Tag: Sketchup

Walton Soap Works

soap comicAt last, I’m getting started on the final artwork for the Charles Waterton comic strip project. I’m starting with the confrontation between Waterton and Mr Simpson the soap manufacturer, whose factory in Walton village has polluted air and stream and killed trees in the Waterton’s park.

Did the soap works look anything like the scene I imagined in my rough? I’ve been unable to track down a photograph of the factory as it was, so using a map in Peter Wright’s 1985 book A History of Walton I made a 3D model in Sketchup.

soap factoryThe factory was built on a triangle of land between the Barnsley Canal and Shay Lane. Shay Lane runs eastwards out of the village towards Crofton. I tried to use the satellite image from Google Earth as my starting point but that got a bit fiddly as I’m not familiar with the program so I started with a blank and drew out the buildings on the ground plane by eye, then I extruded them up into 3D objects using the Push Pull Tool.

soap factoryWith the two chimneys this isn’t so very different to the scene I conjured up from imagination but it’s not quite what I need for the showdown scene, so I’ll take the essential features from it and bring them together to make it a bit more dramatic.

A photograph taken after the factory closed shows that the canal ran past the soap works on an embankment, so the barges were passing by at roof level.

LumenRT

lumenRT testI’m fascinated by 3D programs. My favourite is Vue because of the way it handles natural landscapes but whenever there’s an update, I’ll have another experiment with SketchUp, which is more of a 3D design tool for buildings, furniture and so on. So this morning when I received an e-mail from E-on telling me that there’s now a program, LumenRT, that allows you to export your SketchUp designs into a photo-realistic 3D environment, I had to give it a go.

Sketchup
My design in SketchUpMake

But how easy would it be? In a minute or so I extruded a rectangular block in SketchUp and punched a few holes in it to make it look like some kind of building then I pressed the ‘export to LumenRT’ button. At first there was a glitch as my mouse had become disabled but on restarting my iMac the export worked perfectly. Like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz, my model had dropped into another world, although this one does look rather like Kansas (during the Dust Bowl). I was able to approach move around the model in real time (no lengthy waiting for it to redraw) using the mouse.

The man (I think he’s one of the guys who dreamed up SketchUp) is a 2D figure who appears when you open a new  SketchUp project, to give you an idea of the scale.

Links; Both programs currently offer free downloads for non-commercial use, although Lumen RT and recent free versions of Vue insist on adding a small logo to any image that you export.

SketchUp ‘the easiest way to draw in 3D’ 

LumenRT ‘Quickly create images, videos and real-time presentations of 
Architecture, Landscape, Urban and Infrastructure Designs’. Warning, there does seem to be some kind of bug which disables the mouse on an iMac, so be careful that you don’t have any vital unsaved work open in other programs as you might have to restart.

SketchUp from first principles

house tutorial

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could get through all your errands then, when you have a blank day, feel fresh and thoroughly inspired?

It doesn’t work like that for me. There’s plenty that I could do but nothing pressing so to celebrate the launch of a new version of SketchUp, the first in eighteen months, I’m dipping back into the program again. Mine isn’t the latest Pro version but the free version has plenty of possibilities.

Breathing Space

gable end

I could argue that as illustration involves depicting three-dimensional objects in two dimensions it makes sense to explore all the possibilities. Playful experiment can feed into my regular illustrations in surprising ways.

old chairIt’s probably much more to do with my fascination for making models and creating imaginary worlds. I feel that we should all be allowed to do some things just because we enjoy them.

hall tableI’ve been through these tutorials before but it’s several years ago, so it’s been worth going back to first principles.

In the fourth and final part of the SketchUp basics video tutorials in which you get to construct a hall table, you get to grapple with such subtleties as tapering the legs, mirror imaging two of them to create the other pair and, the final touch, getting the drawer handles spot in the middle of the drawer front. There’s a trick to it.

Link; SketchUp

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Categorized as 3D Tagged

Sketchup 8

SKETCHUP 8, the latest version of Google’s 3D design program has just been launched. As I’m still in holiday mood, I downloaded it this morning and took my time going through the tutorials. Rather like a child learning to draw, they start you off with a basic house.

Taking things a bit further, you can specify precise dimensions as you draw; for instance this second house (right) started with two rectangles of 12×30 and 20×10 feet, joined to make an L-shaped plan.

The Offset tool is useful for creating the overhang of the roof and the frames of doors and windows, while the follow-me tool was used to take the plinth along the lower edge of the house from one side of the door frame to the other.

Table

This elegant hall table has ended up rather deeper than intended but by following the tutorial through I’m beginning to grasp the principles of making components such as the legs and drawer fronts. Make modifications to one of the legs and the others update themselves to match.

Interior

To work on an interior you delete two walls of your house (you can always put them back in later) and switch to a wide angle ‘camera’ so that you can navigate into tight corners to work on your model. Those comfy armchairs are easy to download from the Sketchup website and, like every other component of the model, you can change their colour or pattern with a click from the paint bucket tool.

You’re encouraged to upload your own models for others to use. I’m going to have to improve a bit before I submit my efforts but I’ve enjoyed spending a few hours learning the basics today.

You can get a free download of Sketchup from http://sketchup.google.com/

You can find the video tutorials that I followed on Sketchup’s YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/sketchupvideo?gl=GB&user=sketchupvideo