My house! Sort of.

MyHouse

Welcome to my home! Or at least, a house that appears to bear some resemblance to mine. The roofs are the same color, the garage looks almost exactly like the one attached to my house, and the siding is spot on–but that’s basically where the similarities end. This (not-to-scale) model, constructed in SketchUp, taught me a great deal. I learned how to effectively navigate SketchUp’s interface, although somewhat inefficiently, and how to take advantage of SketchUp’s line prediction. Unfortunately, I was left guessing on how to do a number of necessary actions, such as copying a face (tip: press control when using the Push/Pull tool), since I was unaware until much later that SketchUp had a handy little chart for just that purpose. I was also unaware of the amount of resources there are for beginners to become proficient with SketchUp.

In making this little model of my house, I started from the bottom up–I created the base of my house, and made rectangular prisms to shape each room. That went well! When I started to add roofs, however, everything fell apart. With the overlapping lines in the rooms, trying to use the move tool to literally raise the roof resulted in a web of convoluted peaks and valleys across the top of my house. The only way I found to correct this was by using the line tool and simply drawing in the correct lines from points that may or may not have existed. This worked, although it took a lot more time than I had hoped, and wasn’t always perfect. Lines appeared across the different roofs, which–if I attempted to erase them–left gaping holes.

I realized a little too late that attempting to correct mistakes was infinitely more difficult than creating something the first time around. After noticing that I left out the entire second floor of my house, I attempted to double the height of the body of the model–the largest rectangular prism. This completely ruined the roofs I had created, which meant that I had to go through AGAIN and draw lines to correct them. However, this time the resulting house didn’t look exactly like mine. The model I created seems much larger than my house and was missing certain touches which made it home. Maybe the room sizes were wrong. Maybe the roofs intersected at the wrong places. I’m not sure. All I know is that this house seemed like a poor imitation of the house that I thought I knew like the back of my hand.

pallavkumar

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