making a house tghe easy way...

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RAYMAN
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making a house tghe easy way...

Post by RAYMAN »

Here is a short introduction into making a house in Sketchup ....
You start by enabling all the toolbars from inside the toolmenue.
You go to the top vue with the top vue icon.
You draw your floorplan... in this case we draw a square.....
Note that the cursor changes color with every direction that you draw so its easy to draw normal lines.
When you hover over the middle of your line the midpoint turns blue.
If you point to an oposite line while you are drawing you can constraint to being parallel and the line turns pink.(1)

now that we have drawn our floorplan we use the extrude tool and pull the square into a box shape.(2)
We are now going to make a window
With the rectangle tool in front view we draw on the front surface.
With the offset tool we make 2 rectangle one inside the other see picture.(3)
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RAYMAN
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Re: making a house tghe easy way...

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Now we extrude the 2 surfaces outward.
One more then the other.(4)
With the select tool (arrow) we select the inner edges....(we use the ctrl key to select more then 1 item)
now with all 4 edges highlighted blue we switch to the move tool and move the edges inwards.
we do that by looking at the window from the side and we can constrain to a direction by using the arrow keys
on the keyboard up-down and sideways and in out.(5)
Now we have got our basic window.(6)
We are ready to paint it...
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RAYMAN
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Re: making a house tghe easy way...

Post by RAYMAN »

Now we select our paint bucket tool.
We choose a color and with the cross on the paintbucket we point at the surfaces that we want to have painted with that color.
Note that we dont have to use these colors in our final aplication they are just placeholders they can be made bright in Sketchup and have aluminium or wood with bump in the final application.(7) (8)
When we are finished with that step we switch back to our select tool.
While we keep the left mouse button pressed we draw over the window from a left to right and select the whole window. It turns blue. be carefull not to select something underneath or in the background.(9)
With the window highlighted we rightclick and go to make component in the dropdown.
A tab appears and you can name it and tell the object to be sticky(magnetic) to horizontal or vertical or both or slanted
When you have the component window open it should now turn up in the in model section.
You rightclick into the selected component again and save it to a folder to the other components.
You can reuse that component for future use.
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RAYMAN
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Re: making a house tghe easy way...

Post by RAYMAN »

We can now go to the scale tool and scale that window down to the size that we want it to be and with the move tool(tool with the4 arrows) we move it into position. Be carefull to not move it away from the wall.(10)
When its in place at one of the corners we ctrl click the window component with the move tool selected..
A copy of that component should be moved to the other corner (note that we can constrain to a direction when we move a little bit in the direction and hit the alt key just after moving slightly. The normal dotted line should change into a fat dotted line when its constrained to a direction. When we have it in the right place we
left click and it sticks to that place. By typing in the divide key and the amount of objects we get an array on that surface.Alternativly we can also make arrays with the x and a number for offsetting.(11)
We now select all the windows on that row (with the select tool and ctrl).
We now do the same thing with the row.We select the move tool and with the ctrl key pressed we click onto the row.
we move the copy like we did with the single component (window) typ in the devide key and the amount .
What we typ in can be seen in the small window in the corner of the application.(12)
We now control select all the windows and make a component out of all the windows (component in component)by rightclicking just like we did before.
We have a whole window bank now with all the windows textured.
We can now pull that window bank from the component library onto all the walls.
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RAYMAN
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Re: making a house tghe easy way...

Post by RAYMAN »

When we rightclick onto these components in the model and choose make unique
it breaks it down into singular components again.
If we now make a line (corner)down on one wall we can now move that wall and the windows on that wall go with it.
We are now ready to texture the walls(13) (14) (15)
With the paintbucket selected we can point onto the wall.
We can make our own texture with a texture map.
Once we have added the texture to the surface we richtclick onto the surface and with texture and position we can move scale and tapper the texture. Once we are happy we switch to the select tool and click into the scene and exit the position tool.
We go back to the paintbucket and with the dropper we take up the material again and then we click into the other surfaces with the paint tool.
Note that the texture gets applied to the other surfaces seamlessly.
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Re: making a house tghe easy way...

Post by RAYMAN »

An exported Google Earth file is a zipped Collada.
When you ad the zip extention and unzip the file you get a folder with the texture and the mesh is a Collada.


Windows dont have to be real 3d . What you can do is make 1 surface with windows and render tzhat and apply it onto a simple wall.
Thats 2.5d .
You can fake a 3d effect and save file space and size
Hope that was of help and gets you going with Sketchup
Saves you lots of time !
Peter
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RAYMAN
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Re: making a house tghe easy way...

Post by RAYMAN »

Heres the different look between a model in sketchup and in another application like Vue
It took 10 minutes to make the house and 10 minutes to set up the mountain scene.
All in all 20 minutes
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RAYMAN
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Re: making a house tghe easy way...

Post by RAYMAN »

For a non flat roof all you have to do is draw aline in the center and move it upwards with the move tool
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v3rd3
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Re: making a house tghe easy way...

Post by v3rd3 »

Just a simple cave man kinda question Rayman but this technique appears to leave a lot of n-gons in the object. Are they a problem? If not, why not?
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RAYMAN
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Re: making a house tghe easy way...

Post by RAYMAN »

Sketchup triangulates the meshes same as the render engines.
It isnt a problem as those meshes are not subdivided anymore.
So no problem at all.....
And they are on flat surfaces...
It just looks as if it makes ngons !
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