General workflow tips for house design?

Irkie500

Hey Everyone,

I find that when designing a house it takes me a very long time to even get the basic structure built(floor, walls, doors, etc.). I have been using sketchup for a while and consistently use shortcuts, hotkeys and whatnot, however I still feel like it is taking me way longer than it should. Now part of this could be because I am a perfectionist, and hate having strange dimensions. I for instance cannot just "place" a door frame somewhere on a wall, I always measure to keep things consistent.

I was for example working on laying down a floor plan for a smallish house, took me an hour just to get the floor and walls done. I started by mapping each room out, connecting them into one floor and grouping together. Then added in the walls by doing offsets on each room, deleting the inside lines from adjoining walls. Does that method sound efficient? Hard to explain without images but hopefully you get the idea.

I just tend to get frustrated because I have these great visions of what I want to do, and have the hardest time implementing them.

When doing a slanted roof with two separate angles, say perpendicular to each other, what is the best method for combining those into a single roof? Should they be draw separately, then combined with intersecting objects, and delete the spare lines/geometry?

If anyone has any tips or tricks they use on a regular basis that they want to share it would be appreciated. I love designing in my spare time and would love to start cranking out some neat homes.

Thanks to all who reply.

kaas

I think you will get totally different replies here from every person. It takes time to try and find out a workflow that fits you.

I gave up on getting the fastest result and focused on accuracy and having fun while working. After doing a lot of projects in SketchUp I'm still refining my process and building my libraries although by doing so, it gets faster.

While modelling objects like doors and windows, I spend some extra time making them in a way so they can be easily reused in another project - even with slightly different dimensions or details. They are build as nested objects (groups) just like they would be created in real life. For instance, a door has nested objects for: frame, door, glass, handle, etc

Plugins that help in the process are:

FredoScale (Fredo6) - easily scale complex objects - even with nested hierarchies.
Profile builder2 pro (by Dale Martens) - build cavity walls just by tracing the outline
Mirror by TIG
Solid Inspector (by Thom Thom) - I use a solid-based workflow. Building materials are solids so everything I model is a solid as well. The design gets assembled from individual elements in SketchUp just like it would on the construction site.

Irkie500

Cheers Kaas, appreciate the reply. Profile builder looks amazing! definitely need to check it out. Will make adding crown molding and cabinet profiles much much easier. I too model in a solid based workflow as it makes more sense in my head, and also easier to work with later down the road. Also good tips on using nested components; I find when I make my doors for example I just make the door all one component and do not break it down From the frame, door, knob, etc.

numerobis

@kaas said:

FredoScale (Fredo6) - easily scale complex objects - even with nested hierarchies.

Interesting. I remember that i got crashes using Fredoscale on components with more than one level of nested groups or components. Maybe i have to try it again.

mk11

Here's our (current) workflow for drawing plans... I say that as we have changed our workflow several times over the years since using SU and LO for all our CDs. As a general note - we have used Buildedge for a while now to quickly draw walls and openings until we have a completed schematic model at which point we "commit" the model and work w basic SU functionality. Buildedge is super fast at quickly drawing walls, openings, floors and roofs and is very versatile for plan modifications. Once the plans is solid, we commit the Buildedge model to SU. As far as getting your model onto paper space... We tried Michael Brightman's workflow for a while w good success, our main issue with it was that you are constantly clicking inside multiple containers (groups) to modify things. We then switched to our own layer structure w simple layer grouping and Skalp as the main source for creating section fills. This also works great with one drawback... If you use SU models in the field on iPads as we do, the plan fills and sections now don't work because you used a plugin to create them - I'd say if you don't have that need, go that route. We now use Nick Sonders process w our own layer structure and it seems to work best for our case.