our component axes. We want to make sure that we match what the model's component axes are. We can see that we have solid red and solid green that means the positive direction and solid blue.
The dash means negative. You can see that it automatically places it kind of right here which is on the outside corner of all the surfaces. You can see that the doorknob sticks out a little bit further.
We want to make our axes to be right at this hinge point. So make sure that we follow in the directions green red green and then blue and then let's do create and now let's go click our door to make sure that it's in the same orientation and it is. Now we could copy this door over you know use our move tool control move over or now that it's a component we can just click our component door 3068 and then click our point right there end point and group.
We want this door to be flipped so we can right click flip along green axes knowing that we have the same green axes as our model. Great now that we've created our two restroom doors I will save this file and I will see you in the next video.
