Modeling My House in Sketchup
Modeling my childhood home via Sketchup was definitely a more challenging process than creating a doghouse. There were aspects of the build process than I found easy and certainly aspects that I found difficult.
One of the easier portions of this design was creating the 3D wall structure. I found it surprisingly easy to create a set of walls that accurately depicted my house and were to scale. I found myself often comparing each new component to the 3D person object in order to get the scale right.
While the walls were smooth sailing, I soon ran into problems. Designing the roof posed a difficult challenge because my roof does not go in one direction, but three. I found that using midpoint snaps and parallel snaps to be especially useful when designing the roof.
Perhaps the most difficult task I faced was creating realistic windows. The windows were challenging because they required so much more detail compared to the rest of the house. I found myself using the push/pull tool on every part of the window and frame in order to give it a realistic look. I would have spent far to long designing each window if I had not discovered this amazing feature:
My Tip: When designing a part of a model that you think might be used more than once (example: a window, door, tree , etc …), turning the group of objects that make up the feature into a component can be a real time saver. Once an object is a component it can be replicated and moved with a click of button.
All in all, I had a great time modeling my childhood home and I learned a lot about Sketchup along the way.
And yes, my house really is that blue.
Your very blue house looks quite good, Chris, and you even got some transparency on the windows! Yes, components and grouping are very important time savers, but more important is the process of having a goal in mind, learning the technique needed and applying it to your specific problem. We’ll go through that process over and over this term.