Power Up Your Design Skills With SketchUp

SketchUp for Furniture Design is a premium online course that allows you to learn at your own pace. The course is divided into “milestones” that contain a group of related video lessons that you access on-demand. 

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Access to course content begins immediately with purchase. Participants will have unlimited access to the content. This way you can take your time and learn at your own pace. 

In this course Dave Richards will be using the current version of SketchUp Pro on Windows. Most of what he’ll demonstrate can be done with any current version of SketchUp available at SketchUp.com. There you will find versions for both Windows and Mac.

System requirements for SketchUp can be found here. Although you can use SketchUp with a touchpad or other input device, a basic three-button mouse with center scroll wheel/button is advised.

For Windows users, it is a good idea to make sure the drivers for the graphics card are up to date. Windows updates often include graphics drivers, but they are rarely the most up-to-date version. Best practice is to go to the graphics card maker’s site to download and install their latest drivers. After installing them reboot the computer.

If you are new to SketchUp, take some time to go through the Square One videos on the SketchUp YouTube channel. This will help you get a handle on the use of the native tools.

For this course presentation, Dave Richards is using SketchUp Pro. Pro is not required for the modeling lessons. For the modeling lessons, you can use SketchUp Make (if you have it) or the web-based versions; with the web-based versions the interface is different (unfortunately, extensions do not work with the web-based versions). In milestone 5, Dave is using LayOut, which is part of SketchUp Pro. That means to practice lessons in Milestone 5, you will need to download Pro, which has a 7-day free trial period.

What "tool" you have - Mac or PC - should not prevent you from executing any of the lessons in this course. SketchUp versions are available for both Mac and PC, and the differences between the two are strictly cosmetic. For instance, on a PC you can create multiple rows of docked toolbars while the Mac version allows only one across the top. Functionally, the primary difference is the modifier key for functions like Move/Copy and Rotate/Copy. On a PC, the modifier is Ctrl; on a Mac it's Option. Another is the Alt and Command. The modifier keys are identified at the lower left of the screen when the tool is selected.