What to read after SketchUp to LayOut?

The SketchUp to LayOut book is the essential guide for woodworkers, carpenters, architects, contractors, builders, and designers who already know the basics on how to use SketchUp, but are looking to create stunning presentations to visualize their ideas with their clients using LayOut.

Before you even begin modeling that first rectangle, you'll need to fully understand which type of model you should be building for LayOut. Don't make the mistake of creating twice the amount of work for yourself because you didn't properly organize your model ahead of time.

I'll teach you how to save time and frustration by organizing your model so YOU are in control of how your model viewports look.

The entire first half of the book is dedicated to preparing your model for LayOut. From organizational workflow, to scenes and styles. I share with you my 5 point method I use to visualize and prepare every scene I create for LayOut.

Not only will you understand exactly what those five points are, you'll learn multiple ways to control them. Using these methods, you will gain complete control over the look of your viewports in LayOut. You will master every aspect of a SketchUp scene and style, to enable you to create impressive presentations and drawings in the least amount of time possible.

This book is designed for construction professionals who don't have any prior experience in LayOut at all. But it's also structured in a way that lets you look up specific tasks or methods without having to read the book cover to cover. I’ll save you all the time and frustration that I went through when I first learned LayOut by quickly orienting you with the workspace, then jumping right in to creating your own titleblock, inserting SketchUp models, and adding dimensions.

You should have some basic knowledge on how to use SketchUp. But if you're just starting out, you'll have complete access to my entire library of tutorials and videos for free on my website to bring you up to speed quickly.

Every important aspect of LayOut is explained in the book, with step by step instructions for you to follow along. Learn exactly what you need to know and skip over all the little details you don’t need to worry about. The book has been updated for 2014 so you'll even learn about the new Auto-Text tag feature, saving you a ton of time on those redundant text edits.

The sample projects in the book are real projects, not hypothetical meaningless shapes and boxes, so you can see exactly how to apply the concepts you learn in context with the real world. Plus, the SketchUp and LayOut files are included with each book download so you’ll be able to follow along and discover for yourself how to organize a similar project of your own. The sample projects include a woodworking table project, akitchen project, and a three story house project.

At the same time, each step by step instruction can be read and followed independently from the project. So if you need to go back and reference a certain part of the book to learn how to do something specific, you'll be able to do that too.

I’ve consulted with many of the best SketchUp gurus in the world! I’ve hung out with Nick Sonder at the SketchUp basecamp conference. I’ve interviewed Aidan Chopra, SketchUp evangelist and author of “Google SketchUp for Dummies”, Eric Schimelpfenig from SketchThis.net, and Alexander Schreyer, author of “Architectural Design with SketchUp”. I’ve also consulted with Mike Brightman, author of “The SketchUp Workflow for Architecture”, Daniel Tal, author of “Rendering In SketchUp”, and many other great SketchUp experts.