Making a Wavy Wood Ceiling in SketchUp

i was asked recently how to create a wavy wood ceiling similar to these images i would use a sandbox tool now this tool is designed for contours on a site map but will work just as well for this project we're going to assume we're going to make a ceiling that's eight foot by eight foot i'm going to go ahead and activate the sandbox tool i can either go to draw sandbox from scratch or i can use the toolbar and to see that you can go to view toolbars and make sure that the sandbox toolbar is checked so choose either draw sandbox from scratch or click the from scratch button over here we need to type a grid spacing amount and this is the density of the grid which will affect the smoothness of the curves the defaults will be 10 feet which is going to be too big for an eight foot by foot room so what we'll do is type four inches which will give us a relatively smooth curve click the point to start move your mouse and type in 8 feet and then go in the other direction type in 8 feet and there's an eight foot by eight foot ceiling with a four inch grid spacing this is a group and i just double click inside the group and i can get inside the group here and start modifying it what we'll do is we'll use the smooth button here and that'll help us go up and down onto the surface so if i click on that the radius it wants to give us the radius the larger the radius the smoother the curvature the smaller the tighter the curve we'll start with 24 inches and if i click and go up it goes up i click and go down it goes down and you don't want to go too crazy but it's it's a particular design what your design really wants to be whether it goes up or down a lot you can also type in a different radius let's say 48 for even more smoother curves and arcs and you can see more of it is is selected you can i'm just clicking to select and go up or down how i need and then i can just kind of decide what it looks like so something like that would give us some interesting shapes i think and it doesn't have to be too crazy again it would depend on your on your design intent you know how how many comedy curves do you think you're going to need for your space that would make it look interesting now we're done we can select and click out of this group and then i'll make a rectangle on the side here and i want to make sure that this rectangle is basically the the depth of the whole height of this thing at least so i'm just going to make a rectangle like this and vertical i'm going to look straight down this this grid axis i'll make it vertical and i'll just move it in position and i'll click like you know one of these grid lines what i'll make sure is i want to make sure that it is you know deep enough so you can see here that this isn't quite go down so i'm going to click and move this down in the blue axis so we're good and again i drew my rectangle in the red axis so i know it's perpendicular to this and that's that's what we like to be we'll select this edge here and select the move tool and kind of go back to it so it's so it goes up to the goes up to there select this edge move tool lock it in the red by hitting the right arrow key and then i'm gonna move it up a little bit here then i will do the move command tap control for copy then the next thing i'm going to do is look at the height this is this is kind of deep i'm not going to have something quite this deep now if that would depend if it's a tall ceiling with a very tall piece here this looks this was pretty big for the wave i'm looking for in my mind so i'm going to i'll just bring this down a little bit i think the waves will be about that height for my particular ceiling let's say but that is dependent on the design so i selected the line and moved in the blue down select the rectangle move tap the control key and decide on the spacing um i think this thing could be maybe six inches apart so i'm gonna have six and i'll type in 15 x and that's about right um so these are all six inches apart again it depends on the spacing of your particular project how you're gonna want it to look now that they're all here i'm gonna select them and i just kind of looked straight on this view and i just did this crossing and i right click intersect faces with model so basically all these planes now have intersected with this bottom i'm going to select the top portion just this top portion right here again i kind of looked it on the side select the top portion and i'm going to right click make group i could also make it a component and then i can select the bottom here i'm going to just delete this stuff here so i just kind of delete the bottom oh see i went too far yeah just delete the bottom make sure you don't go too high and then if you you know if you hide the the bottom here hide the the contours and there there it is there's your contours that uh i thought look pleasant so this might be all you need for your project you may not need any thickness at all but if you do need thickness you can just double click inside and select each one of these and you just push pull and push pull let's say one inch or something like that and then just double click the other ones you know so once you do that you got it and and you can also then select this and soften these edges if necessary it just depends on on what you want to do but you can see you're going to get some some view here another possibility is to double click right click weld edges and then when you push pull the one you're not going to get those little grid lines let me back up a little bit to the point where we have the top mean to group and the bottom erased what i'll do now then is make a rectangle in the other direction and again make sure i go down below the the wavy plane and make sure i also go to the edges you want to make sure it covers up that whole the whole edges so i'm just something like this i'm going to select this previous selection and select hide and then select this one and again do the same thing use the move with the copy in the red this time 6 inches 15x select this top portion always good to select just the top portion intersect faces with model and then select the top portion and make group hide this one as well i can go ahead and select this whole thing delete it edit unhide all and this is another interesting effect that you can have and again you can then do thicknesses just to get get the look another thing you can do now that it's a group is you can use a scale tool the scale tool and you know make it deeper or shallower you know or maybe less less wavy you know you can also because it is a group you can select it and make a copy make sure the copy is six inches away and if there's if there's a strong noticeable break what i like to do too is on this copy back here right click and flip along the component green so basically you're mirroring mirroring the the slope and then of course in if you've got thicknesses on this already you know if you've got thicknesses here this will be the the same color if not you can just paint these all that same uh you can just paint these faces white and then it'll match but you can see that way the curves that go up continue across here that's two little tricks you can apply the other direction too and then you want to you basically want to line up these these flanges so i'm going to move this one a little bit here and then this one a little bit here should have lined up maybe i slipped when i was doing that and then again i would this one will flip along the uh red so that these these planes line up perfectly there using this technique along with the scale tool can really cover a large amount of area without having to make too many different wave patterns and too much trimming and push pulling if you will be copying them and mirroring them and making multiple uses of the same shape you may want to make a component instead of a group that way when one segment is edited they all get edited the same way hopefully this tutorial has been helpful

Channel: j.a.lopez Design

Views: 28,001

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Id: 41mDIjbevdY

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021