SketchUp City Building - Basic Tips & Tutorial

I've got a lot of requests via comments or inbox messages on YouTube about people asking me to make a tutorial or explain how to make my cities that I've made on Sketchup and I always thought it seemed pretty obvious because the level of modeling is really basic but evidently people want to know so I thought I'd make a short video just explaining the basic techniques I use all the techniques are really basic and it's just implementation on a very big scale so I'll take you through basic techniques with a simple really small chunk of a city so to start with as always I just draw you know a large really large rectangle my fifth city had a nine square kilometer rectangle initially before it was extended and then always remember to extrude the rectangle before you actually start drawing on it roads are drawn with again just rectangles that are conjoined together I find I used to use the freehand tool a lot more for recording for drawing roads like curvy roads and stuff but that can make it a lot harder in the long run especially when it comes to drawing buildings because when when roads are drawn straight and in a grid sort of system like in the USA for example all the buildings can easily be aligned to it when you're drawing buildings but here's an example of a curved road as well it's just the freehand tool and it does require a bit more precision and alignment I am sorry about the quality of the recording I'm using the Windows game recorder but it doesn't like to record Sketchup really I always extrude the roads down about 25 centimeters I think it's a little larger than in real life but it's just the noticeable amount to show pavements really texturing I usually use the black asphalt texture and you can use the grey asphalt texture if you want but I use the black one because it helps distinguish the roads a bit from the buildings which are usually going to be gray especially from the roof it makes the roads look more like roads rather than just pavements or whatever buildings I just usually draw basic shapes especially for skyscrapers squares rectangles and variants of that you can conjoin rectangles you can join squares together and but you align them about on average four meters away from the road to create pavements and around the same distance or less apart from each other and that way you can create little alleyways into back streets and centers of city blocks adding the circle tool for example here definitely helps to make buildings look a little more unique and realistic and then you can just erase the inside lines and then you've got a completely new shape using the offset tool helps add an extra bit of detail quite quickly and easily where you just can create ridges or extending parts of buildings like so and a lot of buildings will have rooftops with small walls on the roof to stop people falling off the edge and that's what that's used for and then you can just extrude the rest of the buildings and that's basically the process it's very repetitive but you just have to extrude a lot buildings with taller buildings in the center of the city and then dwindle it out to bungalows or to story short houses on the edge of the city as for drawing the actual houses the shapes are really random I mean you can do basic rectangles you can do rectangles that have other circles attached to them or more complex shapes that you can draw I kept it pretty simple than my cities you can add little patio areas but it's it's going to be it's just going to be a basic model so in the end it doesn't have to be that detailed but just make sure you have a variety of houses to spread across the city because you don't want one or two or three of the exact same house across the entire city so I think I made about ten I also made sort of larger I'm what's the word terraced houses that kind of keep it varied as well but there were about ten or so maybe more scattered around the city and it it kept it pretty fresh I think kept the streets looking all different but if you select all the edges excluding the face of each drawing you can simply copy and paste the houses throughout the city and then you can also once you've pasted them you can rotate them so that they can align with the roads and that's the gist of it like the buildings it's a case of repetition just repeating everything you're doing throughout the entire city that's the main thing I want to get across making the cities isn't hard at all it's just a bit boring if I'm honest and quite very repetitive tip to save time on extruding if you have a lot of buildings that you want extruded to the same height to say six meters you can extrude one to six meters and then double-click the next surface you want and it'll extrude to the same distance and that's what I did when I was making my houses in my fifth city so it saves a bit of time I think another little detail you can add is adding just bits and bobs on top of roofs of apartments and skyscrapers that would be pipes and vents and air-conditioning units and stuff like that or little access doors it just adds a bit of detail to the city that's why I did on the skyscrapers in my other city you don't have to do it on every building I just didn't skyscrapers to texture I used them specific building textures that are downloaded from the internet you can Google you know Sketchup building textures and there are loads of different ones for apartment skyscrapers new buildings rundown buildings anything you want really I'm another tip here is using the soft eraser tool can get rid of those ugly lines on curves they join straight surfaces so that's why I use there but why I'm doing here is just scattering a variation of textures throughout each building just to keep it varied I mean if you make a large enough City you're not going to have enough building textures I think for every unique building so you'll have to start to repeat the textures but if you keep them spaced down enough you barely even notice and that's what I had to do when I made my city one point about textures is that they need to be scaled properly in my first in my subject area my second and third city these textures were not scaled pocketed properly at all and you can basically when you import the texture image in the settings on the texture menu you can change the dimensions and what I do is I get the character model and a 3 meter high door because that's about the same size as one floor of a building I get that on a building and then I keep adjusting the scale of the texture until it matches that so one floor equals one floor that I've drawn and it only takes a little bit of a little bit of trial and error but once you've scale law you'll check textures you'll never have to do it again and I think that's the good thing and it means you're just going to create a much more realistic looking city if you if you check my my second city it's on the Sketchup warehouse the textures are just not to scale whatsoever and it really does not help make the city look realistic but yeah I mean with the textures you just keep on going and keep on covering every building if you want the detailed textures the rooftops I just used different shades of gray really keep them like Rare don't want them too dark because it can make the city that really dark it also depends on your lighting settings but housing rooftops I just use the roof roofing section of the textures menu they've got decent selection in there and it doesn't have to be too varied rating but just varied enough so that's the basic gist of it really I mean I think I've covered all the basics that you need to know how to do everything I made in this video and everything I made in all my cities and as you can see I worked on this tiny little square for like five ten more minutes and it's already got that same sort of feel as all the other cities have made so really everything I've covered will cover everything you'll need to know roads and pavements and extruding buildings texturing detailed textures texture scaling that's about it really I mean you can tweak the shadows and fog settings as much as you want to get the right effect for the atmosphere and shadows definitely do make the sea look a lot better but other than that there's nothing else really to learn it's just practice practice practice and that's the that's the idea of it really I mean I've just I made them and I've made them to the detail that they are because I've been using Sketchup for so many years yeah that that's that's all there is to it and I'll hopefully be doing more tours of my other city models soon so yeah thanks for watching guys see you later

Channel: Justin Kreule

Views: 135,658

Rating: 4.9186912 out of 5

Keywords: sketchup, sketchup city, sketchup city build, google sketchup, sketchup make, sketchup pro, google sketchup city, 3d modelling, sketchup modelling, landscape architecture, sketchup architecture, sketchup tutorial, sketchup basics, sketchup tips, city building, city modelling, 3d city model, sketchup huge city

Id: ND6SM6CEuu8

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2016