Sketching Up a Home

House

 

SketchUp is a neat program that allows you to create 3D models of buildings using geometric shapes and unique textures.

My attempt to create a house using SketchUp was difficult and a bit confusing. The hardest part was creating windows and doors that were the right size. If you’re not careful, the rectangle you
make for your door can turn into something a person could only crawl through!

A tip I wish I had figured out sooner is how to scale items within my SketchUp model. I realized halfway through that I’d made the house too long! An brief explanation on scaling precisely can be found here.

 

House

 

Another tricky challenge was placing the boiler/water heater on the side of the house. To make its cylindrical shape I placed a circle on the ground and then pulled the circle up with the push-pull tool.

I ran into a problem since the bottom of the boiler should hover a few feet off the ground but SketchUp only allows circles to be placed directly on top of flat surfaces. In order to get the cylinder at the height I needed, I first created a short cylinder alongside the wall: I simply created a circle directly on the ground and pulled it up with the push-pull tool. Next, I created another circle right on the top of the cylinder I’d just made and used the push-pull tool to pull the circle up into a cylinder. Once that was done, I erased the first cylinder. This left me with a single cylinder hanging above the ground.

 

Security bars on the windows and doors

The security bars on the windows and doors

One thing I had to make compromises with were windows. Some of them are very small and one has an arch on the top but what they all have in common is that there are metal bars in front of them. They’re not straight up prison bars so I could not recreate them with the line tool. Instead of free-hand drawing the security bars, I left them out.

 

The most enjoyable part of using SketchUp, in my opinion, is assigning textures and colors to the geometric shapes. I had a great time with the paint bucket tool. When you make edits to a texture, any object you previously painted automatically updates to the new options you’ve selected.

Overall, using SketchUp was confusing at first but you will quickly get the hang of it and have a fun time. You can make 3D models both of something simple and something very complex. Check out the video below to see a hologram that shows four 3D models made by ZebraImaging in SketchUp.

smithc3

One Comment

  1. This is a very well written and designed post. Your content (both the model and your prose) is well presented, and you have done a great job of linking out to helpful tutorials, including screen grabs of key features, and even embedded a youtube clip. Well done!

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