Modeling Tensile Structures with Soap Skin and Curviloft - SketchUp Extension Tutorials

what's up guys Justin here with the Sketchup essentials compact another Sketchup extension tutorial for you so today we're going to talk about a couple different ways to draw tensile structures and Sketchup so let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so there's a couple different extensions that I found that work pretty well for this kind of thing so the first is going to be soap skin and bubble you can search for that in the Sketchup Extension warehouse or I'll link to it in the notes below and then you're also going to want to have curve aloft by fredo six installed on your computer as well so those two are going to give you a couple different options when it comes to creating skins and stuff like that so I'll link to both those in the notes below but you're going to want to have both of those on your computer to come in here and do what we're talking about right now so first thing I want to do is I want to start off and what I've found is it's generally easiest when you're drawing something like this to come in and draw the area that you're trying to draw this structure over so in this case I'm going to come in here I'm just going to draw a 10-foot by 10-foot rectangle using the rectangle tool I'm just to kind of start off as an example so let's say this is the space that I want to cover with this structure right now well what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and the first structure we're going to draw is just kind of a simple four-sided structure and I found the best way to do this is to think about your structure as if you're actually like building it so like for example what I would do in this case is I would have some kind of support or something like that on each corner of this object so what would happen is we would draw or we would basically have a support up in the air on these two corners and then you'd have your us your pencil structure kind of fastened to the ground on these other two corners and so then what we would do is we'd come in here and we draw an arc just like this between these two corners and so once we draw that arc we can come in here with the rotate tool and we can create a copy of that just like this and then we can go ahead and erase out these ground points so now we've got our first two pieces of our tensile structure so then what we would do is we select these two objects we go ahead and make a copy of them using the move tool in copy mode so to select these two objects tap the M key set your base point and hit the control key so when you're moving this if you hit ctrl you can see how that's going to create a copy of your selected geometry so now you've got a copy of this geometry over here just like this and then all you're going to do is you're going to use the scale tool to flip it or you can right click and use flip along in order to do that you may have to flip it both directions just like this but then all you're going to do is you're just going to move these objects back just like that and you can erase out your corner pieces what that gives you is that gives you four pieces that kind of border on what would be a shape or a face in here and so with these two extensions that we have what they do is they generate a face along a framework just like this so I'm going to make two copies of this you can see how each one of them works so curve aloft is the first one I'm going to talk about and curve aloft has this option over here for skinning of shapes and so what this will do is you can select this object and then you can select skinning of shapes and what that will do is that will draw a face in here I'm kind of a skin along this object and there's a few different options that you can adjust over here I don't know that any of them are going to adjust or change this particular piece of geometry but what that will do is that will come in here and that will create a face it's kind of stretched along these pieces just like this so that's how the skinning on curve Loft is going to work and then for this one we're going to use soap skin to do the same thing so soap skin is over here and what you do is you select your objects and they have to all intersect so there can't be any gaps in here but you kind of select these objects and then you come in here and you select this option for skin and what that's going to do is that's going to give you this little box in here that's kind of showing you the divisions and it's going to ask you how many divisions you want in here and basically that's asking how much geometry you want it to create so you see down here in the corner it says ten well if I come in here and I type 20 and I hit the enter key you can see this divides this face up into more pieces so I can type 15 or whatever I'm actually leave it at ten just like this and then once you kind of got that divided up the way you want it you just hit the enter key and that will come in here and that'll just create a skin along this face just like this so you can see how Kerrville off gives you less of a curve along this object and seok skin does just like this so and the nice thing about soake skin is you can come in here and you can select this XY option right here that'll let you adjust the ratio of what's in there so if I come in here and I type in 20 or 30 you can see how that's kind of adjusting the way that this does this if I do negative 10 or negative 20 and then it'll get really crazy sometimes if you come in here with some higher numbers so in this case I'm just going to put it back to one but on some of these other objects you can really kind of adjust the way that this surface comes in here but you can see how now you've got kind of this tensile stretched fabric shape just like this and then you could come in here and then you could select everything and come down to the soften edges option and you could select softened coplanar and you could just kind of soften everything down here so then you get kind of a smooth face in here instead of the face that has all the different quads in it just like this so you can come in here and you can adjust that that way once you kind of start thinking about this as drawing kind of the drawing the piece of ground that you want to cover in here you can really kind of come in here and get creative with what you can do so in this case if I wanted to come in here and I wanted to create more of a long almost cylindrical type structure just like this what I could do is I could come in here and I could draw some kind of arcing pieces just like this I can make a copy of that across this face here and then I'd have kind of the same thing I have a four piece framework that I can come in here and I can use either soap skin or Kerrville off skinning options to come in here and create a skin on those as well so same thing this time I'm going to go ahead and divide that by a few more I'm going to divide that by 20 I'm going to hit the enter key and then it's going to come in here and generate the same kind of tensile structure phase so you can see how in this case that one's a little bit different because the default for this really kind of stretches this down a little bit but this is one where you could really come in here and adjust that that ratio too to change the way that it looks so you see how I change that ratio to 20 so what that does is that kind of inflates the space a little more if I bring it back down to ten or five you can see how it's going to adjust the way that this arcs in here so then one of the options that you could have for a shape like this is if you wanted to come in here and imagine you were drawing more of more of a shape or imagine you were coming in here and you were drawing more of a structure that had some different height supports in here just like this so if you're going to build this with some kind of curving supports across here what you could do is you could draw arcs across this face you could select just these options right here don't select the ones on the bottom and what curve aloft has is curve aloft as a basically a function that'll come in here and it will draw skin across these and it kind of like it matches basically along these arcs just like this and then there's a couple different things you can do in here to kind of adjust the way that that that draws these between these points but you could come in here for something like that and imagine you were building something that was more of an abnormal shape like this instead of a uniform one you could use curved Olof to come in here and create that so that would let you create more of an abnormal type shape in here so that gives you a lot of options for things that aren't necessarily as uniform as this piece so and then sometimes what happens is you want to come in here and you want to draw something that's more along like a circle so it would be more of a circular structure well what you would do is you'd come in here and you'd figure out in this case I'm going to draw an eight-sided circle so I'm gonna activate the circle tool by tapping the seek II and then I'm going to draw an eight-sided circle with a 10-foot radius well then what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw another circle up above like this with a very small radius so maybe like a 1 foot radius or something like that but then what we would do in this case is you could come in here and you could draw kind of a you could come in here and you could draw like a canvas just like this so just kind of a rectangle between these two points and then you could draw an arc I'm going to race your canvas back out and then what you can do is you could rotate this using the rotate tool in coffee mode in order to draw a pair of arcs along here you could draw another arc up and down and probably one on the inside right here but if you're going to do this along a circle what you can do is you can generate one of these using soap skin so and what it'll do is that'll generate your basically your skin along this face well then what you can do is you can come in here and you can select this and you can copy it in a circle so you have kind of a uniform shape all the way around so and I'm going to save my model before I do that so what I'm going to do is basically I'm going to generate one of these and I'm going to make this a component so we'll call this will just call it piece you can call it whatever you want but you're going to come in here you're going to rotate this in copy mode you're going to type in times 7 and what that does that could that creates seven additional copies around this circle so you've got this whole face in here you can see how that doesn't necessarily line up super good so what we're going to do is we're going to come in here we're going to select this geometry and we're going to soften it so just come down to this soften edges section of your tray drag this so that those are all hidden geometry and then you can see what you've got is you've got this uniform P and then you can come in here and you can delete out this top part so that you've got kind of this basically octagonal arcing shape up here so that's how you'd come in here and you'd create something like that and then the last thing that I'm going to talk about is more of an abnormal shape so what we do is we basically draw the area that we want to cover and then basically what I would do is I would kind of think about where my supports would be so in this case I would draw a support here I'd figure there'd probably be a ground point right here so basically what I'm looking for is I'm looking for something that kind of curves over to this side so what you could do is you could come in here you could draw kind of a rectangle here a rectangular face as your guide and I'm just using this so my arcs kind of so that I have a face to draw my arcs along but then I kind of erase all that stuff back out so once you do that what you can do once you've got kind of your arcs drawn is you just select them you make a copy and you flip them using the scale tool and then you do that one more time over here so you make a copy of those and you flip them up the scale tool them and move them back together and what that does that gives us another face or another series of faces so we can use soap skin to come in here and generate our faith and you can see how that's going to generate this skin and it may take a little while you can see how it comes in here and it generates that like it kind of stretched these like it kind of stretched these between your different supports so once you kind of wrap your mind around the way that works you can come in here and you can get really creative with the kind of stuff that you can create so anyway that's where I'm gonna wrap up today's video leave a comment below let me know what you thought did you like this workflow did I leave it out you would like to see I just love having that Sketch up conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember 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 on this channel please consider visiting my support me page that's the Sketchup essentials comm slash support that's got everything from extensions you can purchase to support the show too links to my patreon page 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: 510,023

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2016, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup organic modeling, sketchup soap skin, sketchup curviloft, sketchup tensile, tensile structure, sketchup tutorial, soap skin bubble tutorial, sketchup, curviloft, sketchup follow me, sketchup follow me tutorial, follow me sketchup

Id: oqq0qYkrpws

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2017