Massive Model Management – Dr. Matthew Nicholls | 3D Basecamp 2018

okay good afternoon it's lovely to be here at base camp thank you very much for coming along to my talk it's a pleasure to be here and I hope you're all having as much fun as I am I am a professor of ancient history at the University of Reading in England so why am I here at base camp because I've used Sketchup to build a 3d model of ancient Rome as it appeared early fourth century AD and here it is rendered in cinema 4d the shot flying into the city from the south so you can already see it as a very large model we might even say a massive model in the words of the title also take it out to lumion for rendering here is a bit closer in you see that lumion has nice lighting effects nice entourage so for closer in shots I tend to use that now but you can see still in the background a lot of terrain a lot of infill buildings a lot of trees little animated water effects so it's really a very substantial model if we go over to cinema 4d where I tend to do a lot of the Assembly of the city I measured it before I came out to base camp and I found it had seven hundred and twenty eight thousand seven hundred and thirty six discrete objects in it two hundred and four million points it's a very large model so this talk is about how I've got round some of the challenges that have come up for me as I've made such a large model in Sketchup all the architectural modeling is in Sketchup for this project I've talked about this project base camp before some of you in the room might have heard me this talk is more about the way that I've used the software to create a large urban model rather than the historical scholarship behind it or the uses to which I put it at the University I work in and beyond and I'm giving a second talk on that subject later on this afternoon at four o'clock for now I'm going to talk more about the technicalities of using Sketchup to make and manage really large models a good question someone asked me when I was thinking about this talk is what is it that slows down your modeling where are the pinch points and I think I've now got to the point in my workflow where Sketchup performance is generally not the issue bug splats slay working or inefficient slips of workflow for me now the workflow pinch points are outside of Sketchup and they're mostly in in here involving historical scholarship and analysis of evidence and the kind of decisions I need to make as a historian or archaeologist I think that's where I want the bottlenecks to be I don't want the software to be slowing me down that's a tool for doing the job so I hope I've got to a point or I'm fairly efficient to using it now by identifying and working out challenges as I've gone along but constant learning and I've certainly learned a whole bunch of new tricks in the last two days here which I'm going to take back and import into the workflow and maybe some of you in the room on though much better ways of doing the things I'm about to show you and you can just tell me and that would be gratefully received something I say when I'm giving talks as an educator about Sketchup is that it's an ideal tool for educators because it's so easy you just pick it up and play with it and to an extent that that's what I've done and what I'm going to be showing you is I think fairly simple tips or workflows that help solve the challenges that arise from massive modelling and I'm assuming that people in the audience are a same sort of position to me perhaps some beginners perhaps some more advanced modelers but people who are running into challenges as they make bigger models and if there are some real experts in the audience I'd welcome your thoughts and suggestions at the end so I'll aim to cover a few different areas but let me start by articulating three general principles that occurred to me as I was making the model and those worth thinking about this talk firstly Maps modelling input to the output you want at the end and questions under that heading I'll come back to you but they include what do you want your model to do what is the point of this model what's it for we'll think through some of that in the course secondly work on the model piece by piece fairly obviously break it up into sub models separate modeling windows but within one sub area of the model we'll use layers use groups use file organization to control and manage what will become a very large collection of data some of the way you break the model up under principle to hangs off the questions you address in principle one how do you want to break this model up to achieve the kind of outputs that you want at the end what layers what groups will serve those ends and thirdly try and get your work flow nice and smooth use pre-made content where you can use plugins use hotkeys to speed up repeated tasks before we get to all of that one area of course that can slow down performance is computer size and capacity now I work on Macs so all the screenshots and menu commands the stuff in this Oh Mac that the PC equivalents are the same or very similar and then you can customize either operating system to to work the way you want so here's a piece of Rome a subunit of ancient Rome broken up into about the maximum size I find comfortable for modeling on my machine and you can see in there there's a large and relatively complex terrain model there's a large map image draped over that terrain model there's a selection of buildings with a reasonable level of detail in windows doors roofs and so on and aqueducts at the back with lots of archers lots of curves if you go to windows model impress statistics as you probably on there you can get a snapshot of what is in this model you see here about 1.1 million edges 16,000 components half a million faces and my computer is fairly happy with that sort of size of model though it depends a bit on the size of the texture files also in that stats window there is a purge run used button and if you press that periodically it gets rid of unused stuff that's bloating your model and weighing down your computer there's also a plugin you can get called purge rule that will delete stuff that you thought you deleted when you deleted a model but maybe it's layers or its textures hang around in the background so purging regularly keeps the model size as small as possible but however good you are doing that and however good your computer is you eventually get to a point where you have a slow and Jaggi graphics performance maybe the orbit tool starts to get a bit laggy your graphics card is struggling to render the screen and if the model file is large autosave can take a long time a get over that spinning beach ball on my Mac as scenes autosave so there's stuff you can do to try and optimize performance right if you go to windows model info and then the rendering submenu you can turn off anti-aliasing it gives a poorer visual effect but less computing cost turn off stuff like shadows and fog if you haven't already done that model in a simple this you'll star like the default visual style rendering profiles and particular seems to play the computer down so you go to view edges profiles and turn them off I all means turn those things back on again when you want to capture a final image but for modeling keep it simple and light as light as possible the second window that I've got opened down there that one is in window model info OpenGL sorry Sketchup preferences OpenGL if your graphics card supports fast feedback turn it on I will turn it off if you prefer the interesting box here is use maximum texture size if you uncheck that box Sketchup will cap with the resolution of imported textures I think at 1024 by 1024 pixels so a fairly coarse image is okay for many purposes but it will degrade a really large image to keep graphical performance humming along if you tick the box use maximum texture size it will use a much bigger version of that file the Skip Shop help site doesn't say what the actual working maximum is and sketcher but I think it's 4096 pixels squared so 16 times bigger so you can view a text era at that resolution in your viewport but your actual original text you might be much much bigger than that I'll come back to that with my map but it won't be doing you any good it's a lot of megabytes but it you can't see the clarity of the pixels in your model so that comes back to the first question how much detail do you actually want in that texture image how well is it going to display in your modeling window what are you actually using that level of detail for perhaps you could go out and save a lower res version of the texture and speed things up a bit so with your computer setup checked and optimized with some basic principles in mind we can go on to the first of these three areas that I want to think about matching input to desired output and this covers a variety of aspects of the modeling process and the use process for the model you create from the initial design stage before you start clicking the mouse at all right through to the the finished delivery of the model in whatever format you intend so questions you can ask yourself include what are you going to do with the finished model what levels of accuracy and detail the needed those two things are not always the same what's the audience for the model how are they going to see it interact with it use it are we talking about flyovers or street level for example key questions that I find really boil all that down for me are where would you be looking at this model from what will your point of view be and when you're standing there what do you want to see and making those decisions early on help you focus your modeling effort and invest detail and time in the right places and ensure you end up with the model you can actually use not all of those aliens are served by packing detail into the model Oh contraire approximation is inherent in any modeling process right all models are models they reduce they simplify they stylize they simulate very rarely do we model anything an absolute true to life detail every Fleck in the wallpaper every tuft in the carpet I mean at some point you're drawing the line and the question to ask yourself is where is the right place to draw that line in your project detail is expensive it's expensive in terms of computing power and it's expensive perhaps more importantly in terms of your time and you're probably the most important asset for your modeling project in time you spend adding details no one's going to see it can be kind of satisfying pleasing but it's pointless if no one's ever going to see them so over time I began to work this out for myself and spend modeling time where it have the best effect on the end product sometimes it's worth consciously adding detail or information to a model to serve that goal sometimes it's better to take it out I'll show you a couple of examples here is a work in progress view of the city of rain I've decided I want to be able to show different kinds of archeological information in this sort of a overhead render I want to have this kind of full color kind of quasi realistic view but I want to be able to show also which buildings we know about from firm archaeological evidence and which ones are more conjectural there we go so the colored ones we know about the white ones in this view will conjectural to be able to generate that render I had to go back into the model and add in this case layering information depending on which category the building fell into so the downstream and the render I had the models organized into known buildings and conjectural buildings I could apply different texture goals to them so right at the macro level a decision about the kind of view I wanted to generate informed what I did with layers inside Sketchup at the micro level the more vertices and faces in a particular element of course the bigger the models so when I started modeling I found lovely architectural drawings and I traced them and I used follow me or push-pull to generate things like this cornice or an in tablet shell if you look at the stats there it's got about a thousand faces and you can't see them if you zoom out here is a much simplified version with the same thing if you kept your eye on a statistics box you'll see the one on the right has about a third of the number of vertices as the one on the left and really they're practically indistinguishable and in fact in my actual road model a lot of my entablatures are grotesquely simple like this just enough relief to throw a bit of shade to get the proportions right when you zoom out to any kind of distance you can't tell so over spending on beautiful architectural detail for this kind of view with a false investment so marshaling the right level of detail for the kind of view that I wanted and another good principle you surely all know is that a lot of the detailed interview likenesses and textures anyway I'm not making millions of individual bricks I'm using a brick texture same for tiles plaster timber you can get a model to convey information by means other than adding geometry to it and texturing of course is one way to do that other choices under this first heading of where to invest time and detailing include what downstream apps you're sending the model out to so in my workflow now I go to cinema 4d for great big whole city renders qubit II I'll be talking about this a bit later on in my second talk q Bertie is a nice little tool that you can use to send bits of model out to people as mobile phones very good for teaching for example but that requires lower detailed versions of the models generally increasingly as you see I'm using gloomy on there has its own needs and its own strengths so I adapt the model when I'm sending it out there as well other users might include unity or Unreal Engine for VR and gaming might include 3d printing all of which have their in particular requirements that you want to design for early on or at least leave a bit of headroom before I found working against my own principles a little bit that details I put into the model early on because I wanted to with no very clear idea of what they were before actually did pay off later on so when I started this project years ago there was no VR there was no gamed engine I could drop it into a lot of the ground level detailed doorways and so on was pointless I never saw it but now I do see it when I'm inside the model in the arts so investing a bit of overhead a bit of flexibility for things you haven't thought of yet can be worthwhile but just do it carefully another area where size and scale in a model can quickly add up isn't terrain I'm presuming that many of you like me and making architectural models city models and there you need a big terrain if it's a geographically extensive project and a big terrain has lots and lots of Polly's in it and that can add weight to a model and slow down your computer a lot also if you want to map as I do the map to cover a big terrain has to be a big image lots of pixels lots of megabytes and that slows down the model too and any kind of edit or a huge mesh like this using something like this move tool can cause a lot of slowdown as the computer tries to pick up and work out how many points are affected how many not are affected and then you do your edit and it can get very slow so the terrain and its map of what slowed down my modelling most and Sketchup this is the terrain model underlying my my 50 model it's about four and a half kilometers on each side so it's geographically quite extensive some are media and kind of obvious things you can do to speed things up is to break it up so the river cuts it through nicely so I use the river as my break point and I put different bits of the terrain on different layers and I can just turn them off so get out of the viewport anything you're not actually working on at the time and your performance speeds up until the point where nothing isn't a viewport so bring back something and work on that a good principle that applies to much more than terrain put everything on layers and turn layers off that you're not using we'll come back to that how do we make the terrain I'm presuming many of you are familiar with this but Sketchup has native tools sandbox tools it will draw a terrain from contour this is how it started set of contours in this case that represent the hills and valleys of Rome as we think they appeared two thousand or so years ago if you're importing contours or even drawing them for yourself do you think about making them nicely smooth quite often if you zoom into a contour set it will have lots of little ins and outs some jockey points which will generate messy terrain and also add a lot of weight and sometimes a lot of ugliness frankly to a terrain model so it might be worth spending some time smoothing these out a bit work out how many you need I was happy with 5 meter intervals there's a kind of level of approximation inherent in this process that made me feel putting in 1 or 2 meter terrain contours would sort of be a false premise that there wasn't actually that much accuracy in the model say 5 meter contours did the job for me when you're happy with your contours you can convert them into a terrain model draw a sand box from contours so far so good we've created a terrain model fairly quickly much quicker of course if you break it up into subunits and make the train in there subunits but there are some features here that are going to causes problems as we progress one is the sketch ups native terrain tool produces for you this kind of mesh which is called a tin a triangulated irregular network and you can see why they call it that it's a network made of irregularly sized triangles some of the triangles where there's a lot of relief in the terrain are tiny some of the triangles where we're on a flat part of the modern like the plateaus on the tops of the hills or the floodplain of the river tiber are enormous because there's no relief there for the model to be describing but the result is that the individual triangles making up the tin are gigantic some of them are tens maybe hundreds of thousands of square meters you could lose whole city blocks inside them but they only have three vertices so you have a very coarse level of control over a terrain of that sort if you want to pick up a vertex and shift you'll be moving your terrain plane through dozens of buildings at once so it's not very easy to edit what I wanted to do was create a regular terrain mesh with on average smaller units to make more editable terrain and luckily you can do this here is a plug-in from Valley called instant terrain it creates a new regular terrain with a regularly spaced grid of verges that replaces the more random groups of triangles you could see here I'm setting a 15 Mesa grid interval I did drop several seconds of waiting out of the middle of this video just to speed it up but it's not too slow especially when you're doing it on little areas of terrain like this so there we go I've created a new terrain mesh draped over my old one and I'm going to go in and delete the old one so Instant terrain is really designed to simplify complex terrains but here I'm using almost the other way around I'm complexify the terrain but regularizing at optimizing it and probably having more polygons because the grid mesh is smaller but they're absolutely grid regular trial and error suggested a 15 meter grid spacing works for me that's enough resolution to allow control around individual buildings or areas of the city but not so much that the thing runs into millions of faces and just crashes and dies and of course I can mitigate the performance penalty of all there's lots of polygons by putting it on layers and turning off the layers I don't want to see so instant terrain will make a much nicer more regular terrain grid if that's what you want the next thing I want to do is to get a map onto it this is a crucial part of my modeling process maybe it is for you I don't know but I'd like to have a map actually within the model to use as a visual reference as I'm drawing you buildings seeing how buildings relate to each other in space how they relate to the archaeological remains in the city of Rome in some cases how they relate to the modern street plan of Rome can be useful for me as well so I found a bunch of mapping resources that I wanted to use and I layered them up in Photoshop and use partial transparency and align them all and made myself a composite map with lots and lots of rich detail in it that was going to be my baseline map for this project I also included the contours as images within this map that I'd used to build the terrain and that was important because I want a visual reference point between the model and the map image and in my case the contours should align you're going to see that and proves that the map is at the right scale in position for the terrain beneath it so I've made the image how how to import it it's hard to position import an image directly onto the face of a large terrain model in part because it's got all those thousands of set faces at all point in different directions so this is how I did it maybe you've got other methods you could tell me about but what I decided to do was to draw a line up to a constant height from each corner of my terrain model which is what I'm doing here and then when those lines are drawn to join them up and that will create a player's Cokely inner loop of lines which generates of course a face and now I have a plain face to exactly the same dimensions and the same XY coordinates as my terrain but it's flat and of course that means I can very easily drag an image onto it like my map and I can very easily manipulate and scale and position that texture image so there it is when I'd done that I have what I think of as my flat map layer and that has other uses downstream that will come back to you but I put it on its own layer and turn it off when I don't need it now I've got the map in place I want to ensure that it's the right fit so this is where the the contours come in go back to my contours turn on my flat map layer and then I think I've got a bit of transparency set here you can see what I'm doing and I'm dragging to make sure that the contour pictures in the map line up for the contour models in the model and that's my lock to make sure that my map there we go is it's correctly positioned and scaled so that everything is from I'd spend a lot of time getting this right do it once and then downstream I'm confident that everything is geographically in the right place when we've done that the confident the maps in the right place make sure that on the flat map layer it's set to projected there we go right click texture projected then use the eyedropper pick it up drop it on to the terrain below and there we have a map in the right place for X&Y draped onto a terrain model that I know is is correctly located so we now have an editable regularized terrain model a flat map reference layer and an image of the map projected onto the terrain below when you've got that done to your satisfaction what I've done I put it in a group I lock that group right click lock and then and my terrain is not going to move around and that's useful and I'd advise you do it in a big model because when you're zoomed in at this level of resolution working on a building or two you can't see the edges of the terrain you can't see whether you selected it or not sometimes and you might pick it up and move it a little tiny bit instead of picking up a building and moving it a little tiny bit and you don't discover that for hours or days hora yeah lots of nods and you come back and all your buildings are a metre out of place and it takes you a while to work out why so if you lock the terrain and also save a master terrain the file and never touch it except as a reference point you will have a reference where you know that the coordinates are true and you know it's in the right place also save successive versions of everything all the time numbered organized versions but especially for terrain because terrain is hard to edit and sometimes you'll do something that just makes a mess and you want to go back to the earlier one copy out the bit you've made a mess of bring it in paste it in place and you've got a you go back to the last version to pick up and overlay your mistakes I think you only have a hundred error steps under your steps the sketch ups not as many as it sounds like so far so good but there still remains a problem to fill a terrain this big we need a really big map you heard me say earlier on that in Sketchup the maximum texture size caps out at about 4096 pixels squared if you don't check use maximum texture size if you're trying to speed your computer up it caps at 1024 pixels squared I told you earlier that my model is about four and a half kilometers on each side so a 1024 pixel resolution less about one pixel for each four meters of modeling space which is useless to me a lot of buildings are smaller than four meters so I don't have the resolution there that I need to do accurate modeling so I took the use maximum texture size box and it slows my computer down but it gives me 16 times bigger image but that's actually still not very good and it took me ages to work this out I brought in my map did all the steps you've seen me do it looks lovely up here from this imaginary ancient Roman helicopter when I get down to ground level it looks like this it's just too coarse to be useful at where where is the corner of any one of those buildings I mean I was really puzzle because it looked lovely in Photoshop but I could see the image file was a really fat image file so I did some reading around on Sketchup elk forums and what seems to be happening is that Sketchup is down something this to its absolute maximum of 4096 pixels what was I going to do about this I went to Photoshop and looked at my map and checked its dimensions and saw that in fact it's about six times bigger than that maximum you can see the size of it there so what I did was split up my map into four equally sized quadrants and I split up my map my model into four quadrants I split up the map into four equally divided quadrants and I separated out theirs map images and I imported them separately onto each quadrant and I spent some time scaling them and positioning them again you really have to be careful with that because you want the look of it to be one seamless map whereas in fact it's four sub maps each important to the maximum possible size that Sketchup will deal with I painted some Rezo marks on to the map in Photoshop the middle crosshair so I used theirs to do the alignment so that's a treat and of course it's adding data is adding megabytes is adding big images to your model and that will slow it down but it's a choice I made deliberately because I wanted that level of resolution in my map so it went from this to this and that is now good enough for me to use zoomed in to position buildings crisply then precisely on the map so there's an area where we're adding size and adding weight deliberately to the model it's a deliberate choice and again you mitigate it by turning off all the layers with the other bits of the map you don't want but that's the choice I made deliberately both so I did it all in one big model to make sure all the scenes were properly corrected and then I separated the map into separate models just because I know you want to the east bank of the river I only open the east bank of the river because it's much much smaller yeah yeah yeah one of the things I discovered that is all published sources of ancient Rome probably including my own differ from each other sometimes by you know centimeters but in some case by meters or tens of meters and that's where you know I said the bottleneck of my workflow is is my historical decision making and that was reconciling different sources the contours and one map came together there's a second map on top of that and a modern Street map on top of that lay it out and there are some inconsistencies between them and there I just have to make a decision I tend to use a bond with the contours in as the master model for terrain because the terrain naturally follows that map but sometimes I have to Terrace out a hillside or cut into a hillside to place a building sure so I've already started mentioning layering right there the flat map isn't a layer different bits of the terrain are on there in layers and that brings us into the second principle which is working on the model piece by piece and this white the first principle of matching input and output is true at different levels and different points and modeling process at the smallest level it's imperative to keep everything grouped and you probably all know this already so I won't dwell on it every building within a building every sub element like a window or a door or a roof as groups can't really overemphasize that one you need to be able to move a building independently of its neighbors and the terrain within a building you need to be able to select and move around elements like windows and doors and proper grouping has downstream benefits too if you group everything correctly it will derive depending on the app you're using and your downstream app your rendering engine or whatever grouped and organized in the way that you want so you need to use groups but that's fairly standard advice swearin dwell on it considering the advice to work on the model piece by piece but a the next level up the next kind of level of zoom out you can see here that I have the model broken up into different areas different city blocks and what I have to remember to do is when I update say that aqueduct in that city block I need to go this is now my adducts master model file my reference model for aqueducts I've got to go out and paste it into that one as well I'm using paste in place which is one of my favorite Sketchup commands I think it's an overlooked super tool it doesn't even have its own hotkey in the default keyboard setup or placed in place so for me it shipped me I never paste anything really you saying that earlier as well I paste it in place so that you know it's an exactly the right geographical location between models so the city block model to the aqueduct over to the aqueducts master model paste in place because it conforms to the terrain and I'm just confident it's in the right place and also sometimes to speed that beautiful performance and because it's easier I'll take a building out of whatever I'm working on open up a new window paste in place work on it so I'm happy with it no clutter in the background to pick it up paste in place back where I took it from so three cheers for paste in place shift V use it all the time there is a plug-in that will do that business of updating multiple instances of the model across different model files which is an or or efferent Manager which I only found out about yesterday so I've not tried it but that allows you to update the model once and in all the other model files with an instance of that component and they all update automatically which sounds brilliant but I've not tried it but it sounds like it would do the job for me you've seen that I use layers to organize the model and you can see here I'm turning layers on and off and you can see I've named them according to the kinds of function I want them to perform so firmly attested buildings unattested buildings aqueducts terrain all have their own layers and layers is a really important part of that work piece by piece principle at least he benefits maybe you can think of more one it allows you to work on massive models without killing your computer because you just turn off the stuff that you're not interested in it also visually speeds up the modeling process because you don't have to wade through a lots of clutter to get to the the view you want and then secondly it allows us to control the display of information in the finished model as you saw earlier with that render that had colored buildings and then some of the buildings turn white that was done with layering in Sketchup now the right way to do this is to remember to click on the radio button at the layer you want to draw in so here I should be drawing into the layer called Servian walls I never remember to do this I don't know about you but I'm just I have very poor lair discipline drawing so what I need to do quite often is go back and correct the lair that things are on you might see if you've got very sharp eyes in this model the roof of this building disappeared when I turned off one of the layers all those archers there disappeared they shouldn't have done they were on the wrong layer so you can fix that with pasted in place right you can take your model out new window pasting place corrector all the layer information bring it back in but you can also use a plugin called to put on layer plug-in which puts everything in a group and everything below the group in the hierarchy on to the correct layer which is a big time save you can't do it in the entity info window without or you can but you have to do every single element and every subgroup of it individually so put on layer helps you now I should be I aim to be I just always forget so and it goes wrong so I need a quick fix and put on layers does that for me well you can choose so did submenu I can choose which layer I want to put it on and that's a fairly new thing in the workflow for me I used to do it by taking the building out paste in place deletes all the layers I don't want bring it back in this is just a bit faster but there's often multiple ways of doing the same drop in Sketchup overall I normally each the building level that building belongs in one layer and all the stuff within it should def will be in that layer too because ya know everything inside the group should be on the same layer because that what my layers are are different types of buildings so I want the entire thing and all that sub components and faces and edges to be within the layer that belongs to aqueducts or belongs to attested buildings does that does that make sense hmm yeah yeah yes you could I tend to try and group everything at the group level and the contents beneath it as well partly because of the way components work in the model and I might have to say in component belonging off to different layers at different times but I found this workflow works I mean they're probably different ways of doing it and that might be maybe I could talk to you about that at the end that the interesting so puts on layer there's a workflow thing and that there may be your question in fact it's about finding the optimum workflow that suits you in your project which is the third of these principles maximize efficiency of your workflow and there's a lot you could say here start with the absolute basics right make sure you have a comfortable chair you saw 204 million points and that cinema4d model says at least till 4 million mouse clicks and make sure you have a good mouse that you like that fits under your hand everyone has their own preferences their own budget some aspects are cheap and easy you've probably heard loads of people at Basecamp say use a three button Mouse already if you don't probably know in this room doesn't but if you don't use the three button Mouse please do right-click scrolling very important and I say that because I often see classrooms full of students that I'm teaching to use Sketchup trying to do on the laptop trackpad which is a recipe for madness and despair so use a mouse next level up get familiar with mouse and keyboard working you want to be able to fly the basic navigation and indeed the basic selection tools and Sketchup really without thinking about it using both sounds looking at the screen so that just comes as like touch typing the more you type stuff the quicker you get it typing I did and I have one I've got two and I like them I don't like them as much as some people like them I mean I think the people that really like them just completely swear by them and it's a really intuitive lovely way of flying around your model I've never quite got to that level of comfort with them but I do I do play with them what I do have is a little Bluetooth touchpad which I use for scrolling and for zooming and I just find that I'm left-handed so left hand on my mouse and then my right hands not on the keyboard I have it on this little touchpad I just find that very marginally quicker than scroll zooming very marginally but in a big model every margin adds up over tens of thousands of iterations so you find what works for you with some experiment do you want to try and minimize hand movement a bit but you want to learn hotkeys and you want to customize hotkeys like shift V for paste in place you should all use that and also don't get to set in your ways like I have in Basecamp learned things about the alternate modes of tools so I thought I knew really well oh it does that if you press alt okay so play around with alternate modes and play around with with with hotkeys and you'll find that little time savings add up in a big project to a lot if you're getting expensive I really like having a big screen and I like having actually two big screens you keep lots of different palettes of windows open Photoshop Sketch up cinema 4d three different sketchup windows it's not essential but it's nice yeah and there's 3d mouse mice of people like as well another principle in sketchup there's a general ruled and maybe as a general rule for life is not to do things the hard way if you can do them the easy way so for example keeping everything grouped at the time it feels like it's a little bit of extra effort triple clicking group all the time but actually further downstream you will thank you earlier self for it because it makes a lot of things massively easy if you don't like a door or a molding or a window you just take it out and take the group out you don't have to heat up the hole that you've just carved in the building one example of looking for easiness and speed is using components identify repeating elements or subgroups in a building and make them as sketchup components you probably all know this I knew that but I didn't quite follow the logic of it through and this is the building where I experimented with components and tried to take that as far as I could so for a start the entire building is symmetrical about that axis so any made half of it the entire building is a component that you just copy and flip within the building loads of elements are components fairly obvious things like these little Ida cools down here that's just the same element repeated there's I'm inside the building too but what's the less obvious things like if you look for lines of symmetry in a structure you can divide along those lines and make the component so these four light wells are actually the same model four times when I wanted to edit just that one to put that staircase in right click make unique and at the point at which it differentiates from its neighbors there you go this structure over the back this isn't the palaestra of the Bauhaus the outdoor exercise yard it's symmetrical about that Center axis I only made half of it and then flipped it same for all the columns same from the plasters these plastron entablature units in that dhamma call Caldari m at the back visual components so thinking where you see a line of symmetry where you see a repeating element that you could save time by making it once and then repeating it is it's a time saver in the end another example of finding an easier way to do something I said I used my map as to find the footprints of new buildings and drawing your buildings in but it's very hard to draw on a top layer model because you can see here the rectangle tool the line tool keeps trying to bind to the direction of the plains of the the topographical surface I can't draw a rectangle on here so I don't you might remember that earlier on I set a flat map layer for other reasons up in the sky so turn that on and go and do all your planimetric drawing up here on the flat map layer where you can draw very easily on a planar surface and then bring it down so this is the the terrace of a large imperial temple building a temple of the day if I don't preclude EOS which is steps from Nero turned into a fountain building disrespectfully so I'm drawing the footprint of ants very easy to draw on a flat surface I'm going to group it and move it down as a refinement I keep that flat map layer an easily typable number of meters up in the air so that every time I make my vertical move down I just type one thousand enter and I know it will land up in about the right place so I'll do that and then go downstairs and it's kind of a slow video actually I could do it faster than this but move it down to the terrain and then you work on it and you'll see it turns into a proper Terrace it's exactly the right place because earlier on we we aligned the flat map player up there to the modeling space that is a different thing that slightly speeds up our workflow and then you can pick up the map texture and drop it back on if you want that as a reference into the group and paste there we go drape it onto the top model and put it on the flat map get it in the right place make sure it's a projected texture so you right-click texture projected then I just pick it up with the eyedropper and click it onto the terrain yeah projected if you don't do that I actually originally had a video showing all of that liked optics it took a bit too long but you end up with this horrible mosaic mess of the map but if it's projected sketch ups metaphors projection like like that projector I tend to think of it as drape like a tablecloth but whichever metaphor you use that that's what allows you to project a texture over an irregular surface and have it fall in all the right places so that flat map player has other uses and I keep it having a hand up there for various purposes the final thing you can do to make your life easier is ready-made content a lot of that of course is in the warehouse but be careful because a lot of stuff in the warehouse might be great for project day but if you're making project B it might not be so good for you this is totally random I don't mean to critique this particular model of a kitchen sink them about to employ if you made it and you're in the room it's a lovely model it's just not quite what I was looking for here so you get some info on this screen which I might have read about how big it was but I'd say I didn't read that information and I bring it into my model it's a nice elegant model of a sink that if you go and look at it closely gosh there's a lot of detail in there if you look if I turn on hidden edges all those corner facets all the facets and that spiral hose Wow so choose wisely if you're bringing stuff in from the warehouse and if you don't like that sink and take it out purge afterwards to get rid of all the hidden stuff that will otherwise linger in your model and bloat it in terms of ready-made content if you're making like I am a city but you're making a contemporary city real world city there's loads of tools that you can get that will cut your workload dramatically you can buy ready-made content you can use specialist procedural tools like City engine parametric and real-world Sketchup plug-in like modeler and place maker that will just allow you to acquire Auto generate city content and and do what I did for ancient Rome but instantly for New York or Melbourne or London I can't do that cuz I'm making a city that doesn't exist anymore and also spoil the fun but what I can do is make my own homemade component and texture library as I think of it so I say that a separate model and in there I keep all of the things I use again and again doorways windows canopies textures that I like you can see other things in there like fountains and planting features that helps speeding up speakeasy speeds things up dramatically make once reuse often and over time you can see how did different source of doorway in different source of column in there the aim was to have enough variety so that the finished model looks convincingly varied but enough similarity to keep the modeling overhead fairly low and also to build up a sort of consistent family likeness look to the finished city they reflect some of the elements and materials that really were used in ancient Rome if Europe's Anderson Phoenix is talked earlier about their city models similar principle to their Arboretum of trees that you make yourself a reference library of stuff you're going to use often and then cut and paste into your model you can see on the right I'm fairly swiftly making a Raymond insider' apartment building I'm using this library of ready-made components I use this all the time there are millions probably if windows in my model but I've only made days windows half a dozen window types and I just reuse them I did got spotted and I if I had a t-shirt cannon I would I will come onto that now there are a bunch of plugins that you can use to speed that work enormous Lee and I'm not yes some are free some are paid for I'll just show you some of the ones that I use a lot Valley architects plugins I think a superb this one is called instant roof it makes crews instantly there we go so you click on a horizontal surface select a roof type press make roof and these are fairly simple ones but it also does complex ones you can see when i text you them all the tiles flow in the right directions that save me days and weeks of modeling time similar is instant defense that makes fencers instantly so I start with the group select my fence type fiddle around with as many parameters as you want to it's very very editable I'm just adding some some wood textures there there we go and if we go and look at that fence now and you'll see that it conforms to the terrain it goes uphill and downhill all the textures are correct it comes with a huge library of fence types and railing types and you can add as many more as you want by customizing it here isn't at all you can probably guess what install does so the front and back yard of this Roman house are now properly bounded by a fence of wall you can see also the wall there sits perfectly on that complex terrain model the textures work so it's just those three tools of brilliant here's a much much simpler free tool they also use all the time called extrude along path which is like a souped up version of follow me and it just allows me to put a little molding to cast a bit of shadow all the way around the building so extrude a long path it's very you select the path I have a hotkey my down arrow you select a distance you want the overhang to be an interest pin so if you're doing like a lip all the way around building something like that there are other plugins I used to use Freddie's scale and freddo's tools a lot tools on surface is lovely you can draw on a curved surface a really complex curve including a terrain model you can push pull into a curved surface with joint push-pull so there are some wonderful plugins that speed up some of the basic drawing operations very well yeah [Music] I didn't have to do the drape I that's something I drew directly on the toposurface so I see where I want my rail to go it doesn't have to be touching it if it kind of you know cuts under the Train and pokes back up again doesn't matter the tool will identify where the surface is and drop defense to it or if you want below it or above it or any combination well I said it really really powerful extension of native drawing set to do stuff I mean six hundred and eight thousand whatever it was buildings and my model if I had to make all the roofs by hand I'd still be here oh not here I still be at home making Reeves so these things really do speed life up so to conclude making a massive scale model can be a real challenge of course challenges of thumb that the challenge is to the performance of your computer your powers of organization and methodical working and probably for most of you like for me the constraint in the end is your time how much time do you have to throw into this project some thoughts invested at the beginning about the uses you want to put your project to will help you shape model input to match that desired output and will really pay dividends later on being an organized modeler the metaphor I use of my students is that you can pick up the guitar sit down at the piano after a couple of hours you can kind of get a teen out of it but if you spend six months learning your scales properly would be a much better pianist later on same thing with this if you invest a bit of discipline earlier on the results will speak for themselves so too is subdividing the model so - finding out efficient workflows and tools to maximize the game for your time and also maximize the fun right nobody likes to frustrating spinning beach ball debug splat the fact that you have to wait for your modern to do things when you orbit so working smart tends to mean working fun as well and these massive models can bring lost worlds to life like in my case or maybe in yours create new future landscapes for people to enjoy so good luck and have fun and thank you very much for listening very happy for questions someone that has one yeah yeah you know yes if I try to do all in Sketchup it would be in their art time that's what I want to grab a big element and paste it into the model and there I have to wait for the spinning beach ball not quite that long but but for a long time but beyond a certain point of size and complexity Sketchup just won't handle the model so when I'm working on the entire city it tends to be in something like cinema 4d lumion now if I want to work on a bit of the city if I'm only interested that day in visualizing a particular corner of it I can just open up that area and Sketch up and work on there but for assembly at a city scale and for rendering those cities together I tend to get outside of Sketchup now to other tools but Sketchup can hold a really big model I'd kind of I keep my subunits actually well below the performance threshold where the software would start a trunk because I just don't want to wait for it to to slow down but when I test the boundaries of what it will retrieve I can get quite a lot of Rome into Sketchup all at one time but it in the end it will start to slow down because I'm not a good enough modern cinema 4d for it to work and the workflow I have built up heedlessly I started in Sketchup because it was free as a graduate student and it's really easy to use and no one was training me and I got so far into it that that's just what I like using for modeling I could do and they would in some ways be more efficient and more under good models but the good thing about not having done that is that Sketchup talks beautifully to loads of different sources there's a whole ecosystem now so having Sketchup as the center point and they're like a an ecosystem of different apps actually works very well for me now yeah not every last building in Rome but a lot of the big monuments yes and you can go inside them and you know I said earlier what about leaving and like an overhead of extra detail without knowing what it was going to be for it turned out it's from walking around in unity in VR it's great for that that didn't exist when I started making all those interiors there are little staircases I made without really knowing why and I can now walk up to them so it's great but generally I would advise my younger self not to throw in pointless detailed it's just in some cases it's worked out really well sorry No the interiors I mean I make I tend not to have different versions of each building so there in the Sketchup original yeah in the particular slice of the city I showed you I don't think they wear any but you had the big buildings like the Pantheon the bathhouses Coliseum you can go inside and walk around and the question was how I found scenes to be useful in managing yes but I didn't use them very much my work first groups and layers when I'm teaching Sketchup to my university students they don't have expensive rendering engines to drop them into so I say one way you can generate a presentation for example from your model is using scenes and so there's a presentational tool my teacher I know it can also be an organizational tool happens not to be the way that I work but I've seen some people use it very effectively for organizing a model yeah there is a way that lumion does that it took me some time to find it out you come somewhere one of the tool menu there's a little sub thing called a line and that aligns everything in that particular layer whatever lumion calls it to the same XYZ coordinates so what I tend to do is bring the terrain in and then I align everything to the terrain and you can do it there is no paste in place but if you used that a line to that's that's what does that for you I've got a few minutes after questions yeah mmm no no baby you could tell me how about yeah yeah yeah yeah right young well that would be really nice I mean part of my Challenger that design and modeling stuff out of my imagination what kind of historical judgment anyway oh maybe there's two things are the same so there's no there's no existing information to bring in and use there is sometimes about where a ruin is sitting within the city but that would be worth exploring the thing that I haven't really got worked out yet is proper metadata I really like these models to have metadata that would include geolocation but might also include stuff about evidential types and the references to archaeological reports and so on yeah yeah well that would be great yeah so maybe I should look into that big good I might catch you at the end and ask you more about that it sounds good yeah yeah I would really like to do that and I was startled to speak to these guys because they just printed out a 3d shifty model it's not made for that so they're not proper solids but I'd like to take a bit of room like an interesting bit let's say the area around the Coliseum I mean it's all interesting but you don't and print that up as a sample so I asked them how much they're there beautiful city model costs and it's several thousand dollars to print it in this lovely resin with all the colors but I actually have access to an acrylic 3d printer back at work at the University I've made individual little bits and that works pretty nicely so it's something I'd like to do more of I don't know what I would then do with it right but there are physical models of Rome there's a whole city scale one that would fill the floor plate of this room it's a beautiful thing it's in Rome in a museum the museum is shut for lack of funds and has been for years so these things become in the end you know then you need to maintain them and look after them and I've I find digital it's more I mean I can just kind of carry around in here but I would like to do some 3d printing yes any more going to let you go to your next session yeah one at the back no I've got an 8-core MacPro at home I also have a PC for lumion because blue Mian doesn't run on the Mac so yeah I have a bigger Mac print but I don't I think I could I mean on this trip I've been opening bits on this laptop and it's fine yeah parts of it yeah the rendering I do on the desktop ok time to let you go thank you very much for coming [Applause]

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 5,212

Rating: 4.8974357 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling, 3D Basecamp

Id: Qxqq91pfYoo

Length: 55min 11sec (3311 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019