SketchUp Live! Modeling Terrain (July 19, 2018)

hey everybody welcome to Sketchup live my name is Josh this guy right here is Aaron hey guys and get it for more people sprinkled around we got Matt behind the camera Caroline over there a couple jokers on the couches answering questions a couple of bums on the couch and we apologize for the delay they were cleaning up some gremlins in the computers and there we got them all no we hope yeah yeah but thank you for sticking around and and being here this is a now a lunch hour Sketchup live yes Aaron's getting a little bit hangry so we're gonna talk about you Devon get going today we're talking about terrain and Sketchup or some modeling techniques that are more freeform that you might find if you're doing some topographic stuff or pulling in big landscapes working with larger context stuff so we're gonna jump around around that topic right so we're not going to get into necessarily landscape designing like that our main focus is how to get that terrain geometry in your Sketchup model and use it a little bit yeah so we'll hop right in let's do it so first thing we're going to do is we use a tool that most of you have probably seen at some point or another this is the ad location tool it's a function of SketchUp Pro so I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna go to file is a brand new model have anything with it yet we're go to geolocation and click add location what that's gonna do it's gonna pull up a map so from this map I can type in an exact address I can pan around I can zoom in and out I can find exactly the piece of land that I want to grab so for this one we're just going to play with a neat stretch of geometry this is a hill outside of Boulder Colorado right near us we're really using it because it is an exaggerated piece of geometry has a road down at the bottom and then big Hills going up on either side so it's going to be a good extreme example of the kind of geometry you could pull in for train so i'ma do is I want to grab this I'm going to pretend I want to stick a house right up here or something like that so I'm going to click select region and give you guys a couple tips on how this works when I click select region of course I have these these handles right here I can resize this window one of the things you want to do to get the highest fidelity capture that is to say that the the best picture the best image and the densest mesh of this geometry you want to zoom in as far as you can so I'm zoomed all the way in this as far as I can zoom in then when I'm in there to get the most geometry I'm gonna drag this all the way down to the bottom corner and make that window as big as it can get so this is going to get me the most to work with this is the the lakes of highest resolution imagery I can grab and it's gonna be the densest terrain mesh that I can create and then again grabbing as big as I can means I'm going to get the most geometry and I'm going to go ahead and hit grab so that's one of the things that we see or a lot or weave the questions we've had is you know when I grab train it doesn't look this this or that it's not as not as high quality as I want one of the things you can do is just this so right so if I look at this I'm gonna look at this image real quick so here's what I pulled in I'm gonna look at this car so I can tell it's a car it's not real super high geometry back and tell that is a car so I did this exact a very similar pull of geometry if I come here and I jump to this other model you can see I pulled a much bigger section of land so if i zoom in on that same spot here's that same car you can't really even tell what it is so side by side you can see the difference the more zoomed in I am when I make that grab the more detail that image is gonna have same goes for the actual terrain geometry so if I if I come up here to file geolocation and hit show train it's going to toggle my layers and show me my terrain layer when you do a pull from ad location it does actually pull in two different things it pulls in just an image layer which is this location snapshot and separately it pulls in a location train you can toggle between them by just going to file geolocation and turning show train on or off or you can actually just toggle layers same thing but if I look at this I'm going to go ahead and change my view here I'm gonna look at just the image I'm going to turn the textures off and I'm gonna go to show hidden geometry that's going to show me what my actual mesh looks like so you can see there's a nice ordered mesh if I just grab my pencil and draw across here and see that one side of that mesh is about 20 feet so I'm about a 20-foot mesh zoomed all the way in if I go hop back over to my big trained model example this one right here will look at the same thing zoom all the way out we'll go to file geolocation show train go ahead and look at just the white again and then turn on my hidden geometry you can see from here it looks like they're about the same size squares but remember up my grab was only this little tiny section so if i zoom in here and check the geometry again that's almost a hundred and forty feet so you can see this is a much larger much bigger mesh so I'm gonna have a lot less geometry so it looks smooth because I'm zoomed way out on the geometry but if I'm really concerned about something like I got a figure backfill inside of a lot or something like that something that's more dialed in then I'm going to want to make sure that Izu min as much as possible because it's gonna give me more detail in that mesh to work with something to shout out to at this point we did do a Facebook live a little ways back with Daniel tall talking about place maker this is kind of where place maker shines they will get not only that geometric data but they'll actually get you some high-res imagery higher than the stock imagery that we pull in right here so if you do a whole lot of this kind of work where you're grabbing train that sort of thing then this is absolutely something you want to take a look at this place maker so so that covers the basics and a couple tips on add location but obviously that's just the start from here and want to go through and do some kind of maybe editing to this train editing to this mesh and that's I'm gonna hop over to mr. Josh Raleigh in his awesome topo shirt oh yeah it's a good one good one yeah we'll talk about the sandbox tools here and first of all we just we gotta address this a little bit this is a man who dresses for the occasion I had to wear this today yeah boy whines there sorry for the derail all right so we're talking about the sandbox tools in Sketchup and if you have never heard of those they are actually a native toolset and I'm on Mac of course they'll be a little bit different on Windows but to find the sandbox tools you go to view tool palettes and sandbox and of course on Windows you'll have some check boxes there with your trays but that's where it is on the Mac and it is this lineup of tools they're sawdust crews down the line and we'll talk about each one so this is as you can see very similar geolocation import that Aaron was dealing with so I'm kind of going to use the same same spot there and the very first tool on this tool set here I'm gonna hover over it it'll say from a contours so of course Aaron brought in the terrain and the satellite imagery with the geolocation but we don't have actual contour lines here we could if we had a DWG CAD import that had you know all the contour lines and then a vertical separation of those but to get those it's actually pretty easy to get those from a terrain like this so what we can do here if you look in the back here I've already done it but I'll show it as well so I'll go to x-ray mode real quick you can see there's the topography inside a bunch of sliced planes here that will slice the topography so I'll jump back over to this terrain and we'll do that so what I'm gonna do is just take a simple rectangle here and copy this to the top of the terrain so I'm just gonna hold shift and lock it over there and then now I'm going to type in a number and then the slash key so let's try 20 divided or backslash key and there's a potential I guess topo line interval there I could use let's try 40 divide enter looks a little bit better so I'm defining where each of those contour lines will hit in vertical space there so again I'll go to x-ray mode you can see there's that topo topography kind of hiding in there so all I have to do is get a good view here for a selection and I'm going to select all this stuff so all 40 of those planes are gonna slice into this 3d terrain with a right-click intersect with selection but before I do that I'm gonna go to file save just a good time to do a file save before any sandbox tool stuff because Sketchup with the sandbox tools is often doing a lot of stuff all at once it's it's grabbing information from a lot of polygons and vertices so it's kind of the nature of the beast ya know if you guys have noticed but we're not exactly batting a thousand a day so probably you know make sure do little extra save yeah there's more gremlins cruising around so we'll do file safe so I'm gonna right-click on all that stuff and then go to intersect faces with selection I'm gonna take a few seconds but you're gonna see as you can see on the right right there it's already done on this side so what I can do now is just all just delete these one by one and you can see we'll get revealed those lines are start to appear there and this this is something this is a cool process I've actually done this process before to create slices for other things like if your laser cutting something out of cardboard I want to create those successive slices and that kind of thing you can actually use this exact same process to create those layers for other geometry as well yes I'm just going to delete all these and I grouped the planes before I did this because it's a bit easier to delete them when they're grouped otherwise it would be a face and a couple of lines so slow that you can do that and go ahead and turn in so if you want yeah we've had a question come in about asking about where the data comes from when we do those add location steps we just showed right now we're using OpenStreetMaps we had we're using with google for a while but google closed down their api we can't actually use that anymore so we're using OpenStreetMaps and that's where we're getting the data and that imagery from yeah so you can see here we with that resulting intersect faces operation that we've got a bunch of contour lines now so we kind of went backwards if we didn't have those contour lines and we wanted them the reason I'm doing this is to show you what to do if you have only the contour lines so I'm going to delete let's see let's delete that and delete that and those are the original layers that have the ad location geometry correct yeah so now let's just pretend that we started with this information so this is a common workflow that all this stuff here that I'm selecting it's possible that you may begin with this kind of info where you're importing a CAD file of some kind and you're starting with these contour lines so how do you put a surface on top of that and there's a couple different ways there's native tools there's extensions but we're talking about the sandbox tools so let's use the from contours option here so again file save before you do this just good practice and then we'll click on from contours and Sketchup will do its thing and drape some kind of surface on those contour lines and what's happening here is if i zoom in those contour lines are I'll turn on hidden geometry you can see we have some triangulation here a lot of polygons were created based on the termination of each segment so each time there's a termination sketchup will add polygons and triangles in this case it stitches all those lines together into a mesh yeah all right let's go to the next tool that one is from scratch this one here so with this tool I can actually draw a grid ordered grid kind of like with the line tool I'm just drawing almost like you have the line tool here except you're gonna be creating a grid so before you start drawing you may want to specify the grid spacing so I'm gonna escape this go back to this tool and show you in the bottom right grid spacing is set as a hundred feet so I could change that to something different based on the resolution I suppose of the polygon breakdown of my terrain 100 feets gonna work for me I'm gonna just draw this way I can hold down shift just like with the line tool as I said and I can draw a grid like that and the reason you might want this is because we've already given ourselves a bunch of polygons to work with instead of just a surface with four edges now we have a lot of vertices and polygons to interact with and that brings up the next tool which is this real quick one point on here is if you turn on hidden geometry real quick yeah these are actually quads so they're actually squares that are bisected with hidden lines so that's one of the reasons we use this for terrain and for other places we're creating smooth geometry is those quads make it easy to automatically create or maintain smooth geometry as you move in geometry or no so yes it's imperative to understand that when or I guess not imperative it's good to know that especially going into the next step that josh is gonna show ya so this next tool that'll be important because it's gonna utilize all those different pieces of geometry so if I go to the next tool it's called the smooth tool which is combination of smooth and move and I'll jump into this group and go to that tool and just like with the grid tool I have the ability to change the radius right away so 600 feets what it's set at let's just go to maybe 300 feet and see what's happening here so you can see as I hover around I'll zoom in there and check it out when I click you can see that the yellow dots are a little bit more bold towards the center of that click point and they kind of get a little bit less intense as you go out that's kind of the sort of a proximity sensor I suppose where it's going to pull more in the center and less so out towards the boundaries of that radius of influence so while you use smooth rather than move yes so you can push pull the whole terrain like that with one giant circle and it's pretty fun to change the radius too because if you go a little bit bigger you go a hundred feet and do a larger I guess manipulation of that terrain and of course we're not being hyper accurate here we're just kind of playing around so it's fun to show this tool because people often don't understand that in Sketchup you can do a lot of this really freeform organic stuff with native tools so that tool let's show that tool again on this terrain let's go to the let's go to the monochrome mode double click in here turn on hidden geometry and we'll try that again so here you can see we can do that on this train as well so let's jump over to the next tool in this tool set which is stamp so that is this one right here stamp and I've already got a building footprint kind of set up here so what we can do is stamp a footprint into this 3d terrain I'm gonna zoom to about right there and go to file/save real quick I click on this tool always notice in the bottom left Sketchup is telling you information about that tool it says select the face to stamp into the mesh so I'm going to select that footprint when I do that I also have a chance again in the bottom right to change what's called an offset so I can change how much terrain is sort of connected to this footprint so if I go to 20 feet you can see in the red there it kind of adjust is a lot smaller let's try 75 and then we'll click on the mesh so Sketchup will do its thing it'll stamp that down and then as you orbit around you can decide kind of how that's going to be stamped into the train so it could be higher up lower down so it's almost like you're creating a little bit of retaining wall type of terrain there and you can further of course edit that but it's a pretty quick way to get a footprint going and then the next tool is the drape tool so in this case I'm gonna use a 2d trail here so let's call this a trail that we want to drape down on to our terrain so I just drew this with the follow me tool and we can drape that on to the terrain below so pretty similar I'm gonna go to the tool it's gonna tell me select the entities you wish to drape I do a file save real quick I'm gonna select those entities there and drape it down on to the topography below and let's get rid of that we don't need that anymore so you can imagine that that trail perhaps was or a road it could be additional CAD information that you've brought in from somewhere else could be auto cad filed that you're bringing in and you're combining that with the topo lines that maybe you got from someone else and the nice thing about this is if I click into it let's go back into this mode here if I wanted to give it a quick color it's already broken that surface up so I could drop in a color there and as you know with the line tool or other tools it would be take a lot actually to draw that in so it's a bit faster to drape that 2d stuff onto the 3d terrain and then I'll really quickly breeze through the next couple of tools here I rarely use these tools but I want to show them anyway let's get rid of that this add detail tool so this one here let's go to hidden geometry real quick and we'll jump in here and if I click on this tool you can see that you're able to add a little more polygons if you just click like that so I don't use this very much but you can do that and then the next one here is flip edge just like it sounds if I click on this polygon here with that edge in that direction I can flip it so it might be useful to try that over on this one you can see how it actually changes that quite a bit just by flipping that edge so that could be useful if you're modifying some terrain and then before I go back to Erin I want to show another way to use the drape tool and scheduler which is pretty cool so this one here this example I've got this complex loop of edges so I'm going to select that real quick I do a file save before I do from contours so from contours it's going to apply a surface here if I go to hidden geometry you can see that's what we're looking at there and this may not be the most useful polygon breakdown of this complex edges so if we had more of a grid that'd be pretty useful so kind of a sneaky use of this tool in sketchup the drape tool is I can actually drape a grid down below so let's move this grid over top of that more complex surface make sure it's looking good and I'll move it over this way a little bit I can drape this down below so I'm going to click on the file save go to the drape tool click on those entities and then that mesh so now delete that turn on hidden geometry again you can see we've got a little bit better polygon breakdown there so now if I were to go to this move tool and do some smooths here that's a little bit different treatment of that geometry than it would be if I hadn't put that grid down on there well it's a good good set of tools yeah so don't forget about drape for things beyond its obvious use and there is more in there than just create a mesh let's move yeah move is the coolest named one but very cool third there are some other things in there that's awesome alright one of the things that we've I've had lots of requests for and we talked to several people about is using these tools or using Sketchup in general to to figure out things like cut and fill so I have a building that I know I'm going to put into a landscape or into a train and what I want to do is figure out how much dirt do I have to cut out for the foundation if I have to build back up how much filter do I need so what we're gonna do we're going to look at an example real quick let's gonna show how to use solid tools to calculate both those numbers so we're just gonna go ahead and hop right in here I have that same mesh we saw before and what I did was I added a house to it so right here I have this little building I know here this is this is a grain of salt this is suspension of disbelief time I press it's probably not the ideal place to stick this house on the side of the hill it's an extreme example if we look at something with like a you know a quarter grade it's not going to be real exciting to see building it up and that sort of thing so this is extreme landscaping or we're doing right here so what I did is I created a couple things here I have the house so I'm just going to go ahead and hide the house real quick and then I created two geometries two solids actually the first one is basically a solid that represents the foundation or the space that the foundation is going to take up in the landscape so this is the chunk that I want to make sure I clear all the dirt out of because my foundation fits inside this below that I have an exaggerated fill geometry so the top of this geometry is the top of the foundation and then I just have a grade filling out from there so I just stuck these to where I would want them to be in order for that house to fit right on top so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go in and start by cutting out of the current train and then I'm also going to figure out how much of this actual fill information I need to put the house right here so I want to use solid tools for this I'm not going to run through each of the solid tools but we're just going to use those tools one of the things I have to have a core are solid so if I look at these my proxy for the foundation is a solid my fill proxy is also a solid but my landscape right now is a locked surface not a solid so first thing I do is I need to make it snow solid so I'm going to go through a couple steps to generate this real quickly into a solid what this is going to need it's going to need both my terrain location or location train and my location snapshot both of these you'll notice that when these come in it it always does any time use add location it's going to lock them so any time you pick them they show up in red they show up is locked not a big deal I can select them both right click and click unlock alright so now what I want to do is I want to project this rectangle straight up so it intersects this complex geometry one of the things that happens when it creates this geometry inside of Sketchup is a lot of times this line will go slightly like seriously like fractions of inches off of this rectangle so will not be perfectly straight so I can't just simply draw a line up here and draw a line up here and boom have that closed in as a perfect surface sometimes it works out a lot of times it'll be just slightly off so the best solution I've come up for with this is T I'm gonna zoom underneath I'm gonna double click in to my location snapshot and I'm gonna draw a rectangle draw the rectangle inside that snapshot so it so it breaks the geometry so here and then I'm gonna use push/pull to just drag that up through my landscape above through that terrain so I still have two groups ones this big block and get some really cool effects on the side this is just bonus fun and then I have my train right here I'm gonna do now is I'm just like both of them and explode them so now I have a bunch of geometry lapping over itself I'm going to take a note from Josh and I'm actually going to simplify what we're looking at by just turning on turning off the materials right there so there now I have all these geometry intersect I'm going to right-click I'm just going to say intersect faces with selection and what that's going to do as I come around here get rid of these extra lines and I can select this piece right here delete it it's like this piece right here and what I've created there is a solid of my train so I'm going to right click and make that into a group and what I should get right there who it's not a solid group because I didn't close up there when it intersected I lost that bottom section so draw a line there now we have a solid group all right so we're that much closer to cutting so I'm going to go ahead zoom back in here I'm going to hide my filled geometry and now I want to cut so this is my template I want to cut this shape out of the hillside so I'm going to select it I'm going to use the split command Y now you split and click on the geometry of the terrain what it's going to do is it's going to break all three pieces so that they're separate so I'll have one piece that is my terrain one piece that is my geometry and that my geometry of my foundation and then a separate piece that represents the cut between the two so if I delete this group right here I have what looks like just lines on the side of the building here but if I use move to slide it up out of the way that is my cut that's what I need to take out of this hillside in order for my foundation to fit and I can see right here by selecting it's still solid and it tells me this is just over 4,500 square feet of material I'm going to take that and slide it off to the side that's great so now I know what I have to cut out but what do I have to fill in order to fill up the sides of the foundation and get a flat section there to build my house on I'm glad I asked I'm going to come in here and I'm going to unhide that last piece right there this is my fill avatar one of the issues I have with fill right now is the fact that it doesn't actually have the hole that I need to build into so this fill actually is flat on the top so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring that foundation back in I save it as a component so I can just drag it back into my mom anytime I'm gonna grab it and I'm gonna stick it right onto ups it's backwards flip that around how many degrees and line it back up with my fill all right so now I'm going to do I'm going to temporarily hide that what I want to do is subtract this from this I'm just gonna click on it hit subtract hit my fill all right I have a fill with a cavity unhide that last piece and similar to what I did before I'm just going to select this I'm going to say trim it and then click my geometry of my train and I immediately know I did that wrong because my outline didn't change for that group you know you think for 50% chance I get this right most of the time but it just seems to be backwards I don't know I always seem to do this I don't know if there's some geometry or some logic there that just doesn't stick with me all right so I'm gonna try that one more time I'm gonna select no I did when I practiced I got a ride then to select the hill and then I'm going to say trim this solid group right here which will then give me a new geometry and this is my fill geometry this is the earth I would have to fill in on top of this so what I can do right now is I can look at this I can say all right to do the fill I need around 5,000 square feet Kranitz and feet not cubic yards and I'm cutting out 4,500 so I need to find 500 plus square feet to do all of this so it's a quick and easy grant that's not super hyper accurate but it gives you an idea of the amount of Earth you would need to move to put this house right back here on top of that location so yeah that's using solid tools to figure out how to move some earth around cool all right one more time for another tip or two from the topo man and I should point out too if you guys have questions I know some some questions already come up but if you have other questions specific questions about what we're talking about throw them in the comments either one of the guys on the couch will answer for you or if it's good enough you have a good enough question you might get on air well thank you personally by whatever name you call yourself on Facebook I have a big deal so yeah all right I'm gonna start with two things I wanted to mention when I was talking before but didn't so I'm gonna jump into this group here this Topo group and those are all those lines something that's worth knowing about you don't have to use it but you should know that you can simplify contours in in Sketchup pretty easily with an extension so let me jump over in straight with where that is here it is called simple fly contours so simplify contours is actually made by the sketchup team but it is an extension you have to add so take a look at that if you're curious about what I'm doing here and I'll go back into Sketchup and this piece here if I do a triple click I can select all that connected geometry go to entity info and I can see that it's 61 edges here so if I go in to do that again select all that go to extensions and choose simplify contours I can simplify this entire complex curve if I say ok for 10 degrees you can see it didn't change that much but if I do a triple click now I'll explode that first explode that curve and now I do a triple click that is now six edges so if I undo that real quick you can see it's barely changing so 61 edges to 6 edges across a bunch of contour lines in a pretty huge model is actually a pretty big deal in some cases it might extrapolate the wrong point and change the actual contour line but that's worth knowing about if your model is getting huge and you want to kind of tackle this issue before you do any 3d generation of terrain so just know you can do that of course you wouldn't want to do that if you're really trying to keep the fidelity perfect from whatever line work you're starting with so just just know it's an option also I want to talk about I didn't mention this here on this when I draped the grid onto this surface it's it's useful to know that I can do a triple click and then I right click and go to soften smooth edges and I can pretty easily you softened coplanar or dial this slider around to basically hide all those lines that we don't need of course they're still available in hidden geometry but you may want to soften and smooth that stuff okay let's jump over to and talk real quickly about an extension called topo shaper so I'm gonna jump over back to my browser here and actually you know one of the guys in the on the couch there will we'll put a link for topo shaper so this is the resulting thing that I'm gonna generate now but let's go to the these contours here so the point here is that instead of using from contours in the sandbox tools I'm going to use the topo shaper extension so I'm gonna do a quick file save and then now select all of these contour lines and let's open up that extension again that's called topo shaper and this button here I'm gonna click on this one and minimize a few things so we're not gonna deep dive into this extension but I'm just gonna let it do its thing and see what it generates from those contour lines so we'll say calculate terrain and this is a fun one to look into if you're dealing with a lot of topography and Sketchup and I'll just click to accept that and we'll see what happened here so the main thing I want to point out here is the difference between the surface generated with a sketch of native set sandbox tools and the topo shaper one because they are different so let's turn on hidden geometry and we'll cruise down here this one was the from contours and Sketchup so you can see that if i zoom in like I said before every termination of a segment results in a polygon connection there but if we take a look over at this one and we really zoom in you can see the topo lines actually kind of skirt out and in if I go behind it's not actually a perfect representation of those topo lines so you may not care about that it depends on what you're doing but know that even though this is a better ordered mesh I guess you could say in some cases you may not want to do this but if you do some if you're affecting the geometry afterwards with other tools that ordered mesh might be better so I think the point is just that there's different ways of getting a 3d surface like that yeah if you're gonna come back in there in this example and raise up that low point in the topo shaper map here just like you showed a smooth be able to bring up a nice smooth thing yeah in the the mesh that was created by solid to sandbox tools they'll actually kind of create a weird geometry so yeah and that brings up a good point I didn't say before about the smooth tool is if you pre select geometry it's a different way of affecting that that terrain because it will act upon that selection a little bit differently so you can see here I selected this piece first then went to this move tool and so now if I pull this up it's gonna be more of a plateau there where I selected that stuff first so that's a thing that people often miss with the Smoove tools you can pre-select geometry instead of just letting it do the circular mound adjustments right which is actually a lot a lot better for accuracy so yeah and like you said if you want to keep one set of polygons together in the same plane yeah that's the way to do it whereas smooth tool is always going to have some fall-off with those blades yeah so last example I'm gonna go to a different file here and let's pull that up so I have a tattoo of some topo lines and I thought let's throw it into Sketchup and see what happens because I don't know what it would look like in 3d so that's this is the kind of thing you should really have sketchup for yeah so basically what this is is the freehand tool here I traced over a trace of the tattoo so we have a few degrees of error potentially introduced but it actually looks pretty cool so that's what I ended up with with the freehand tool and after I did the freehand tool tracing I did a triple click on some of the edges and welded them so they would be basically a polyline are all connected so if I do an orbit here and see they're all flat there and then over here I just kind of guessed I chose my own elevations for different parts of the of these topo lines and just kind of guessed about what I wanted there's kind of a fish hidden here so a little fish mountain so I just was curious what it would look like and it actually looks a lot cooler than I thought so here is Josh in 3d yeah this is what the tattoo would be if it were a 3d landscape I suppose gonna toss some water over here yeah I think that's a place I'd like to go yes sounds good we take it with you everywhere you go yeah so this is nothing more than a random use of the tools and yeah sure tattoos are for thought it's too many topos today well as we did have a couple little questions come by guapo pointed out that I did say square feet several times rather than cubic feet that was what I meant I don't just just happened I don't know that's really don't think I got there yeah and and Jack pointed out that sandbox tools was something we actually just just released the skill builder earlier this week showing how to use scam sandbox tools to make stuff that's not terrain so there are other tools for sandbox tools as well yeah and also good thing to look at beyond what me and Aaron just showed is a tool called artisan it's an extension so artisan is pretty cool if you go to the warehouse and look for artisan you'll see a video right away play that video it'll be all you need to know about it yeah pretty easy to figure out what it does it's a lot of control over the stuff we were showing today it's kind of more freeform artisans pretty cool okay well since you don't have any of any burning questions coming in here that means we did explain everything so well there's no questions left that's how I take that okay all right uh and then the question comes in thanks Trevor extensions that people use for terrain modeling besides from contours so bubble or topo shaper those are the big ones that I would say really one of the big things with that is the data that's imported a lot of people don't go in and model geometry totally from scratch they're working off with some other information so really the question comes down to how do you get that data into you import a10 do you import a CAD file like Josh was saying so but most of those just geometry you import and and build from there and that's where something like a topo shaper or from contours comes into place generating the mesh based on that line information that's imported yeah one thing I just thought about too we didn't show this but if you actually import a DWG file you'll be prompted with some decisions if you haven't done this there's things like preserve origin so things like that you do want to preserve an orange and if you're let's say you're bringing in contour lines plus a building footprint plus roads or whatever and they're different CAD files you do want to preserve the drawing origins that they're stacked properly right yeah and then units I think is another choice so if you are prompted with the choice of units it actually is very important to know the units of that CAD file because in sketchup you may see some weird scaling if you pick inches and it was actually feet so just thinking about that stuff at all right well I think maybe that's it I thought something else is beam in I think we're good all right well thank you guys thank you for bearing with us we apologize for the rough start this stuff just happens so hopefully next time we'll start right when we say we're going to start yeah and that's that's what we got have a good Thursday all right thanks guys you

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 52,964

Rating: 4.931973 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling, skill builder

Id: tgiYHSCpuX0

Length: 39min 15sec (2355 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018