In this tutorial I cover how to customize your template (and set up your work environment) in SketchUp. There is no need to only accept what the default templates give you! Make your own and give yourself a head start when you begin new projects.
Tutorial Video
https://youtu.be/DHqnhxFU1A0
This is a free sample instructional video from the book "Architectural Design with SketchUp: 3D Modeling, Extensions, BIM, Rendering, Making, and Scripting" (2nd Edition). I discuss this topic more in detail in that book's Chapter 2.
Want more of these videos? If you own the book, use the password from the inside cover to gain access to all of my remaining videos on Wiley's website: http://www.wiley.com/go/schreyer2e. If you don't yet have your own copy, follow the links in the sidebar to get one. It is a great reference for SketchUp!
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As I covered in last week's post, Trimble recently released a new point cloud extension for SketchUp, Trimble Scan Essentials For SketchUp. In today's post and video, I am using this tool to perform some analysis with the same 3D point cloud data that I introduced earlier (a scan of our classroom). I am basically checking how level the floor in our classroom really is by using what is aptly called a "floor flatness analysis".
This approach is useful to verify any concrete work, especially if tolerances were defined in the specs. As you may have guessed already - our classroom's floor is not overly flat at all in some areas.
My solution uses the extension's Inspection Map feature and simply compares the floor scan's points to a planar reference surface. This then results in a color-coded map that nicely illustrates where the ridges and valleys are. You can even label individual points and produce well-documented reports from this. Of course, the...
The new Scan Essentials extension in SketchUp
A few days ago, the Trimble folks announced the release of a new point cloud extension for SketchUp, Trimble Scan Essentials For SketchUp. This came on the heels of their release of version 2020.1 of SketchUp Pro. And if you asked me, being able to easily work with point clouds in SketchUp is absolutely the most exciting feature of this year's release cycle!
TIP:Never heard of point clouds? Check out this Wikipedia article as a primer.
Up until recently, Trimble produced the Scan Explorer extension for SketchUp that allowed you to load a point cloud and extract construction points, planes, etc. into the 3D model. The workflow was a bit clunky in that the cloud would never load into the modeling environment but remained in the viewer dialog. This is now much improved in this new extension.
I should mention at this point that there are also other LIDAR and point cloud extensions for SketchUp, most notably...
https://youtu.be/mnAv54zK1DE?autoplay=1&loop=1
The resulting turntable animation
Every once in a while it's very useful to be able to precisely control the view in SketchUp. One of those cases is when you are creating a turntable animation video of an object (like the one shown above). The snippet below allows you to set that up by creating pages with defined view parameters.
First, we need to set the eye (view) height. That is best roughly located at the middle of the object, nine feet in my example. Then we are simply creating as many pages as necessary (in SketchUp proper, those are called "Animation Scenes", of course). I decided to go with four orthogonal views that all point at the object (which for this purpose needs to be located at the origin). A zoom_extents command then makes sure everything is consistently in the view, independent of how far the viewer is away from the object.
As you can see, there are a bunch of parameters that...
Dropping all stones to zero (Model: "Rock for landscape 02" by Intresto from 3DW)
The following simple code snippet takes any objects (groups or components) that you have selected and drops them to the ground (i.e. moves them to z = 0). I find this quite useful sometimes to just make sure that all those objects in my model are actually on the ground plane and not 1/64" above or below it. Just keep in mind that this routine uses the lowest point in an object's bounding box. Select the object to see how that (blue) bounding box looks like before you use the code.
Also: This does not work for lines and edges because for those you will need to move their vertices individually to z = 0. I'll post a tutorial for that at some later point.
Code Snippet
Select some objects in SketchUp (groups or components only) and run this script.
This collection of small script snippets presents handy little routines that...
