Site Modeling in SketchUp

this video is about building a digital site model with Sketchup Google Earth and Google Maps this is an example of a little model that I built using the technique that I'll teach in this video these are massing model versions of buildings surrounding a theoretical site if I flip on the photo scene you'll see that these models are actually based on photo textured versions that I got from the Sketchup 3d warehouse these are actually the same 3d models with photo textures that appear in Google Earth alright we've got a lot of ground to cover so let's get started here we are in Sketchup 2013 before we do anything in this program though let's take a look at Google Earth now Google Earth is a program lots of people are familiar with but a lot of architects don't realize that it's possible to do quite a bit of really valuable site research here in Earth as well so I'm going to fly to the location of a theoretical site that I picked in Denver Colorado it's a parking lot kind of sitting on half a city block between several existing buildings it's actually right here so big convention center and there's big Hyatt Hotel here and this is the site that we're theoretically thinking about building something on here now if you've used Google Earth recently that is to say in the first half of 2013 you'll notice that Google actually changed the way that it models existing 3d buildings it went to a system whereby it flies planes through the air and takes pictures and uses lasers to build models they look fine from a distance but if you get up close you'll see that it actually looks like there is maybe a major earthquake or something that happened if you remember using Google Earth before you you'll recall that the quality used to be much better the good news is there's actually a way to get back that good quality in Google Earth here's what you do on a Mac you go to Google Earth and preferences right there on Windows it's actually under a different menu I believe it's called options and I think it's under the Tools menu regardless if you say use 3d imagery that is disabled to use legacy 3d buildings if you uncheck that option and say ok you'll notice that Google Earth actually reloads with a ton of really really nice buildings now of course this is only going to work if you've got the 3d buildings layer with the photorealistic buildings enabled right here in Google Earth alright so you'll notice now that those buildings rather than looking kind of lousy and broke and they actually look nice and sharp the other nice thing about these buildings is of course they were made by people so if I were to click let's say on this hotel and then look at that model I not only get information about the model including its height and when it was built things like that I actually get a link to the model file in the 3d warehouse which is really useful all right let's take at a look at Google Maps because there's another piece of visualization functionality that I'd like you to take a look at what I want to do is I want to go to the same place in Google Maps I don't want to have to go and hunt for it like I was in Google Earth though there's a really nice little trick I'll show you let's get looking at the thing I want to be looking at in Google Earth and then right up here in the Edit menu I'm going to find the option to copy view location right there and when I do that it copies to my pasteboard or my clipboard on my computer the latitude and longitude that is to say the coordinates that I want to be looking at I'll just go ahead and paste those into the search field in Google Maps and lo and behold I actually get a view of exactly what I wanted to look at right there now I'm going to go to a satellite view of that location there it is and the reason I'm here in Google Maps is because there's actually a type of imagery that maps shows that Google Earth doesn't show and that is 45-degree imagery so notice that we're actually looking at this from a bird's eye point of view I can get an awful lot of information about the buildings surrounding my site using this type of imagery that I can't get from Google Earth so that's another resource that I want to be looking at the third type of imagery resource that I can use as an architect to scout my site is Street View data so right here in Google Earth I get this little Street View orange man on a green dot I drag him and just set them down on a blue road you'll notice we enter Street View and now I'm actually in a mode where I can look around at my site from a first-person Street level point of view and this imagery of course is captured by Google with their Street View vehicles that drive around we can actually see that this imagery was from July of 2011 if I exit Street View you'll see that the aerial imagery for this site was captured October 7th of 2012 and so Google's actually done a really nice thing by telling us exactly when this imagery is from go ahead and turn off that site all right so that's a little overview of the existing resources that you should know about that you can do a little bit of site research on without having to set foot outside of your office back here in Sketchup I've got pretty much nothing to begin with I've got Derrick and the axes and nothing much else what I need to do to begin with is bring in what's called a Geo snapshot it's a piece of the world I'm going to go up here to my add location tool it looks like a folded map if you prefer to use the menus you can always say file geolocation add location what ends up opening is something that looks a lot like Google Maps it's asking us to go and find something I'm just going to paste in the coordinates that I had copied out of Google Earth before and hit enter and zoom back a little ways and there's actually the site that we are considering right there I'm going to click the select region button in the upper right corner and I'm just going to use these blue pins to actually grab myself a piece of the world so let's go that and then I'll hit grab which is a button right there now when I do that it actually plunks this geo snapshot right back down in the middle of my Sketchup model now I know a few things I know it's at the actual scale because there's Derrick standing in the middle of it it's actually accurate to north which means a couple of things most importantly if I were to let's say just make a little block on here and then I went in here and showed my shadows and scrub those shadows around let's just sort of change the time of the day the shadow using Sketchup shadows engine is automatically going to be accurate for this location right now because the coordinates came in at the same time that the aerial imagery did just actually kind of neat let's just get rid of whole that bone-building okay and the other thing that we got at the same time you can't really see it on this site is we got a three-dimensional version of that terrain at the same time that we got the aerial imagery now this is such a flat site that you really can't tell it talk see it toggling very well but you can take my word for it that it is so I got a 3d version of the terrain and I got a 2d version of the terrain obviously what I also got is some nice aerial imagery for this site do you remember when we were back there in Google Earth we actually saw that there were some really nice 3d buildings available for this site right around here would it be nice if we could leverage these buildings if we could actually bring them into Sketchup instead of having to model them all ourselves there's a really nice way to do that I'm going to go to window and components and then right here next to the little house button there's a button labeled navigation if I click on that and choose nearby models what this is doing is it's going out and searching the 3d warehouse for any 3d models that are geo located within the vicinity of this snapshot that I was looking for so here's the Colorado Convention Center the Denver pavilions the quest building here's the Hyatt Regency now I know that I need the Hyatt right because I recognize that building so I'll just click on this little thumbnail right there when I click on that you'll see that building actually downloads from the internet and appears right here in my model and not only that it appears exactly where it's supposed to do be in the model this model was built a few years ago so it's a little bit unique you'll notice that any building that was made a little while ago also comes in with a black and white snap shot kind of pasted to the bottom of it if you're in here you can click on that component and then we're going to double click to edit it and then you'll see that I can click on that black and white thing I'm just going to go ahead and erase it because we don't need it for this exercise I'll just get rid of that all right so there's that building now I don't know what other buildings I need right I don't I'm not familiar with the area let's say so I don't know what these are called I may well need these buildings but I'm not exactly sure here's where I'm going to jump back to Google Earth and I'm going to do a little bit of research so I know this building is one that I need that is called 600 16th Street I'm actually just going to copy that right there and let's go back over to Sketchup I'm going to kind of scroll down I'm not seeing that building appearing here but this is what I can do I can just go into this little search field paste in the title of the model that I got from Google Earth and hit enter that searched the 3d warehouse for that building and look at this 600 16th Street it's right there let's just click on that and you'll see that that one came in there as well so you get the idea right we can go through and methodically we can download all of the buildings we need there you go I have downloaded all the buildings that are available that sort of border my site here there is one glaring omission though this one here with the white roof probably newer maybe nobody's got around to modeling it yet it's hard to say let's just double check earth to see if it's available there you see in the detailed high quality 3d model view it's actually missing as well one more place we can check is we can turn on that default 3d imagery that is to say the low quality stuff and see if anything shows up there let's take a look you'll see that it actually is modeled using the low quality high coverage method there it's useful from one point of view we can see how tall it is it's as tall as the adjacent building so that's a that's a useful piece of information let's go back to Sketchup first order of business here is actually to trace this outline so I'm going to get the line tool or I could hit L on my keyboard and I can start to trace now it would be really nice if these lines lined up with the default model axes but denver's rotated about 45 degrees I could fake it or I can just go ahead and change the model axes orientation right now I'll show you how to do that let's go to tools oops tools and axes right there that gets me the axes tool I'm going to click on an origin let's just choose this one here I'm going to say this is the red direction that is the green direction and now what I've done is I've reoriented the model axes to line up with the orientation of the city block here let's go and get that line tool again and I'm just going to start tracing I'm going to say I want to come about as far as this let's come out maybe I didn't want to come out quite that far let's kind of kick this back a little let's go out this far over here in the red let's go back in the green let's go back in the red in this direction right here until we hit that corner now what we've got is a face that represents the footprint of that building I want to go and get my push-pull tool let's just click to extrude it now we learned from the little bit of research we just did in earth that it's the same height this adjacent building so I'll just hover on the adjacent building and click and I've matched the height and now I have a little block on the site that represents that building would it be nice if I could use some imagery to actually photo texture the sides of this building too so that it would match the rest of this site well I actually can it's pretty easy and remember that Street View imagery that we were looking at before we have access to that in Sketchup so let's do that I'm going to click on the face that I'm interested in photo texturing but is painting with the photograph I'm going to right click on it and I'm going to say add photo texture and when I do that what ends up opening is a photo textures dialog there's a lot of information here for you I'm going to say start photo texturing just like that what you notice is that Street View imagery has appeared right here inside of Sketchup now I'm a little close to the building to capture anything useful so I think what I'll do is I'll just drag my little man over here and now you'll see that I'm a little farther away from the building I'm going to fly myself one more photograph in that direction you'll see there's the side of the building that I need I'm going to hit the select region button in the upper right corner and just drag this just like this and then I'm going to crop the part of the photograph that I'm interested in grabbing for the purposes of building my model here and you could be precise about this you can be imprecise it's kind of all up to you but you get the idea I've cropped a rectangle in perspective let's say grab I'll get rid of this dialog and there is the photograph from Street View mapped directly onto the model that I'm working on let's go ahead and do this face at the same time let's click on it right-click say add photo texture once again it's shown me the right building but I'm a little bit too close I'm in luck there's a parking lot across the street from this as well so I'll just drag my point of view back a little ways let's actually fly up against traffic just like this and I can fly up and take a look at that let's just fly up one more and see if we can get a better you know it doesn't look like it I think we need to head back in the other direction so we'll fly back this way we'll take a look over here just like this now I can always go in and Photoshop an actor or some other image editor and just take away these poles let's go to select region let's grab a piece right here I'm getting a piece of bus I'm getting a piece of light post getting all kinds of things but again this is quick and dirty let's just crop the part that I want right there and say grab we'll get rid of this and you can see that I grabbed the piece of building that I need and mapped it to the side of the building and that actually that doesn't complete the building because look we actually need a top of roof surface as well the way to get that is actually pretty simple as well we're going to go up and we're going to get the paint bucket tool right there and when we do that we can actually modify the paint bucket to turn into a sampling tool by hitting and holding command on a Mac or I believe it's alt on the PC so command on the Mac alt on the PC we're just going to sample the photograph that we brought in in that very first step and then we're just going to click over here on the roof of the building so even though we sampled from here and we clicked over here it's basically just using whatever part of the photograph is directly below this building here to paint it with so there's no magic involved that photograph looks like this underneath and it's just brought it up to the top of the building just like that once I've gone through that I think I'll just select that whole building I just made and I'll right-click on it and I'll say make that a component in this case maybe I'll just call it new building and say create and now it's a component like every other building in this model as a component so now what I have is a model of the buildings that I'm interested in using as context and we'll move on to the next step I've added a little bit more geometric detail to that building that we just made using the Street View textures what we want to do in this step is create a in this case white or gray massing version of these buildings the idea being that all this photographic detail on these buildings is going to compete with whatever I decide to put on this site at least initially it's certain that I'm not going to use photo textures in my design I probably just want this context to look as simple as possible so what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate these buildings and I'm going to make versions basically white versions of those duplicates first thing I'm going to do though is I'm going to go up to Styles I'm going to go to edit and I want to choose to edit my face styles I'm going to switch from this photo textured style to just a colored style that's going to help Sketch up in my computer out a little bit if it's struggling to keep up with all the photo textures in my model now it's just colors that I have to deal with instead of photographs that's easier for it to deal with these buildings are all components what I need to do is put them on their own layer as a first step so let's do that let's go up here to window and layers and I'll make myself a new layer and I'll call that layer context buildings just like that and I'll say return now simply creating that layer didn't actually put them on that layer I have to right-click on the buildings and say entity info and then I have to say what layer I'd like them to be on so I'd like to be on the context layer I'm going to toggle that turn them on and off just to make sure it did what I thought it was going to do the next thing I need to do is just reselect those buildings here we go I'll go up and I'll say edit copy what it's doing is it's just making a copy of those buildings to the system memory and then I'm going to go up and say edit paste in place in this case paste in place paste won't put them back where they belong paste in place will put them back exactly where they belong will go paste in place now I actually have those duplicates selected what I can do is I can select one of each of those duplicates just like that and I'm going to make myself another layer called massing models or massing buildings there's a very cool trick right here at entity info I can create a new layer and put everything that I've selected on it all at once by just typing a new layer right here into this field so we'll go like that notice it made a brand new layer called massing buildings if I turn that layer off and turn off context buildings you'll see that it did exactly what I wanted now I have duplicates of those components on this massing buildings layer right there ok these are components though so anything I do to one instance of this let's say building is going to happen to the other instance as well which is to say that if I paint this thing white the other one's going to get painted white too so I need to break the connection between this instance and the other instance and the way I'm going to do that is just right click on that and I'm going to say make unique and when I do that it breaks the connection between this component instance and the other component since on the other layer let's just go through we're making these unique there we go do we do this one already nope make unique and this one we already did all right so we've made unique copies of all of those buildings now let's dive in and actually paint them white this building is a great example of an older Google Earth model notice that it doesn't have any edges on it it actually came in from a 3d warehouse this way it's an example of a technology period before Earth was able to handle models with black edges on them so the modeler him or herself actually had to go in and manually hide the edges on the model for our purposes we want those edges to be visible because otherwise the model won't be visible at all on a white background so this is what we do take the Select tool double click on the component two so that we're just just looking at that component in isolation let's triple click on the component to select absolutely everything inside of that model that or we could say command a or control lay on a PC to select everything inside the component and what actually was selected at that point was more than just the faces that I wanted it actually selected this little Hyatt go I'm just going to delete that because I don't need it let's go ahead and do that again we'll just select all and I can actually just right click on this thing and say no I can't say unhide because there's nothing to unhide what I need to do is go up to view and say I want to see the hidden geometry the hidden geometry consists of all of those edges that were actually hidden now that I can see them let's reselect everything again notice that I selected the edges in the faces we'll right-click on that and say unhide and go up and turnoff hidden geometry and you'll see what we got we actually ended up with all of the edges that had been hidden in that model really valuable tip let's do that again let's select all but this time what I'd like to do is I want to paint the whole thing white I'm going to go up to my paint bucket I get my colors or materials depending on operating system you're in I'm going to go up to my library of colors in model and the very first color in that list is this thing called the default material it's almost always sort of half greyish purple and half white I could paint this whole building white but I want to paint it with the default material and I'll show you why in a little bit let's just click on that default material while this whole model is selected I'm just going to click once on it and turn it white just like that so let's repeat the process for these other buildings it's kind of just head over here like that double click select everything get the paint bucket select that default material and click and repeat the process zoom out a little ways right up here we'll double click on this model I'm going to select everything inside of it we'll go over here to my paint bucket grab that default material and paint it on and just check our work now you'll notice that there are actually some objects in here that did not get painted and in this case these escalators are not something I want so I'm actually just going to delete them because they're not important to me from a context point of view let's actually do the same thing over here do we'll get rid of that one and that one but you'll see there are some other materials like let's say this one the reason for that is they're probably mapped to the backside of these faces so let's just go ahead and select everything again we'll grab the Paint Bucket default material and we'll paint anything that isn't already white click just like that and now that's become the default material too if I click out here you'll see what actually happened so let's click out there we'll click over here to deselect it and now I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing to the other buildings in the model here I've painted all the buildings white in the model there's one little condition that I think it's worth mentioning if you look at this building right here you'll notice that there are no edges appearing where these two faces meet and the reason for that is pretty simple if I dive in here and get rid of let's say this face just temporarily you'll see that this mass is intersecting this mass but the face is intersecting the face there's no edge there I could dive into the geometry and actually see if I could fix that but there's a faster way this is how I'm going to do it let's just undo to get that face back all I really want is for the edges that define the boundary between these two faces to appear so I'm just going to click on this face right there and I'm going to right-click on it and say intersect faces with model in this case right there and what that's done is it's automatically drawn an edge everywhere that face intersected with another face actually that wasn't great because in reality it also drew this edges now those edges come from the building that's actually adjacent to it the new building that we model we probably didn't want those edges to appear on that building so let's actually go back one step I'm going to click on that face again right-click on it and say intersect faces instead of with model I'm just going to do with context which will limit the faces Sketchup is looking at for this operation - just the ones inside of this component right now so we'll go with context and that gives us the effect we want let's click out excellent and all right so I think the next thing we want to do at this point is trace some streets on the model and we're just going to use the aerial imagery that we have on this geo snapshot to do that maybe I'll actually turn off the buildings at this point because the buildings are sort of hindering my ability to be able to see what's going on so I'll go up to layers I'm going to turn off those massing buildings you'll see that I renamed that layer something a little bit clearer in the interim let's turn that off but I do want to keep that snapshot let's just go back over here to layers and let's do something now remember how those axes were re oriented in order to draw the building that was over here I reset them in the interim but let's go ahead and actually set those axes up so that it's easier to draw these roads again as well so we're going to go to tools will go to axes I'm going to find a road that looks nice and straight and seems oriented to the grid this right here looks good I'll click there I'm going to say this will be my red axis this will be my green axis notice that I want to make sure that that blue axis is pointing up will go green now I reoriented those things and there are quick ways to draw these streets and there are less quick ways to draw these streets I think what I'll do is I'm going to draw a rectangle I think so let's just draw a rectangle now if I knew exactly how wide this thing where I could type in dimensions but this is just a quick sight model so let's just for the sake of argument say that the road is that thick or that wide I may just actually erase out the edges of this thing looks at the endpoint edges anyway to simplify things then I'll go up and get the pencil tool and I'll just extend this I don't extend it all this way I'm just going to sort of assume that the road continues from there to there but there's a pretty easy way to check that out let's go back to Google Earth and I'm going to go to a street view of this to see if the street actually gets wider or narrower or or what it looks really like that looks like this let's go to this I'm just going to set myself down right there it looks like this is the street car that runs this way is the curb yep the kerb is lined up from side to side right there over here it's hard to tell because there's light rail in the way but it looks to me like the curb lines up on that side as well so let's go back to Sketchup it looks like what we did made sense I'm going to go up and get that line or pencil tool again let's just continue on off in this direction now let's create some that actually cross this way so again I'm just going to use the rectangle tool I'll come up here I'm just going to pick an arbitrary spot that seems like it's a good reference we'll go like that maybe and we'll come over here and that seems about right right there again I'm just going to take my eraser tool erase away the ends and maybe I'll even extend the lines here that I want just manually using the line tool there I switch to the line tool using the letter L on my keyboard I'll go there come out this way good and Papapa all right so we want to deal with this intersection right now let's come over here to the eraser get rid of the eraser eraser eraser eraser just like that so we just erased away those four edges which just leaves this intersection for realism sake I think what I'll do is even put in the little radius on the curb so let's go and get the tape measure I find that this is a nice way to do this when you have an intersection of four streets we'll go that says it's a 24 foot I'm just going to type in 25 feet at this point because it'll make it a little simpler now let's go a 25 foot radius in this direction loop will go 25 feet enter and I looks like I need those on this side as well so we'll go over here that's 25 feet and let's do another one on this corner as well 25 feet now at this point it's probably easiest to turn off these photo textures because I can't really see the lines I'm working on so I'll go back up to styles I'm going to go to my face styles and I'll switch from this photo textured mode over to this just colored mode I can even go over here to hidden line which is just black and white that'll make it easier to see on the video now I'll get the arc tool I can hit arc or I can press a on the keyboard I'm going to say I want to start here I want to go here and I'm just going to move this until it turns magenta which tells me that it's tangent to this edge and to that edge let's repeat that operation here to here up engine let's go from here like that to about there up tangent and let's do whoops I clicked in the wrong spot so I'll hit escape to get myself out of that predicament we'll go back to magenta just like that good all right let's get the eraser we're just going to erase out those edges now let's go back to my Styles because I want to turn on those photo textures again it looks to me like I actually need I didn't grab enough context up here you see that I don't have enough information to model this intersection but I need that intersection because this is my site what I'm going to do is go back to that add location tool that we used at the very beginning of the video let's just click on that and I'm going to go and I'm going to use this tool to grab some more context for myself in this case I want this corner over here so I'll just select a region I'll say that's about what I want we'll say grab and look at that what Sketchup did was that it actually just added this snapshot to that snapshot exactly where it belongs and it gave me as much information as I need to model this road as well let's just repeat that process we'll take the rectangle tool I'll zoom in and say this might want to go from here to here it's very difficult to see what's going on here but I'll make a guess and say that it's just to the just to the side of where the cars are maybe there let's go ahead and take that end edges off again this street isn't intersecting with this street I think we actually have enough information to switch back to a black and white style though here we go let's go to the line tool let's just extend those out escape to end the line well extend this out to there alright escape to it clip off that line and for the sake of argument let's just imagine that these radii here are the same as they are there so I think I'll take that tool here this is my tape measure tool and I'll give myself some more line reference line so we'll come out here to 25 feet come out here to 25 feet and let's just take that work and finish this up we'll come from here to here there we go we'll go from there to there till I see that magenta I'm a little confused by what's going on right now so I'm just going to delete the stuff I know I don't need right there and right there this is well we'll go to the arc go bonk bonk your if you don't get the snap you want try orbiting around to reorient your view that's usually the best approach we're going to go from here to here and we'll go just like that we'll get the eraser and erase out those roads well at least the edges associated with the roads let's get that line tool again and extend this out just in case we need it and I think at this point we can probably erase the guides as well this point I could manually erase the guides or I can go up to edit and delete guides it gets rid of all the guides inside my current context Derek's still standing there such a trooper we're going to delete him though because I don't think we need them in the model at this point and let's turn back on the photo textures and I think we have as much context as we need right now so that is the procedure that we use for adding some roads to the model what I'm going to cover next is a procedure for adding roads to a model that is not on a flat site here we have a section of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania I believe this is the Duquesne University campus or at least part of it there aren't a lot of flat sites in Pittsburgh so what we need to do here is deal with three-dimensional terrain first thing you need to know how to do is to turn on the three-dimensional version of the terrain that comes in when you capture a snapshot the best way to do that is to say file geolocation and show terrain and you'll see that what actually came in on this version is a quite a three-dimensional version of that now if you don't like to use the menus what I suggest doing is going to view tool palettes or I think that's called toolbars on windows and turning on the Google a little tool bar set and you'll notice there's a button here and I think it's probably called something like toggle terrain if I click that button I'm toggling between the flat and the 3d versions of that terrain but what's actually happening when you're toggling that is that you're toggling between the two layers that were imported when you did that so watch as I click this button you'll see that those layers are getting switched the terrain is the 3d one and the snapshot is the 2d one so it's really important to understand that when you're doing this let's just toggle that so it's 3d again now what I've done in this model already is I've already brought in all the buildings I need so let's just go ahead and turn on the buildings those are the buildings that I found really easily in the 3d warehouse but what I want to do at this point is I want to trace some of these roads and hard scape on the campus we can imagine that we're doing a hypothetical project here or someplace in this kind of quad area right there for that I think what I'll do is I'll actually turn off the photo buildings like this and I want to trace the roads I want to trace the roads on a 2d version of this so I'll toggle that terrain so that I'm looking at a two-dimensional version and I'm going to go ahead and I'm just used the line and the arc and whatever other tools I need to just trace this in 2d now I already did that for the sake of time I'll just turn on the layer I put that on here if I go up to my Styles you'll be able to see what I did a little better I turn this on hidden line that's the piece of hard scape that I actually just drew manually and right here it's flat but of course in 3d it needs to be mapped to that 3-dimensional surface so let's do that now go back to my shaded with textures here let's turn this on now I think I'm going to dive right into the layers and undo some things so this is what I'm going to do let's go to layers I'm going to turn off that two-dimensional snapshot version of the terrain there we go and I'm going to turn on the 3d version terrain right there there's the terrain I think what I'd like to do is actually make a white copy of that terrain just that I'm not sort of distracted by the by the imagery and this is how I'll do that I'll just click on it now actually ordinarily it's locked just like this so it would look red locked like this to unlock it you right click and say unlock until it's bounding boxes blue now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up and say edit I'm going to say copy it'll copy it and now I'll go pasted in place right there and with that copy what I'd like to do is put that on oops I lost my pallet well this is actually a good time to show you another little tip if I lose a pallet because I change resolution or go double screen or something like that I can go to Sketchup preferences on the Mac or under window preferences on a Windows machine and right here under workspace I'm going to say reset workspace that takes away all mine windows but when I go to try and get something that was formerly lost it'll actually put it right there an upper right corner where I expect to find it ok so that is of course the duplicate of the terrain that I made let's go layer I want to put that on my context massing layer right there okay so nothing really appeared to happen let's go back up and get layers again there's that make this a little bigger so we can see what's going on ok let's make it big enough that we can see the text and I'm actually just going to turn off the terrain layer right now I'm going to go back to massing you'll see that I already made massing versions of all the buildings I just turned them white made their edges a little more visible and this is the version of the 3d terrain snap shot that's in color let's make that white so let's just double click on it I'm going to select that surface make sure that hidden geometry is not turned on at this point if it is this won't work we need to select this so it's just one nice big surface we'll get the Paint Bucket tool choose that default color and click on it once let's get rid of colors and you'll see that I now have a white version of that terrain that I can use I think what I'll do at this point is yeah I think I'll map the roads and then cut the buildings into the returing so let's do that the roads even though there are other on their own layer are actually also just a group I'm going to take the Move tool I'm going to move them up up in the blue direction so that they're hovering over this terrain object that I just turned white alright now what tool I need is called the tool I need is called drape now drape is part of the sandbox tool set depending on what version of Sketchup you're using it will either be activated or not activated so let's do another little piece of Education if I go up here to tools the very bottom of the menu I'll see sandbox and there's a drape tool right there if you don't see the sandbox tools it means they haven't actually been turned on all copies of Sketchup I think from 7on Pro and make or free depending on what version you're using have the sandbox tools they're just not always activated so we're going to go up in this case to preferences again that's under the Sketchup menu or the windows menu right there and I'm going to go to extensions and I need to scroll through this list and make sure that those sandbox tools are turned on if that's not checked you won't see them make sure they're checked as soon as you check it it'll actually turn them on and you should be able to see them again under sandbox Dre so I'm just going to activate that tool let's go drape and I get this little thing that I can pick groups with now what this does is it lets me pick one group and then pick another group and it automatically uses the top group to cut the bottom group so I'm basically cutting those edges directly into that bottom thing so I'll turn off my tracing layer here and you'll see that the 2d stuff the flat thing that I traced goes away and lo and behold I actually have those roads cut directly into the three-dimensional version of the white terrain that I made just like that okay let's actually go into this terrain object again I'm going to double click let's select all of this and I'm going to right click and say intersect faces with model and this is actually just going to get all those edges where the buildings poked through the terrain to appear as well so let's just double click or just single click out of there looks like this this little edge didn't come in no worries I can go into the building actually you know what the reason it didn't know don't know why it didn't come in but let's just do this we'll double click on that building we're going to right-click on the surface and say intersect faces with model and now I get that edge and they have to do that in a couple of other circumstances as well with model into here intersect faces with model you get the idea through a few simple steps like that you can actually end up with exactly what you're looking for here we are back in the original project we were working on this is the parking lot site in Denver I've got those roads drawn in I think what I'd like to do though is substitute a big white ground plane in to go with my white model versions i just opened layers and turn back on that context buildings massing layer I don't want this photo graph-based ground plane though because it doesn't you know it's not going to work so what I need to do is just turn off that that layer you'll notice that there's two layers that come in by default every time you add a location to Sketchup Google Earth snapshot Google Earth terrain I'm going to click off the one that's currently on and you'll see that that layer will go away quite nicely alright let's put away this layer let's put that away just like this now before I draw that ground plane I think what I'll do is I'm going to select all my streets and group them in that case I just selected everything it's easier to select everything and then deselect the buildings than it is to just try and pick and choose the street edges that I want so we've got that let's just right-click on this and say make myself a group consisting of those streets and now I'll get the rectangle tool and I'm just going to draw a rectangle kind of goes the extents of the the site that I want in this case I'm just going to arbitrarily say that it's about this big now that thing came in backside up white side down because Sketchup does that so that when you extrude something it actually flips it inside out it's kind of a long story if you want the white side up in this case all you have to do is right-click on that and say reverse face and that is now white side up while I'm at it I'm also going to take that whole ground plane that I just drew and turn that into a group as well I like to keep things nice and separate so I've got my Street edges I've got this group everything is easy to pick and easy to hide and show if I want it to if I dive in here you'll see that I'm running into a similar problem that I had before on that other context building where I don't have an intersection line between this building and the ground there see the building is actually penetrating the ground right there so I'm going to use the same trick to solve that problem but I'm going to do it on the ground plane instead of on the model here let's take this rectangle out double-click on it to dive into it click on that rectangle right click and say intersect faces with model in this case and it's going to draw in ground edges wherever the building models intersect with that ground now it didn't draw one over here because that model is actually not intersecting with the ground plane maybe it should be but it doesn't visually look wrong to me so I'm going to sort of late slip let sleeping dogs lie so I've got a ground plane in there I think what I'll do next is add some street names I personally like to put those into sight models because I think it's easier to orient yourself when when that's done and I think it's kind of an interesting lesson in using the 3d text tool let's go back to Google Earth and exit Street View I'm just going to take a look at what these streets are actually supposed to be called now am I getting street names is the question now I'm not getting any street names so I need to turn on a layer over here I'm going to turn on borders and labels and let's see if the street names come in that I want did that work nope maybe I need to turn on roads there we go there's a roads layer here we go this is California Street it looks like um-um um-um does appear oh here we go California Street sometimes it doesn't put them exactly where you think you're going to go and this is 15th Street right here crossing so let's go back to my model and throw those in so this is if I recall California Street I think I'll go up to my tools and I'll go up to 3d text right here I'm just going to type in what I'm interested in in this case I can maybe choose a font I'll go with good old Arial because you know everybody has it will go regular maybe I'll say bold I'll just get rid of that I'm going to type in California Street right there in this case I don't want the text to be extruded or three-dimensional I don't feel like that's necessary so I'll just take that and say place now what's happened is it doesn't look like I've got anything on my cursor but that's just because these letters are ten inches high by default if i zoom in and zoom in and zoom in you'll see that I actually did get the text I want it's just a little smaller than I was expecting so in this case I'll just set it down right there I'm going to switch to my scale tool it's right here on the palette just like that I can click on that or I could hit S on my keyboard or I could go to tools scale and I want to scale it if I want to scale it uniformly about the center I can hold down a key on my keyboard on a Mac its command I'm sorry it's option on a Mac it's probably control on the windows I'm just going to bring that out sort of like this and you'll notice that as I move around you see that Z flashing that's called Z fighting right there it's because the color of the letters is actually different from the color of the road and it's coincidence coplanar meaning it flashes and that's I find it very annoying actually so the first thing I'm going to do is double click on that new component and I'm going to reverse all of these letter faces let's get rid of that here we go we reversed these faces just like this and we'll just right click on that and say reverse faces so we've got exactly what we want now what I want to do is actually pick that up off the ground a little ways the reason I want to pick it up off the ground is just because I think it's more interesting when it's kind of just floating a little bit you may want to do this as well so I'll show you how if I select this and then I get my move tool and I try to move it up in the blue direction you'll notice that I can't I can't move it up at all I'll hit escape just stop moving the reason for that is 3d text when you first create it is what's called glued to the surface that you put it on so I have to right click and say unglue first that detaches it from the background or from the ground plane now I can get my move tool and actually move it up in the blue direction I'm going to move it up just six inches in this case just like that so that looks good the trouble is now when I have shadows turned on like this let's turn on the shadows and kind of sweep this little ways like that you'll notice that the road name is actually casting a shadow and I think that's probably undesirable I think that's an effect I don't really need well that's relatively simple to fix as well believe it or not over here in entity info right there if I select that Road name and I expand the entity info dialog box you'll see that I have options for cast shadows and receive shadows for this object so let's actually sell it not to cast shadows there now it's not casting a shadow and the problem that I want to fix this time if I go back up to my shadows where they go there we're hiding behind like this is I don't really want the street name to be in shadow either I'd like that Street name to sort of sit as a as a graphic so in that case I'm just going to select don't receive shadows either just like that and now it neither casts nor receives shadows and it happens to look good just about all of the time so we'll go over here I think I'll turn off my shadows for now turn off entity info put that away and take a look I'm going to go ahead and add some more street names into this and come right back I've added some streets to the model there are three things I'd like to cover in this last part of the video number one I'm going to show you the reason that we chose to paint these buildings with the default material instead of just white or gray or some other some other thing like that number two I'm going to set up scenes that makes it really easy to toggle back and forth between the photo textured versions of these of this map model and the and the white version of the model and third I'm going to use scenes to show you how to do a simple shadow study on this model so let's jump right in okay you'll recall that when we were in here painting these entire models I recommended that you use the Paint Bucket to use this default material the reason we did that was there's kind of a neat trick in Sketchup that you can do if everything inside of a group or component is painted with the default material watch this if I take the paint bucket and I say I don't know hypothetically let's say my building or whatever I do on this site is actually going to call for the demolition of these two buildings well I'll go over here to my colors I'm just gonna maybe pick a red to indicate demolish and I can just go ahead and click on the buildings that I want to color red no the reason this works is I'm basically coloring the component instance red and then any material that's inside which is the default material will automatically also turn red so let me show you what happens if that weren't the case if I go in here to this component and I select the whole thing and instead of having it be white I chose to paint it a beige color or something like that maybe yellowish like this now when I come out here and I choose red for my color and I drop red on that component you'll see nothing happens click click click and the reason for that is even though the component knows it's red the individual faces inside are yellow and and and the red won't override the yellow because it's not the default material all I have to do if I've accidentally used white instead of the default material is select everything get the paint bucket go back to that default material let's kind of scroll Scroll scroll go the fault material paint that on and you'll see instead of turning white it turns red because it's picking up the default color for this component instance it's a little complicated but I think it's worth mentioning because it's a nice little trick in this case I can I can do other things diagrammatically with these buildings too I could say you know these two are key and this building is of particular interest because maybe it serves as a precedent for what I blah blah blah something like that in which case I I might just color it and blue something like that okay let's undo that blue let's do something else right now what I'm going to do is I want to use scenes to make it really quick to switch between views of this site model so let's open up layers just like this I've got my layers there it shows which layers are showing in this case my ground plane and my streets are both on my layer zero I think they're probably on this layer zero I'd actually like to make a new model you know what actually I'm just going to put them on this context buildings massing layer because I think that'll simplify things so let's just move them on to that layer like that close up entity info I'm going to go up to window and scenes and the scenes dialog box is pretty critical here I'm going to click this to expand just like that now I'm going to get this showing the layers exactly the layers that I want to show so I don't want the photorealistic I don't want anything from Google Earth in this case I really just wanted to show the context buildings massing layer and my layer zero so I'm going to go up here and I'm going to say add a scene it's going to complain about the styles that I have when this dialog box pops up I find that the easiest thing to do is just to save as a new style and deal with the Styles later so we'll say create scene I I don't find it that handy to see these thumbnails all the time so I'm going to change to a list view of my scenes but I am going to rename that scene and call it massing just like this all right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the scene through the layers I'm sorry that are visible I'm going to say you know what I really want see my terrain and I want to see the photorealistic versions of those buildings that'll take a few seconds to appear because it's having to render the photo textures there we go I notice that I accidentally forgot to put those street names oops on that other layer as well alright come on in this case oh they're actually below it so I better pick it from below there we go alright so once I've got those three street names selected I can move them to the proper layer as well they're going to go on the masking layer which is hidden so they disappear when I put them on that layer okay more importantly that is the photorealistic version of my site model I'm going to go up and add a new scene and I'm going to call this seen something like photo and hit enter and you'll notice what happened when I did that I created a couple of scene tabs so that when I click on this thing it's toggling back and forth but you notice how the camera position is actually changing so let's say we're out here or I had done some sort of an intervention I had done something over here in this case I've got a three-dimensional version of that terrain turned on so it's not easy to model on top of it but you get the idea let's say I had something here and I wanted to just quickly flip back to a massing version of this thing if I click back on my massing thing it actually rotates the whole scene again that bothers me there's a neat thing you can do inside of scenes mmm I don't want to and generate thumbnails for this I'm just going to say cancel it's a very neat thing you need to pay attention to it if you're kind of an advanced Sketchup user I can save which properties I want to save with each scene in this case I do not want the camera location to be remembered as part of the photo scene by the same token I don't want the camera location to be remembered for the massing scene either if I close up that scenes thing and I fly around and switch to photo you'll see that switching on that seemed to have no longer changes my camera position it actually just changes the layers which are active so it's kind of a really nice way to work with this kind of a model because you don't always want to change your camera position every time you want to change which version of the of the site model you're looking at finally let's do a little shadow study here this is really simple we're going to go to shadow settings and we're going to turn on shadows and say that you know in the summer time let's say right around the Solstice so June 20th ish something like this in the morning the shadows look like this this is at 6:22 a.m. I'm just going to go up here to my scenes and I'm going to add a new scene and call that morning morning summer how about that and then I'm just going to scrub my shadows over to the evening let's say just like this right there that's 601 p.m. let's just add a new scene just like this and we'll call it evening summer and enter now it's split up my scenes up here that bothers me a little so I'll just go over here and select this and move this guy up so that they're kind of grouped together the way I want them to be and notice that the camera location property is not saved for morning and evening either and that's fine because probably I want the same thing to happen I want to be able to do a shadow study no matter what you I'm looking at of the model so I'll save everything else except those turnoff the scenes and then no matter where I am in the model when I click on morning you'll see those shadows moving across let's go evening and this is exactly how they work all right if for some reason you wanted that to take longer like let's say you wanted the transition between those scenes to happen a little slower let's go up to window model info and then right here under the animation heading which is the very first tab in this dialog box I'm going to change the transition time to let's say 5 seconds between those scenes we'll close that and now when I click on these scenes well it should be taking five seconds let's see what happened oops you know what happened I didn't say enter lets click enter and now when I click on this it'll take a whole lot longer to move between alright that was a little tutorial about how to make a digital site model using resources that you can find on Google Earth and Google Maps in Sketchup to quickly figure out a site if you don't happen to be there or if you're running on a short deadline thanks very much have fun

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 776,106

Rating: 4.9381204 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, architecture, tutorial, workflow, site model, context model, google earth, 3D Modeling (Profession), technique

Id: nVhM3IYMF8o

Length: 60min 2sec (3602 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2013