The 3D software with the gentlest learning curve is SketchUp. Formerly owned by Google, it puts an emphasis on ease of use and compatibility with other popular platforms like Google Earth. This is the software that many of the 3D buildings you might have seen in Google Earth were created with. Despite the user-friendly goals, SketchUp is a powerful program used by industry professionals and will let you start making impressively detailed models very quickly, which can be exported in a variety of formats.
Assignment
In class, we modeled a simple dog house to get a feel for the software. (If you’d like to review that project at your own pace, you can watch a tutorial video of it here.)
Your assignment is to use the techniques we employed to make a model of the house you grew up in. Don’t worry about photo-realistic accuracy, just try to get the basic features, colors and textures in place, so that someone who knows the house (your parents, say) could recognize it. If you grew up in a ranch house, then your building should be long and contain only one row of windows, whereas if you grew up in a bungalow or a cape cod you’ll have a taller building with a half or full second row. You get the idea. And don’t worry about the inside! We’re just focusing on the external features for now.
When you are happy with your model, export it as a 2D graphic and save it to the Google Drive shared folder.
During the next class we’ll set up blog access, and you’ll use this image to write your first post along with some thoughts on your process. As you model, think about how easy/hard it was, what elements particularly bogged you down, what compromises you had to make, etc. Also think about a technique or tool that you wish you had figured out sooner, so that you can provide a tip for other novice SketchUp users and share your knowledge.
Resources
There are millions of SketchUp tutorials available online (just google SketchUp + what-you-want-to-do and you’ll be overwhelmed with options), but here’s a targeted list of resources to get you started.
- If you haven’t already, download and print out a Quick Reference Card, so that you can start using keyboard shortcuts to switch between tools and get good fast.
- Watch the Getting Started with SketchUp tutorial videos. The first two are particularly useful for exteriors, but the third and fourth will give you more advanced techniques and tool tips, if you’d like to explore further.
- SketchUp has also put out a couple series of videos that let you watch pros at work and give you great advice.
- A good quick start guide is SketchUp Basics for K-12 Education, which is where the dog house example comes from (video 2).
- If you have a question about a particular tool or technique, the SketchUp Training Series is the place to go.
Lynda.com is a paid service, so not open to everyone, but you can access its tutorials by logging in with your Carleton ID. If you want a more structured course, their SketchUp Essential Training is a great place to start.
Feel free to leave a comment if you’re having trouble, or if you discover something really great, and feel free to respond if you know the answer to a question.
Happy modeling!
SketchUp is in general easy to use and has a really intuitive interface, but drawing in 3D can always be challenging, especially when you are used to visualizing in 2D.
Using SketchUp was pretty fun, and the different tools that are available keep it engaging. I found that I completely forgot that there was a back to the house until I had already saved it, although I did remember the sides so I can’t completely blame the 3D aspect of it.
Orbiting, panning and saving often can help recognize and fix errors earlier in the process.
SketchUp is pretty easy to use but it can be hard to use sometimes because it often moves things in the wrong direction, and randomly puts lines where there should be none. It is pretty fun to mess around with though!
The ability to group objects together in SketchUp made it very easy to copy windows and doors around my house. I still struggled with rotating them around a plane, even after watching some videos!
I agree Max, grouping and making components (repeated elements that can be instanced throughout the model) is one of the most powerful features of making more advanced models.
In modeling my childhood home, I found SketchUp to be fairly powerful for visualizing 3 dimensional objects at a high level, but difficult and quite time consuming when attempting to add details. For example, creating the shape of the house, including the walls, floors, and roof was not too difficult, however, adding details like windows and window frames, doors and door frames, and the sloping sidewalk that led to the back of house time extremely time consuming. However, this dynamic of difficult details should be expected of most tools. I also wish there were more textures. However, my overall impression of SketchUp is that it is a powerful tool that’s easy to learn how to use, if you want to take the time necessary to explore the details.
Sketchup is very easy to use if one is trying to just draw basic structures like basic houses or dog houses or any rectangular buildings, but to create greater detail and more realistic buildings, one must look up and research sketch up techniques in order to attain greater detail and more sharper 3D images
Sketchup was fairly easy to get the hang of after playing with the program for a little bit. I found it challenging to figure out how exactly to translate my memories of what my house looks like to a 3D depiction, but watching tutorials helped.
I found sketchup to be fairly intuitive. I sometimes had trouble judging scale when transitioning from 2D to 3D. It seems very easy to create non-detailed buildings, however it does become more difficult when trying to create a detailed 3D object (such as a house).
I found that operating and maneuvering in SketchUp was fairly intuitive and did not have much of a learning curve initially. However, I did find some difficulty in using some of the higher-end and more detailed functions of the program.