In the spirit of learning by making and diving in head first, we are starting with some relatively easy 3D modeling. Our collective project for the term will revolve around Carleton’s built environment and building histories, and fabricating an interactive reproduction of it in 3D. We will be discussing the theoretical implications of such a project throughout the term, but since the skills required to model in 3D are complex, we will begin practicing in week one.
The 3D software with the gentlest learning curve is SketchUp. Formerly owned by Google (but since sold to Trimble), it puts an emphasis on ease of use and compatibility and the free version is now browser based so you can use any machine to get started. This is the software that many of the early 3D buildings in Google Earth were created with. Despite the user-friendly goals, SketchUp is a powerful program used by architectural and design professionals and will let you start making impressively detailed models very quickly, which can then be exported in a variety of formats.
Getting Started with SketchUp
In class, we started modeling a simple dog house to get a feel for the software. If you’ve never used SketchUp before, I would encourage you to follow the tutorial videos 2-4 of the list here to get a sense of what all the tools do.
NB: This video series was made using a previous version of SketchUp so the window may look a little different, but the basic tools and icons are all the same in the browser based version.
Assignment
Your assignment is to use the techniques you just learned 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, SAVE IT to your Trimble account and DON’T FORGET YOUR PASSWORD
During the next class we’ll set up blog access, and you’ll use these images 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,
- what 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.
LinkedInLearning (formerly 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!
34 replies on “Intro: SketchUp and 3D Basics”
I found Sketch-Up to be relatively hard to understand. I was not a fan of the orbit feature, and moving the house to different angles was a struggle.
I agree Andrew. The orbit and camera’s angular positioning is something that is awkward to grasp. There’s also a move drag function that moves the position of the camera itself and not the angle, which helped me a lot to get better views of my build.
I quite enjoyed working with Sketchup. Many of the aspects of it I found to be intuitive, and at a base level it made creating a house not too complicated. One of the biggest struggles I encountered was trying to make changes on something more “foundational” to the structure of my house after I had already built onto it. To fix this, I would often add little extra pieces or have to make a bunch of small adjustments on pieces of the building so it wouldn’t look out of place. About halfway through the assignment, I realized that instead of trying to add rectangles onto the sides of buildings it was much simpler to just use the line option, which made adding pieces like the room easier.
I agree that making more precise changes was much more difficult than adding basic pieces!
That is a good tip to know. I had the same problem while making my house, I will definitely be adding lines next time.
Using lines instead of trying to draw rectangles is definitely something I will keep in mind for next time we use StetchUp. Thanks!
Things went fairly well for this assignment, wildly surpassing my expectations given how my last experience with SketchUp went (I got lost half way through the class and pretty much gave up trying to follow along on my computer). There were certainly things in the tutorials that I didn’t quite get the hang of and that I ended up having to abandon/work around, but overall I learned a lot through this assignment.
Great to hear you had a positive experience Nicole! I remember being frustrated with SketchUp as well in that class and its great so see we’ve both become more experienced.
I found SketchUp to be not as difficult as I expected it to be, since for the most part it is very intuitive. I am very glad that I have a mouse that I can plug in to my laptop, as I feel like it would be a much more difficult program to use with just the mousepad.
As someone who just used the mousepad, I will confirm your idea that it was definitely a bit more challenging to make my house. However, I eventually got the hang of it and the process went much smoother.
I agree! I tried using my laptop’s touch-pad while my roommate was sleeping and I eventually gave up and went back to using my mouse.
I agree with the part about the mousepad. I worked on a computer in the library so I did not have to worry about not having a mouse either.
Using SketchUp reminded me of playing video games as a kid, however there were some frustrating features that reminded me it was a different software. My biggest struggle was getting the roof to work. Most of the time the line would move side to side and not up, so I ended up building vertical triangles and push/pulling those into a roof shape. My second struggle was when I had two rectangles adjacent to each other, random lines would appear that would delete part of my house when I erased them. That being said, I felt like it was a pretty easy software to learn.
I enjoyed the process of constructing the outside of my house in SketchUp, and it was fun to see the finished product of my work next to the Google Maps street view of my actual house. I also sent pictures to my family, who appreciated the similarities. One challenge I had was making the chimney stick up vertically instead of at the angle of the roof. How can I fix this issue? Additionally, despite following the exact steps in the video, my roof would not hang over the edge of the wall like the tutorial demonstrated. This issue was slightly frustrating, but overall I believe that the model resembles my actual home.
I had the same experience with my chimney! I fiddled with it for a long time but couldn’t figure it out.
SketchUp was initially a challenge, as I’d had little to no experience with the tool beyond 7th grade projects (where we’d basically been guided through the process step-by-step) and was frankly unfamiliar with the tools within the program. However, the videos provided shed a lot of light on the process, and more and more the cliched aphorisms of “Practice Makes Perfect” and “Fake it ’til you Make it” began to apply. While time consuming, the program was fun and accessible to beginners.
While this was not my first experience with SketchUp, it was by far the most successful. Previously I have tried to model buildings from photos or historical documents, but using a more familiar building, in this case my house, yielded better results. Rather than getting frustrated by not getting the small details perfect, my preexisting knowledge of the features I needed to include made my experience in SketchUp the most pleasant to date.
Oh, word? I’d like to hear more about your using SketchUp to model historical buildings. If you’re working off of a photograph, do you have to guesstimate dimensions/ measurements? And if you’re working from a document, do you have to get creative with the appearance of it somewhat?
I had a really similar experience to you (not surprising given our similar backgrounds). An interesting phenomena I think we both experienced was becoming okay with letting small details slide for the sake of the exercise. For me, it was easier for me to let go of things because 1) it is a training exercise and 2) it was my own house, so I was less concerned with accuracy. With historical buildings/projects, however, the concern for detail is much more important because you have the responsibility of an accurate portrayal, making it a much harder thing to sacrifice, even for strictly tutorial purposes.
While I am excited by this software, I am quite terrible at using it for now. My house contains shapes that are not rectangular, and trying to draw symmetrical non-rectangular shapes like three protruding sides of and octagon and a triangle that met the former shape at slope was enough to make me quit for a few hours.
Never give up, Eli! I’m sure there are ways to make that house, it might just be about finding some more specific instructions online or asking Professor Mason.
Using SketchUp was a challenge for me because I had never used it before. However, the tutorial videos were extremely helpful. I eventually made a decent house I was proud of.
While I enjoyed the drag and pull features of Sketchup and found it generally easy to begin, I wish that there had been a less cumbersome way to move around the building and zoom in on certain features. However, it was easy to make something large in just a few settings rather than toggle and enter dimensions before getting any preliminary view.
At first, getting familiar with SketchUp was a challenge for me, as I have next to no experience with modeling or computers in general. However, after the tutorials and fiddling around with all of the tools for awhile, I was able to discover how I could use certain functions to piece together a rough model of my house. It was not as bad as I expected, mostly because I used the rectangle and extruding tools liberally instead of more complicated functions. However, I could not figure out how to set dimensions because for some reason my laptop was not letting me input numbers as the tutorial showed. I also had difficulty with changing shapes I had already made. For instance, I made the front of the house too tall and I just wanted to scooch it down a little bit instead of draw a whole new shape. Overall, it was a pretty good first experience and I’m sure it will get easier as I gain more familiarity with the tools.
My experience with SketchUp started off difficult and got easier with time. As I broke one barrier my process snowballed and everything flowed smoother. One item I could not figure out was how to add a Chimney to a slanted roof. But overall my experience was good.
I enjoyed using Sketchup for this assignment, I found it fairly intuitive to learn as I played around with different tools. I would’ve liked to know how to change the base structures after having made changes to them because I realized halfway through a draft that the house was too small for all of the windows. Other than that, I look forward to getting to use Sketchup some more and learning more efficient and better ways to use the software.
At the beginning of the assignment, I was having a lot of fun with the overall task of building my childhood house. The rectangles were easy enough; however, once I began creating the roof, I was really struggling with completing the little details. I followed the directions of the tutorial video and tried to pull one side of the roof to match the other, but it did not work out. I ended up leaving my roof with a slight gap in the middle. I also struggled with trying to get the windows on the second floor created. They are pushed out in a sort of “mini house-like” way, and it was extremely difficult for me to attach them to the top of my house. Everything seemed like it was supposed to be simple to do but ended up being so hard. In the end, I still enjoyed the creative aspects of this project since it is something I haven’t done in the past.
I would say that the SketchUp experience went relatively well, especially when it came to making basic components. However, there were some rules the tools have that were not entirely intuitive and made creating some parts of the house confusing.
This was my very first experience with SketchUp and even though it was challenging I found it rewarding to learn so much in such a short window of time. It was definitely a little frustrating not to understand some keys and features and also having to figure out some differences that exist on the website when using Mac. However, I’m looking forward to discovering more features that simplify my experience in SketchUp!
I’m also excited to discover more fetures to simplify my experience. Once we get more comfortable with SketchUp and learn the little shortcuts, I feel like it will much more enjoyable to use!
When I was about halfway done (well, “done”) with my model, I discovered that you could download models made by the SketchUp community. I nabbed some models for doorknobs, an outdoor light, etc. and tried to graft them onto my house. It was incredibly frustrating to get them positioned where I wanted them – half the time I would think I had moved something onto the siding, only to realize a moment later that it was just hovering in midair – but I feel that it really paid off in making my model look more like an actual, recognizable house. Hopefully being more experienced with how SketchUp works (moving the camera, placing things on the axes, eg.) will streamline that process.
I love SketchUp. It’s a easy tool for novice and could have been used for higher-level users. It took me half an hour to get familiar with all the buttons and an another hour to finish the assignment.
Was a pretty straightforward / fun assignment. Would love to start a group and work on bigger projects together!
After a very embarrassing long time of trying to figure out all the tools and crying over 2d roofs, I was pretty happy with the final result of my project. I’m not a technology person, but every tool was pretty straightforward and it was easy to make basic shapes and ideas.