Sketchup 17 1 – Create 3d Design Concepts

This should be a quick beginners-introduction of Sketchup for architects. I want to show you quickly how to make a 3D CAD model of a building using probably the easiest-to-learn software in the field of building architecture: SketchUp. This software can be downloaded for free from sketchup.com.

• 3d Concept Design
• Create 3d Design Online

For now you are not supposed to have much previous experience in this software, all you need to do is go through this step-by-step guide and follow the instructions and of course a little practice afterwards. You will not need to read tons of boring theories preliminarily, instead you will study while drawing a real house.

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First we start with the basics of SketchUp. It's very important to know what tools are available for you and to apply these tools to perform certain tasks, and this is the main goal of this tutorial. Once you are experienced enough in using SketchUp tools you will be proposed to apply these tools to start drawing a house. In this lesson you will study how to prepare and import blueprints as the basis of your design, how to setup the software for easier work and finally how to outline and erect exterior walls.

So, let's get started. Open SketchUp. You can see empty area with just a model of a person that is useful to keep drawing proportions. There are only about a dozen tools in SketchUp that covers all you need to draw a house, and you will study these tools during this lesson. Most of the tools that you need are on the Large Tool Set toolbar, please activate it by menu View/Toolbars/ Large Tool Set (Fig. 1). Please find some description of tools and shortcuts (solid circles denote default shortcut, dashed circle denotes manually added shortcut – see below how to do this) on Table 1 and Fig.2.

Using shortcuts will significantly boost your performance. But it's up to you weather to memorize them. Instead, you can reach tools via toolbox. Go to menu Window/Preferences/Shortcuts if you need to manage shortcuts.

Now, let's get to modeling. You probably have floor plans of your house – either made by architect or hand drawn by you. Depending on the format of those drawings (JPG, PNG, PDF, DWG/DXF Wondershare filmora 8 7 0 – video and photo editing. etc.) the following procedure may change a little bit. Let's consider raster graphics formats first as it's the most common case that moreover requires some additional work in comparison to CAD formats like DWG/DXF.

Use drag&drop method to place the file with floor plan into SketchUp. Find the list of supported formats on the figure above. Alternatively, you can use Import… dialog under the menu file.

First of all, let's specify units and precision. You don't need to operate within the precision of 1mm or 1/16', in building design reasonable precision is 1cm or 1'. Go to menu Window/Model info/Units.

If you work with inches – specify Inches as default units. Press to apply changes. When you type dimensions in default units, you can omit unit sign. For instance, if your default units are Inches you can just enter 2'6 and SketchUp will interpret this to be 2'-6'. But you need to type 700mm because mm isn't default unit. Turn on and setup length snapping to be 10mm or 1' to avoid fractional dimensions (like 2567mm) when drawing with mouse.

Let's make this floor plan properly scaled so that we can outline structures, furniture – whatever is needed. With tool press and measure current value of any known dimension – no mater interior or exterior. Try to use the largest dimension to minimize error. We may use 6330mm – width of the Living room. You will see as-measured dimension in the bottom left corner in the white text box. The current dimension is usually wrong. To specify true value just type that correct dimension (6330mm) right after you measured it. Note: do NOT try to place cursor in the text box – this won't work. Just type.

Again, if you are using units that differs from default units (for example, model units are mm and you want to enter 14″), you need to type units as well right after numerical value. Possible dimensions to be typed are 1'2″, 2500mm, 2.5m etc. Do not type any spaces or dashes. You can omit units, in this case SketchUp presumes default model units.

3d Concept Design

So, you have typed correct dimension of the previously measured wall. Click Yes in pop-up to confirm scaling of the entire model and now you have your floor plan in real-world scale. To check this, measure again – you must obtain proper dimension.

Now, let's protect the floor plan from any occasional changes. , Explode; on face, , Make group; , Lock. Now you are unable to edit the floor plan picture – and you don't need this.

Time to draw lines! Use tools 'R, L, E' to outline exterior of the house. Use 'X-Ray' style (in Styles tool box) to see floor plan behind shape you are drawing. Please note that SketchUp extensively uses snapping – when you hover mouse over points or edges SketchUp builds additional temporary construction lines that make drawing process easier. Now you have drawing similar like this:

Use 'F' to specify walls thickness. Select your shape, press 'F', click, drag and drop, then type the wall thickness to give more precision (e.g. 300mm, or 12″) and press . If you are OK with approximate dimension, do nothing after you drop the mouse. This technics is common for all drawing tools in SketchUp.

Delete interior part by selecting internal surface and pressing DEL, or with 'E' tool. In 3D view use 'P' tool to specify height of the walls.

Resuming, now you have basic skills in SketchUp, you are able to import a picture as a substrate for your future house, scale that picture to obtain correct dimensions, outline and erect walls.

In the next lessons we will continue to work on this house. We will place openings, roof, porch and walkway – basically exterior of the house.

To create a 3D model in SketchUp, you're constantly switching among the drawing tools, views, components, and organizational tools. In this article, you find several examples that illustrate ways you can use these tools together to model a specific shape or object.

The examples illustrate a few of the different applications for creating 3D models in SketchUp: woodworking, modeling parts or abstract objects, and creating buildings. The examples are loosely ordered from the simple to the complex.

Drawing a chair

In the following video, you see three ways to draw a 3D model of a chair. In the first two examples, you see two methods for creating the same chair:

• Subtractive: Extrude a rectangle to the height of the chair. Then use the Push/Pull tool () to cut away the chair shape.
• Additive: Start by modeling the chair seat. Then extrude the back and the legs with the Push/Pull tool.

In the third example, you see how to create a more detailed and complex model, using components to simplify modeling the chair legs and rungs on the back of the chair.

Drawing a bowl, dome, or sphere

In this example, you look at one way to draw a bowl and how to apply the technique for creating a bowl to a dome or sphere.

In a nutshell, to create bowl, you draw a circle on the ground plane and a profile of the bowl's shape directly above the circle. Then you use the Follow Me tool to turn the outline into a bowl by having it follow the original circle on the ground plane.

Here's how the process works, step-by-step:

Create 3d Design Online

1. With the Circle tool (), draw a circle on the ground plane. These steps are easier if you start from the drawing axes origin point. The size of this circle doesn't matter.
2. Hover the mouse cursor over the origin so that the cursor snaps to the origin and then move the cursor up the blue axis.
3. Starting from the blue axis, draw a circle perpendicular to the circle on the ground plane (that is, locked to the red or green axis). To encourage the inference, orbit so that the green or red axis runs approximately left to right along the screen. If the Circle tool doesn't stay in the green or red inference direction, press and hold the Shift key to lock the inference. The radius of this second circle represents the outside radius of your bowl.
4. With the Offset tool (), create an offset of this second circle. The offset distance represents the bowl thickness. Check out the following figure to see how your model looks at this point.
   
5. With the Line tool (), draw two lines: one that divides the outer circle in half and one that divides the inner circle that you created with the Offset tool.
6. With the Eraser tool (), erase the top half of the second circle and the face that represents the inside of the bowl. When you're done, you have a profile of the bowl.
7. With the Select tool (), select the edge of the circle on the ground plane. This is the path the Follow Me tool will use to complete the bowl.
8. With the Follow Me tool (), click the profile of the bowl. Your bowl is complete and you can delete the circle on the ground plane. The following figure shows the bowl profile on the left and the bowl on the right.

You can use these same steps to create a dome by simply drawing your profile upside down. To create a sphere, you don't need to modify the second circle to create a profile at all. Check out the following video see how to create a sphere.

Creating a cone

In SketchUp, you can create a cone by resizing a cylinder face or by extruding a triangle along a circular path with the Follow Me tool.

To create a cone from a cylinder, follow these steps:

1. With the Circle tool, draw a circle.
2. Use the Push/Pull tool to extrude the circle into a cylinder.
3. Select the Move tool ().
4. Click a cardinal point on the top edge of the cylinder, as shown on the left in the figure. A cardinal point is aligned with the red or green axis and acts as a resize handle. To find a cardinal point, hover the Move tool cursor around the edge of the top cylinder; when the circle edge highlighting disappears, this indicates a cardinal point.
5. Move the edge to its center until it shrinks into the point of a cone.
6. Click at the center to complete the cone, as shown on the left in the figure.

Here are the steps to model a cone by extruding a triangle along a circular path:

1. Draw a circle on the ground plane. You'll find it's easier to align your triangle with the circle's center if you start drawing the circle from the axes origin.
2. With the Line tool (), draw a triangle that's perpendicular to the circle. (See the left image in the following figure.
3. With the Select tool (), select the face of the circle.
4. Select the Follow Me tool () and click the triangle face, which creates a cone almost instantaneously (as long as your computer has the sufficient memory). You can see the cone on the right in the following figure.

Creating a pyramidal hipped roof

In SketchUp, you can easily draw a hipped roof, which is just a simple pyramid. For this example, you see how to add the roof to a simple one-room house, too.

To draw a pyramid (pull up a pyramidal hipped roof):

1. With the Rectangle tool (), draw a rectangle large enough to cover your building. To create a true pyramid, create a square instead of a rectangle. The SketchUp inference engine tells you when you're rectangle is a square or a golden section.
2. With the Line tool (), draw a diagonal line from one corner to its opposite corner.
3. Draw another diagonal line from one corner to another. In the figure, you see how the lines create an X. The example shows the faces in X-Ray view so you can see how the rectangle covers the floor plan.
   
4. Select the Move tool () and hover over the center point until a green inference point is displayed.
5. Click the center point.
6. Move the cursor in the blue direction (up) to pull up the roof or pyramid, as shown in the figure. If you need to lock the move in the blue direction, press the Up Arrow key as you move the cursor.
7. When your roof or pyramid is at the desired height, click to finish the move.

Modeling a building from a footprint

In SketchUp, the easiest way to start a 3D building model is with its footprint. After you have a footprint, you can subdivide the footprint and extrude each section to the correct height.

Here are a few tips for finding a building's footprint:

• If you're modeling an existing building, trace the outline of the building with the drawing tools. Unless the building is obscured by trees, you can find an aerial photo on Google Maps and trace a snapshot. From within SketchUp, you can capture images from Google and load them directly into a model, as shown in the following figure.
• If you don't have an aerial photo of the existing building you want to model, you may need to try the old fashioned route: measuring the exterior to create the footprint and drawing the footprint from scratch. If literally taking measurements of an entire building is impractical, you can employ tricks such as using the measurement of a single brick to estimate overall dimensions or taking a photo with an object or person whose length you do know. See Measuring Angles and Distances to Model Precisely for more details.

If you're able to start with a snapshot of your footprint, the following steps guide you through the process of tracing that footprint. First, set up your view of the snapshot:

1. Select Camera > Standard Views > Top from the menu bar.
2. Select Camera > Zoom Extents to make sure you can see everything in your file.
3. Use the Pan and Zoom tools to frame a good view of top of the building that you want to model. You need to be able to see the building clearly in order to trace its footprint. See Viewing a Model for details about using these tools.
4. Choose View > Face Style > X-Ray from the menu bar. In X-Ray view, you can see the top view of the building through the faces that you draw to create the footprint.

After you set up your snapshot, try the techniques in the following steps to trace the building footprint:

1. Set the drawing axes to a corner of your building. See Adjusting the Drawing Axes for details.
2. With the Rectangle tool (), draw a rectangle that defines part of your building. Click a corner and then click an opposite corner to draw the rectangle. If your building outline includes non–90-degree corners, curves or other shapes that you can't trace with the Rectangle tool, use whichever other drawing tools you need to trace your building's footprint.
3. Continue drawing rectangles (or lines and arcs) until the entire building footprint is defined by overlapping or adjacent rectangles, as shown on the left in the following figure. Make sure there aren't any gaps or holes; if there are, fill them in with more rectangles.
4. With the Eraser tool (), delete all the edges in the interior of the building footprint. When you're done, you should have a single face defined by a perimeter of straight edges. You may want to turn off X-Ray view, as shown on the right in the following figure, in order to see your faces and final footprint clearly.
   
5. Some simple buildings have a single exterior wall height, but most have more than one. After you complete the footprint, use the Line tool to subdivide your building footprint into multiple faces, each corresponding to a different exterior wall height, as shown in the following figure. Then, you can use the Push/Pull tool () to extrude each area to the correct building height.

Creating a polyhedron

In this example, you see how to create a polyhedron, which repeats faces aligned around an axis.

To illustrate how you can create a complex shape with basic repeating elements, this example shows you how to create a polyhedron called a rhombicosidodecahedron, which is made from pentagons, squares, and triangles, as shown in the figure.

The following steps explain how to create this shape by repeating faces around an axis:

1. Establish the correct angle between the first square and the pentagon, and between the first triangle and the square. See Measuring Angles and Distances to Model Precisely for details about measuring angles with the Protractor tool.
2. Mark the exact center point of the pentagon, which is shown here on a green surface that has been temporarily added to the pentagon component. This is the axis around which the copies will be aligned.
   
3. Make the square and triangle components, and then group the two components. For details about components, see Developing Components and Dynamic Components. To learn about groups, see Organizing a Model.
4. Preselect the objects that you want to copy and rotate (in this case, the group you just created).
5. Select the Rotate tool ().
6. Align the Rotate cursor with the pentagon face and click the center point of the pentagon, as shown in the following figure.
7. Click the Rotate cursor at the point where the tips of the square, triangle, and pentagon come together.
8. Press the Ctrl key to toggle on the Rotate tool's copy function. The Rotate cursor changes to include a plus sign (+).
9. Move the cursor to rotate the selection around the axis. If you originally clicked the point where the tips of the square, triangle, and pentagon came together, the new group snaps into its new position, as shown in the following figure.
   
10. Click to finish the rotate operation.
11. Continue rotating copies around the axis until the shape is complete. As you build the rhombicosidodecahedron, you need to group different components together, and rotate copies of those groups around various component faces.