Modeling a Voronoi Bridge in SketchUp!

what's up guys Justin here with the sketch of essentials combat with another Sketchup extension tutorial for you so in this video we're gonna use a couple different extensions to create kind of a bent vorn wah bridge before I get started today's video is brought to you by the mine site Studios holiday sale mine site Studios is the group that brings you extensions like place maker and profile builder and artisan all of their stuff is 25% off until January 15th so if you're interested in that go visit the sketchup essentials com / - it-- or visit the link in the notes down below now let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so in this video what we're going to do is we're basically going to bend over and wash shape around a bridge profile and so you're gonna need a few extensions in order to do this and these are all free extensions you're gonna download JHS power bar you're gonna want the voron law and conic curve extension as well as the extensions flow of phi and weld and so i'll link to all of those in the notes down below to where you can get those but what we're gonna do in this case is we're gonna draw we're gonna start off and we're gonna draw an arc and I'm gonna draw an arc that's twenty-four sides and so to set the number of sides you just tap the AE key to activate the arc tool if you see down in the corner to ask you for a number of sides and I think it defaults to twelve maybe what you're gonna do is you're just going to type in 24 and hit the enter key and you're just basically telling Sketchup you want to draw a twenty four sided arc and now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna draw an arc with a width of 20 feet and then I'm going to draw up will give it a bulge of 10 feet which basically brings that in here is a half circle and so once we've created that that's gonna be kind of the top of our bridge and now we're gonna draw a couple arcs that define the path so I'm just gonna draw an arc out this way and then another arc out kind of across this way and so what I've got is I've got two pieces right here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the extension weld to weld these into a single line to create a path and so in order to do that you're just gonna select these two lines and then you're going to go up to the weld it extension and you're gonna click weld and what that'll do is Sketch up north at extension will take that line and it'll merge it together to create a welded shape and so now this is a single line that you can extrude an object along this path and so now that I've got my arc I'm going to draw a line across the bottom so that I have a face and if you didn't want to do it this way you could also use extrude tools to just extrude this line along this path but in this case what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna click on this line I'm gonna use the follow me tool to extrude this along this face face so I've got this long kind of curving shape and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna delete out the two ends and so now I have a base piece which can be the base of your bridge and I have this curve along the top we're gonna use the extension flow if I to bend a shape along the face and so I'm gonna go ahead and erase out my default model just because it's kind of gonna be in the way but you can see how when I did this this got broken up into a series of individual lines well what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select them just along this arc here so I've just got the lines of the arc selected and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to use the weld extension to weld this back into a single line and the reason I want that is because I want to get the length of this line because I want to when we draw a shape to Bend along this and flow Fi we want to maintain the we want to make sure that our base face is the same length as this so you don't get a lot of distortion and so I'll show you what I mean so if you remember the way this extension works is you have three groups so you have a target face so I'm going to double click on this and before I even do that I'm going to move a copy of this line off to the side using the move tool and copy mode because I'm gonna use that in just a second but I'm gonna double click on this face to select all the edges then I'm going to right click I'm going to make that a group and so this will now be my target face so the face I'm gonna bend something along and then the way flow if I works is you draw a pair of target lines to a flat shape and so in a second we'll draw our second line but what I'm gonna do if you remember the length of this curve was 31 feet 2 and 3/4 inches so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna draw a line here that's 31 feet - and did I say 3/4 inches I think I did so I've got that face this basically is the same length as this curve right here and so what's gonna happen is I'm not gonna get any distortion because basically anything I bend along this face as long as it make meets this dimension will fit nicely along this face and so then the other thing I'm gonna do is this line I can look up here and it's 201 feet 10 and 3/8 inches so I'm gonna do the same thing I'm gonna draw a line here that's 201 feet 10 and 3/8 inches and then I can use the rectangle tool to close this out and I'm gonna go ahead and reverse the faces because you want the face of this object to be facing this you want the white face of this object to be facing the same way as the white face of this object and so then I'm gonna double click on that and put it in a group and I'm gonna draw a line from this corner to this corner and I'm gonna put these two lines in a group because if you remember and the other thing I'm gonna do real quick before I go there is I'm gonna go down to my outliner and I'm gonna start labeling things so I'm gonna select this base face I'm gonna make that a group and I'm gonna call that just base so now I know that that doesn't really have anything to do with my flow if I group and I'm gonna go ahead and hide that and then now I can go ahead and erase this line out but I've got these three groups here I've got my target face I've got my target lines and I've got my base face I'm gonna select all three of those and put them in a group and so your outliner should look like this when you do this and the way you can test to make sure that's working is you can go up to extensions flow Fi and you can click impose grid if grid shows up in here then you've done it right if a grid doesn't show up in here you probably didn't set your groups up right take a look and make sure that you've got your target face your base face and your target lines if the grid doesn't show up ninety-nine percent of the time it's because these groups aren't set up properly so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and save my model it's usually a good idea any time you're using extensions to create complex geometry or even if you're just a ways in and you don't want to accidentally lose your work you want to make sure that you're saving your model because you can get a little bit of instability when you're doing this all right so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna generate our vorn wall shapes and so we're gonna use this extension this extension gets a little bit touchy so but what we're gonna do is we've got this whole group in here and we're gonna hide it in just a second but the first thing you're gonna do is you're just going to draw another rectangle on top of this so when you do that then you can come in here and you can hide this group so you just have a rectangle that you're dealing with so your flow is all set up now you're just creating the geometry that you're gonna bend along this face and so the way that we're gonna do this is we're gonna use JHS power bars see points at vertex option and basically what this allows us to do is this allows us to draw control points in our model or guide points and guide points are basically just points in space that aren't actual geometry they're basically just guide points that you pick and you put in a location and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take that we're gonna activate it and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna put some guide points around the perimeter because what this is going to do is this is gonna triangulate faces inside inside basically the perimeter option so I'm just gonna add some guide points in here just so that my triangulation will be kind of smooth so I just added some guide points around the edge well now you're just gonna add some random guide points inside your face so I'm gonna add these points in here and probably what we'll do is we'll run this extension and see how it looks and decide if we like the way that this looks so what I've done right now I've added all of these guide points and you can see they actually stayed selected they stayed selected because I haven't clicked out of this this tool and so you may have to come back in and select them if somehow they get deselected but what we're gonna do because I don't think the voron want XY works very good on this one yeah if for some reason that one doesn't work very well I'm not really sure why so what we're gonna do is we're gonna use this other one instead we're gonna use the triangulate points option and that's going to go ahead and ask you for a layer name and you can just click OK now and that'll create a series of triangulated points in your object and so what you're gonna do then is that's all going to be inside a group so the faces that are created those are all inside of a group well what we're gonna do now is we're gonna use this last option which is conic curve in face and so when you select conic curve in face what it does besides adding some weird geometry over here that we're not gonna worry about right now what it does is it basically will add these voron wash shapes inside your faces and it's basically using math to place these and you can see this is getting pretty close to these edges right here and I don't really want that because what I want is I want there to be some space in between these objects and so you can see if you look down in a corner you can set your offset and your number of points and your weight by pressing the tab key with this tool open well in this case I'm just going to tap the tab key I'm gonna go ahead and set my offset to 75 millimeters and I don't know how to change the units and this one everything else in my sketch up is set to feet and inches but this one still shows up in millimeters but we're gonna go ahead and try this with 75 so now if I click in this face you can see there's a little more space in here I want to see if I can get even more so let's see maybe I can try to let's go to 125 and see what that gives us that gives us that's why we save our model so you can see how my model crashed when I did that that's why we need to save this this is really important because every time I use this foreign law extension you can get it to create what you want it to create but it seems like you get a fair amount of instability and you can see how I'm gonna have to come back in here and add all my points again because that crashed so just kind of a warning when you're doing this make sure that you save your model otherwise you're gonna have to come in and redo everything so and I don't really understand why it's so unstable but it is so sometimes you just kind of have to be aware that something is unstable and just kind of prepare for it so I'm gonna come back in I'm gonna create a few points along this face will use the vorn wah and conic curve to create our triangulated points and I'm gonna save again I should have saved before I started adding all of these and I'm basically gonna click inside this face and I'm gonna use this and we'll go ahead and we'll set this offset to a hundred and see if that works there we go that'll have to work and so basically what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come in here and I'm just gonna add all of these different curves into this object and I wish I could get a little more spacing in here but as of right now that doesn't look like it's gonna work you can definitely fool around with this to get better results but I think this will be OK for what we're trying to do here well now that I've got all of these what I want is I want to merge them with this face because you can see it adds them all in here as a group so I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna erase out all of these triangulated lines that we're in here so this is one uninterrupted face there you'll try it again okay so the face is in here so you're just going to come in here and you're gonna erase all of these out and be careful not to erase your edges that's what I did there and so now you're inside this group and you've got all of these foreign log groups go ahead and delete that out and unhide last there you go so you've got all these voron log groups inside this group what we want to do is we want to select this whole thing we want to right-click and say explode and so when you say explode what that's gonna do is that's going to explode this so that it merges with this face you can see how now if I click on this face these are individual faces in here and there's two ways you could go from here the first way you could go from here is you could leave this all in here and so maybe what I'll do is I'll create kind of an example so I'm gonna save my model and I've been getting this message a lot in Sketchup 2018 I don't really know what it is usually if you just click fix now everything will get fixed but I'm gonna create a copy of this off to the side that we can use in a minute but for this one what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come in here and basically what you can do is you can select the whole thing and then do a shift double click and that'll deselect the edges and this big face and just leave you with this other these other faces so I'm gonna go ahead and delete those out so that'll give me my kind of that'll give me my geometry with all my curves that has the holes in it and then all we're gonna do is we're gonna push pull that and give it a little bit of thickness so in this case I'm gonna go ahead and give it a thickness of 6 inches and one other thing you may want to do is you may want to select all of this and use the soften edges option over here to smooth out these edges so you can check this box or soften coplanar then just drag the slider until those extra lines kind of get hidden out and so now what we have is we have this object and it's already in place that we can use for flow if I and so I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna unhide this target group that I had and so what I'm gonna do now I'm gonna go ahead and call this something else I'm gonna call this four and wha skin and then we can rename this other one and call it the flow fi group that way you kind of know what everything is over here in your outliner so I'm gonna go ahead and click the Save button and what we're gonna do is we're gonna select this group with our skin and then this group with our flow fi group and we're gonna go up to extensions flow fi we're gonna click flow fi and what that's going to do and that's going to take a little while is that's gonna take this object and it's gonna bend it along this face so now what we have if you hide your flow fi group is you've got this VAR in wash ape that gets bent along this face and you can see how it's a little choppy in here because what it does is it brings in all of this geometry as unhidden geometry well all you're gonna do is you're gonna do the same thing where we use soften edges and just move the slider until all that extra geometry goes away and again you may have to check this box for soften coplanar and don't drag it too far because that'll smooth everything too and you don't really want that that looks kind of funny but basically what you have now is you have this bent Warren law shape along this face then you can unhide this base and you could come in here and you could model structure or do whatever you want but that's how you can create this organic shape and one other option that you have when you do this and I'm going to go ahead and move this stuff off to the side after I save my model again is if you remember a minute ago I said that the other option in here is you could use this face in order to do this so I'm gonna unhide my flow if I group and I'm gonna move this object over here and then I'm gonna hide my flow if I group again what you could do in this case is instead of instead of erasing all of this out you could push pull it to give it a little bit of thickness so we'll give it a six inch thickness again and you can go ahead and soften your edges like you did before but what we could do instead now is we could come in here with the material like a glass material so you could go down to materials glass and mirrors and you can pick like this translucent glass and you could apply that to all these phases and so if you wanted to you could make this an enclosed bridge instead of a bridge with all the holes in it so we're gonna do the same thing we're gonna unhide our flow fi group we're gonna save our model notice how I'm really focusing on saving our model before we do anything now but you're basically gonna select this object you select your flow fi group you do flow of five flow five and give it a minute to bend all of this and so you can see how that that gets brought in here and we're gonna do the same thing where we hide our flow fi group and we're gonna go ahead and soften all of these edges again so I think I hit the wrong group we'll go over here and hide our flow of fight group and so you can see how this has the same issue that we had before so we're just gonna use the soften edges option again to soften them and so you can see that gives you a really smooth shape and if you wanted to you could use an extension like inscape or something like that to actually render walking through this shape you could add people and you can do a lot of different things in here so once you get an idea of kind of how you can bend this and how this works you can use this to create a lot of different shapes so that's where I mean in today's video leave a comment below let me know what you thought did you like this do you have some kind of cool ideas for what you can do with this I just love having that Sketch up conversation if 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 finally if you like what I'm doing on this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month you can 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 and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 136,303

Rating: 4.9717159 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, voronoi sketchup, voronoi, voronoi diagram, sketchup voronoi, voronoi pattern, flowify sketchup, sketchup parametric

Id: Er0pwxQbMzs

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2018