Landscape Architecture

Hiding Edges: Part 1- Eraser Tool

You’ve taken the time to create an elaborate SketchUp model, and have the perfect view you want to share. And what sticks out – muddy line work and blurred objects, like those circled here. Distracting, in what’s otherwise a compelling view. What’s needed is to get rid of all those visible edges within the various […]

Tools on Surface Extension

I love extensions. And Tools On Surface might be my favorite (along with Soap Skin & Bubble which I’ve mentioned before and will mention again). This is one of SketchUcation’s extensions. See our post on how to get SketchUcation’s ExtensionStore. Why Tools on Surface? We all know SketchUp’s native drawing tools: Line, Rectangle, Circle, 2 […]

Quality Components: Part 3- Podium Browser

The first two posts in this series discussed how to find lightweight, well-crafted models by the SketchUp team, and models offered by the subscription service FormFonts. This post showcases one more resource: Podium Browser. SU Podium is pretty well known as a SketchUp rendering engine. Podium Browser is a collection of render-ready entourage models (trees, […]

Quality Components: Part 2- FormFonts

Part 1 of this series on quality components focused on generic, lightweight models provided by the SketchUp team. This post is about another great resource for quality SketchUp models: FormFonts. The model creators at FormFonts have been at it for almost 15 years. It’s a subscription service, but you can download up to 30 models […]

Quality Components: Part 1- SketchUp Collections

My “day job” project this week has been working on a chapter for an upcoming book on Modeling with SketchUp for Film and Stage Design. This chapter is about props – modeling or importing entourage objects such as furniture, knick-knacks, plants, and of course, people. If you rely only on the 3D Warehouse for these […]

Skatter Extension: Part 2 - Realistic Trees and Rendering

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced Skatter, the amazing extension that allows you to mass-place objects onto surfaces. Specifically, with Skatter you can create detailed, vast forest plantings, lawns, and similar vegetation patterns. In this post, I’ll show a quick demo of using Skatter to generate a quick mass vegetation planting for a bridge […]

Skatter: Part 1 - Vegetation Mass Placement

When I first came across Skatter, I cheered out loud. This powerful extension allows for easy mass placement of objects, in particular vegetation, onto a model surface. And since its first release, Skatter’s ability to generate vast forested areas has become even better. And while excellent for placing many, many trees and shrubs into SketchUp, Skatter’s real power […]

Joint Push Pull: Part 2 - Examples

In Part 1 of this Joint Push Pull series, Bonnie showed some simple examples of what you can do with the Joint Push Pull extension. I’m going to show a few real-world models where I’ve been able to use JPP with awesome (and fast) results. Massing Model This master plan model has a number of faces […]

Park Pergola Design 17

In Part 1 of this series, I showed how to create the curved, horizontal cross beam for the 3D pergola. And in in Part 2 I showed how to make the vertical supports.   In this part, we’ll finish up the pergola by adding the tilted cross-beams along the horizontal beam.   Design the Beam […]