Easy 3D Models from 2D IMAGES in SketchUp!

what's up guys justin here with the sketch essentials dot com back with another sketchup quick tip for you so in today's video we're going to talk about how we can quickly create models from images using a free tool that's online so this is actually a response to a question i got from one of our students in the sketchup essentials course on our live calls last night the question was okay i've got this image this two-dimensional image that i want to take into 3d what's the best way to do that so if you have questions about sketchup make sure that you check out the sketchup essentials course so that's going to be my course where i get really step-by-step in-depth teaching how to use sketchup but in addition to having the course instructional materials in there we also have a community forum and live calls where you can come ask questions like this one so if that's something you're interested in make sure you check that out at the sketchup essentials.com course now let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so i've got three simple images here that i want to bring in to sketchup and what i could do is i could just import these as images right so if i brought the train in for example i could drag it in and then i could trace over top of it but that's going to be really time consuming and so i i could come in here and draw these different edges in here and all of that but it's just going to be kind of a painful process and so what i've been doing instead is i've actually been using a website that i found online called convertio and what what this website does is it allows you to convert different kinds of files to different kinds of files well one of the functions that this has is this has the ability so this has the ability to bring in an image and then export it as a dxf file which is a file that sketchup can import so what i'm going to do is i'm going to start with this simple shape right so i'm going to bring this file in like this and then notice how this gives me the option to convert to different kinds of files well i'm going to go down to the cad dxf option right here so i'm going to click on this i'm going to click on the button for convert so what that's going to do is that's going to let me upload my file it's going to convert it to dxf and then i'm going to be able to download that dxf file and import it into sketchup pro alright so now within sketchup i'm just going to do a file import i'm going to find that dxf file and i'm just going to double click on it and what it's going to do is it's going to bring that in as a cad file so it's going to bring that cad file in and then import it to sketchup and so if i look at this you can see what this did is this basically took that profile and it just converted it to a series of polylines that are in here and then if i wanted to i could just draw a line across the face right here and i could do the same thing with the exterior like this well then i could just come in here and now this is a 3d object that's inside of sketchup so and so now what i want to do is i want to take a look at the more complex models so i'm going to import the train that was created some bring the train in like this and so if we look at that one notice how that one comes in as a group that one's a little bit more complex but it still comes in pretty good right so all we would have to do really is just draw over the top of this and it's going to fill in the space so one thing that you might have to do is you might have to try to merge this onto this face because it looks like it's not picking it up as an individual face inside of sketchup so which is kind of a common issue when you're inside a sketchup so you might have to do a little bit of tracing in here for some of these just to make sure that that uh that split of the face is actually getting picked up in here so and sometimes you have to do a fair amount of tracing in here in order to get that to work so there is a little bit of cleanup that you might have to do in this case probably what i would do since i've traced this once is just use the move tool in copy mode and just create a couple copies in here like this but then you could come in and you could push pull this into 3d so not that big of a deal you don't need any special tools or anything like that and then the last one i wanted to look at is i wanted to look at the leaf and the leaf is a more complex model right so if we click on this and we bring it in notice how this one's going to bring in 304 poly lines and so if we look at this one so i'm going to move this over right here this one comes in with a lot more detail so this one's going to be a little bit more complicated shape but again we're just going to do the same thing we're just going to come in here and just kind of trace across the faces in order to kind of fill those faces in and so there are some tools like i think s4u has a make face extension that you might be able to use in order to do this a little bit quicker um the problem with this though is it has so many different faces in the curves that it's probably better to just do things manually now you could also use like edge tools from tomtom to come in and reduce the number of edges that are in here but notice how these are filling in pretty quickly i'm not really having any issues getting that to work so then once we do that we just kind of push pull this whole thing like this so just a little bit up and down and we just want this to be like this tall right here but then you could just do a double click and just double click the rest of these in order to get this one into 3d as well and if you did want to like soften these edges to make it look a little bit better you could just triple click on this or you're probably going to have to click into the group and do a control a actually but then you can just use the soften edges function down below so usually checking this soften coplanar is enough to do it for me but now you can see how this is going to give you this nice 3d shape without you having to come in here and trace it alright so that's from in this video leave a comment below let me know if this was helpful i just love having that conversation with you guys if you are interested in learning more about how to use sketchup make sure you check out the sketchup essentials course i'd love to see you in there get you on the live calls as well as just help you with your sketchup journey but as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this i really appreciate it and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 106,588

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup 2021, sketchup 2020, sketchup image to model, sketchup 2d image to model, sketchup image to model tutorial, sketchup convertio

Id: fjP0THYOSSE

Length: 5min 56sec (356 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021