I got as far as I could with mapping West Gym. The overall process was a pretty big headache for me. The most defining feature of West Gym is the parabolic roof, which is next to impossible to build in Sketchup. As I mentioned before, after hours of trying with the regular set of Sketchup Tools, I downloaded the Soap Skin extension, which allows you to create things like bubbles or curved surfaces.
Ultimately I ended up creating a different sketchup file from my original and playing around for a few days. This is where the majority of my time was spent, rather than on detailing like wall color. I had a lot of trouble getting things to behave the way I wanted them to, despite watching a lot of tutorials on the subject. I used the rotate and copy tools pretty extensively, as well as lots of maneuvering around axises and frequent undos. My roof began something like this: and eventually became more like this:
I then copied over my file and scaled it up, as well as moved it around. .
The next part of the process was to smooth the roof and make it look more like the top of West Gym, as well as add details. I really struggled with this part. Because my sections had so many pieces, they did not smooth well by hand and took a long time. Ultimately, I did not completely finish the model.
My final product looks like this:
I’m pretty proud of what I learned and the amount of work I put into everything. However, I wish I would have been better at time management or asked for help while I was struggling with the roof, since it led to me being unable to properly complete or smooth the model over. Overall, this was definitely a learning experience and gives me a new appreciation for architects who not only design these buildings, but most likely build them in a design program similar to Sketchup.
While the final product might not be as “finished”-looking as you’d hoped, I am super impressed at how you dealt with the challenge presented by the roof. I probably wouldn’t have thought to download an extension to add on to sketchup, but once you mentioned it, I looked into extensions for sketchup and realized that there are a bunch of super helpful ones. I’ll readily admit that had I been modeling the West Gym, I probably would have tried to make the roof using (or abusing) the “pie” and “push-pull” tools, but your way of doing it was clearly a much more effective and accurate strategy.