Modeling Framing in Your SketchUp Models with House Builder and 1001Bit Tools
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DOWNLOAD House Builder Here
DOWNLOAD 1001Bit Tools Here
In today’s video, we’re going to use a pair of extensions to create a wood framed house model in SketchUp.
The first is called house builder – it’s an extension from TIG that as far as I know, can only be downloaded from a forum post in SketchUcation. The second is 1001 Bit tools, which I’ve talked about a bit in the past. It has a great rafter framing tool that we’re going to use.
Housebuilder allows you to generate framed wall assemblies, as well as generating roofs, and probably most importantly, openings in those wall assemblies.
We’re going to start off by drawing the outline of our house, then we’ll use house builder to generate our framed walls.
Note that you can adjust all the settings for the framing in the settings section.
Once you’ve drawn the outline of your framing, you can come in and add walls along the lines that you’ve outlined.
Now, you can add openings using the opening creation tools. This extension comes with the ability to quickly add door and window openings, as well as move them around within house builder assemblies. This allows you to quickly and easily generate openings in your framed walls with proper framing.
Once we’ve developed this for our first floor, we’re going to add rafters with 1001 bit tools. I will note, you could also use and extension like Medeek Truss from Nathaniel Wilkerson, but that is a paid extension, where 1001 bit is free.
Now, we can add our upper level framing, then we’ll work on our roof. In this case, what we’re going to do is use 1001 bit tools to generate the rafters along our edges. Once again, Medeek Truss gives you more options for this if you don’t mind paying a few bucks.
To use 1001 bit tools, we’re going to start by generating the footprint of our roof as a face. Then we’ll use the “Automatically Create Hip Roof” function to generate the roof faces, then finally we’ll use the generate rafter function to finalize our roof.
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About Justin Geis
Hi, I'm Justin Geis, and I'm the founder of The SketchUp Essentials. I started using SketchUp as part of my work as a general contractor in 2008. I quickly realized the power of the software and started using it for personal projects. I started The SketchUp Essentials as a place to share easy to follow SketchUp tutorials and tips to help everyone harness the power of 3D Modeling in their lives. When not working with SketchUp, I enjoy playing soccer and spending time with my wife and our two dogs.
