10 Ways to Create Curved, Rounded, and Organic Shapes in SketchUp

what's up guys Justin here with the sketch of essentials calm back with another sketch up quick tutorial for you in this video I wanted to talk about ten different ways that you can create both rounded as well as complex curved shapes within Sketchup before I get started today's videos brought to you by the Sketchup essentials course the Sketchup essentials course is a course that I created to uh basically be the equivalent of a two days start to finish Sketchup training in the course we cover everything from the basics of Sketchup and then we get into more advanced modeling techniques I'm including working with extensions modeling for layout and interior design and photorealistic rendering so as a part of that course I'm there answering questions you can go step by step if that's something you're interested in you want to get some more Sketchup training make sure you check that out at the Sketchup essentials comm slash course now let's go ahead and just jump into it so in this video I wanted to talk about a few different ways that you can create both rounded edges as well as rounded objects within Sketchup so there's a lot of different options for this both using extensions and also not using extensions we're gonna cover both of those in this video so the easiest way to create a curved shape in Sketchup is to use the push/pull tool and extrude it so let's say for example that I was to draw an arc and then I was to fill the arc in by drawing a line along this face you can use the push/pull to extrude this so that you have a round shape so this is probably the easiest thing the first thing that people do in Sketchup is they push-pull a profile that's filled in using the push-pull tool and you can use this not only to add curved faces but also to subtract curved faces so let's say for example that I was to draw this box and then draw an arc along this face I could use the push/pull tool to remove the material along the face of this object as well as adding that material so you can use this both additively and subtractive lis so sometimes though you want to extrude this but you don't necessarily want to fill this object in and so in order to do that we have an extension called JHS power bar and I'll link down below to a bunch of different functions for this extension but in this case what the sixteen has it has an option in here for extrude lines by vector and so what that means is let's say for example that I wanted to create a curve and I wanted to extrude this but it could be a bit difficult to create a face using this line that you can push pull with the push-pull tool what you can do is you can use this extrude lines by vector option and then you can click on this and you can actually extrude this into a face without it having to have any thickness so you can draw curves select them and then extrude them into curved faces using this extension so sometimes you want your curves or your curved objects to follow a path and so when you decide that you want to do this you're gonna use the follow me tool so let's say for example that you were to draw a circle standing up and you had a path that you wanted this to follow along so let's say this circle needed to go along these two lines you can use the follow me tool to extrude this curved shape along this path so what you would do is you would come in here and you would select your two lines they make up your path and you could use the follow me tool to extrude this object along a path and you can see how Sketchup smoothly creates this transition around the edge so you can use this to create different rounded and curved objects so let's say for example that I didn't necessarily want that to be a full circle let's say that I wanted this to be a curved edge that follows this curve so you would do the same thing you would select your path then use the follow me tool to extrude this around the corner so you can see how you could use this to create different kinds of trims and other things as well so you could add this you could do this around a complete circular path again let's say you wanted this to go on the inside you could just come in here draw your profile and then select your box instead of having to select the individual lines then activate the follow me tool to extrude this along your object and you can see how what this allows you to do is this allows you to create a curved face along the end of this and you might have to come in here and close off this in face but you can see how Sketchup seamlessly merges this a rule along this edge so sometimes you don't always want to use the follow me tool to add material to an object well in this case what you can do is you can also use the follow me tool to subtract material from an object so in this case let's say that I had a box in here that I wanted to round off these different edges on the top all the way around the perimeter well what we could do is we could use the follow me tool or we could use the arc tool to draw a profile so let's say this was the profile that I wanted to round this off to you could select this top option then you could use the follow me tool with that profile in order to remove material around the edge so that's a very useful way to round off different objects and create round edges by removing material instead of adding it so in addition to being able to extrude shapes long paths and also remove material the follow me tool can also be used to extrude objects in a circle so let's say for example that we were to draw a circle right here in order to come in and draw another circle that's standing up right in the middle of this circle this is how we would create a sphere in Sketchup so all you do is you just click on this object just like we did before activate the follow me tool and click on this face what this does is this extrude this object along that circle to create an uninterrupted sphere shape so not only could you use this to create a sphere you could also use this if you wanted to create a profile and then kind of leave it in a circle so let's say for example that I was just to draw a quick curving profile we'll race out this extra we could just select this face use the follow me tool to kind of lay this in a circle to create a curving shape it's basically centered on the center of this circle sometimes though you also want to round off multiple edges at once and so there's an extension that's very useful for rounding off edges it's called round corner and so let's say for example that I had a box with another box along the face and I wanted to round off all of these edges well obviously coming in here and trying to figure out how to do that with the follow me tool would be fairly difficult and so what I could do instead is I could use the extension round corner and I could just select this object activate the extension and you can see how this shows me a preview of all these lines this is how this would round off all of these corners so I could actually come in here and I can set the offset value of what I want to round everything off to and then I can go ahead and click to execute and what that'll do is that'll come in here and this will round off all of the different edges for me so let's say for example that I was to let's so not only can you do that with with all of the faces in your object you can also come in here and just select different faces that you want to round off when you have the tool active so you can see how this gives me a preview of what edges are gonna be rounded and how far they're going to be rounded so this is a great alternative if you don't want to come in here and do all of that manually using the follow me tool so sometimes when you're trying to create rounded or curved objects you don't necessarily want to take a square object and round it off or extrude an object along a path sometimes you want to do more of a sculpting type option and so what you can do is there's a built-in set of tools and sketchup called the sandbox tools and you can use the sandbox tools first of all to create a grid so there's an object there's an option in the sandbox tools for from scratch and what that'll do is that'll allow you to create a grid that'll allow you to create a grid within your model and so once you have a grid you can come in here you can use a tool in here called the smooth tool and what the smooth tool does is the smooth tool will allow you to come in here and this'll actually allow you to adjust and kind of sculpt the different faces so you can see how I was able to come in here and set the radius of that object or I can set the radius of the smooth tool to get really specific with the way that I'm going to sculpt this object so I could set the radius to 3 feet and then it would only affect vertices within this 3 foot radius and so you can use this in order to really come in here and sculpt different things then once you're done with this if you've kind of sculpted this the way that you want it you could use a tool like the soften edges tool within your tray to soften everything so this is more of a smooth a curved shape and sometimes you want to get even more specialized with the kind of sculpting and objects that you're gonna create there are several extensions for Sketchup that are more designed not only for sculpting but also for subdivision modeling and so I'll give you an example of what that means so if I was to come in here for example we'll go ahead and create another grid in here and I'm just gonna right click and I'm gonna explode this there's basically two sets of tools that are basically designed for sculpting and creating more organic shapes within Sketchup so the first is called artisan an artisan comes from the guys over at mine site Studios and that's this first extension in here and it's got a series of tools in here for selecting different vertices for subdividing models which we'll talk about in a second and also for sculpting and then the other the other tool that's also very good for this is the combination of vertex tools and sub D and so let's start with vertex tools and so what vertex tools does is vertex tools allows you to come in here and select different vertices within your model and you can see how when I do this this is basically set up so that I can come in and sculpt different things within my model and the nice thing about vertex tools is really easy to bring things in here and spend them and adjust their orientation and really do some interesting things you can use this to create some curved organic shapes that you couldn't necessarily create otherwise so vertex tools is another tool that's more for sculpting and in addition artisan also has some different sculpt brush tools that allow for some really interesting options as well so I will note these extensions are paid extensions I think that the only paid extensions I talk about in this video but the other cool thing about these extensions is they're what's known as subdivision extensions and so basically what that means is if I was to come in here and create a series of boxes so let's say I use the Move tool to create a couple copies of this and then I was to select this and I make it a group what these extensions allow you to do is they allow you to subdivide this geometry so that it becomes more curved so if we were to turn on hidden geometry you can see what this does when I activate it is it takes all of these objects and it subdivides them so it divides each one of these lines and it moves the faces when I do that well if I use the increased subdivisions this becomes smoother and smoother and you can see how this gives you some really cool options for creating different rounded off shapes so you do have to be a little bit careful with these extensions because they do create a lot of geometry and they also require you to model things a little bit different but they do give you the ability to basically create organic shapes and curve shapes that then sketch up that you couldn't really in any other way and so sometimes you don't necessarily want to create curved objects or you don't want to model things as curved objects as much as you want to take a straight object and you want to bend it along a curve and so there's a couple extensions that are gonna allow you to do something like that so let's say for example that I was to come in here with the rectangle tool and I was to draw will just draw a kind of a very general profile shape and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna extrude that out and so let's say for example that I wanted to take this profile and I actually wanted to curve it and so what I would do and I'm gonna make another copy over here cuz I have another exam but the first extension that allows you to do this is called shape vendor and so what shape bender allows you to do is it allows you to set a baseline and then it allows you to set a target line and so basically what this extension will do is it'll ask you to select the shape that you want to bend it'll ask you to select your target line or your base line and then it'll ask you to select your target line and what that'll do is that'll allow you to come in here and bend this shape along this target shape so you can create a curved object based on some very complicated or complex curved shapes using this extension and let's say for example so let's say I was to come in here and I was to create a more complex shape so a shape that has a couple different curves in it so and we'll just go ahead and do this for right now and one thing you would have to do is you would have to use an extension like weld to weld this into a single curve but now I can come in here and I could use shape bender to bend this along an object it has multiple different curves so this gives you a lot of different options for creating curved objects within Sketchup and then the other extension that allows you a different set of functionality but it's a little bit easier to use is called fredo scale and I'm gonna link to information about all of these in the notes below but fredo scale has an option in here called radial Bend and what radial Bend does is radial Bend allows you to take an object and bend it live along a curve so let's say I wanted to bend this 90 degrees I could come in here and I could do that really quickly and really easily so you can use this to curve a shape as well and then the last thing I want to talk about is sometimes you don't want to come in here and sculpt or Bend what you want to do is you want to create kind of a curved shape along a frame and so in this case what we would do is we would use an extension like so bubble or curve all off to create a curved skin so basically the way this would work is let's say we have a rectangle like this one and we would come in here and we would flip this using the scale tool so that everything's kind of uniform and then I'll just move this back and I'll erase out this other stuff but let's say that we wanted to create a curved face that kind of stretched over this object so what we could do is we could use an extension like soap skin so I'm just gonna select this go up and select the soap skin option you can see what this does is this allows me to subdivide this into basically a skin and so I can set the number of subdivisions in here to set how smooth my geometry is then I can hit the enter key and what this does is this comes in here and this creates an actual skin based on this frame so you can see how you can create this kind of curve organic shape in here and so this is kind of something that you really wouldn't be able to model by hand but then you can come in here and you can set the pressure and when you set the pressure what you can do is you can adjust the way that this object looks so how filled out it is and that sort of thing so you can use this to create curved skins within Sketchup and then in addition there's also an extension called curve aloft and what curve will off does is it actually has a function in here that allows you to skin contours as well and you can see how it creates a little bit of a different result than this one over here but it allows you to create a skin in much the same way so this allows you to create curved organic faces in a way that you really wouldn't be able to otherwise so that's where I'm in this video leave a comment below and let me know what you thought so what's your favorite of these options for creating curved objects in Sketchup I just love having that Sketchup conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week if you like what I'm doing this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month so make sure you check out that link in the notes down below but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it that will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 568,127

Rating: 4.9586039 out of 5

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup organic modeling, sketchup organic models, sketchup curved shape, sketchup rounded edge, sketchup shape bender, sketchup fredo scale, sketchup subd, sketchup vertex tools, sketchup roundcorner, sketchup jhs powerbar, sketchup extrude curve

Id: Zk-Css2mGt0

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2018