I now had a starting point for the design, a rough sketch. The floor plan had to evolve and this would require a suitable tool. 3D greatly interested me and my previous forray into Autocad was many years ago. A friend suggested I look at Sketchup by Google. After a few hours I was able to get some results and it quickly became my tool of choice.
There are many other tools in the market which are probably easier than Sketchup to achieve fast results such as Chief Architect. But what others lack is the ability to stray from convention. While it was important for reasons of cost not to stray too far, features such as the roof design, and of course the core shape of the house meant Sketchup would make this possible at the expense of a steeper learning curve.
To make sketchup a little easier to use they have a concept of plugins which can perform programmatic tasks on the model which would take far too long to perform manually. Three were particularly useful, these were Solid Inspector, Weld and Bezier Curves.
As Sketchup is about 3D it works best when your objects are solids. That is there are no gaps or holes which prevent the use of solid tools for trimming, subtracting or intersecting two or more solids. Solid Inspector is a quick way to identify where shapes need fixing to become solids.
When drawing in sketchup each line is recorded as individual vectors. Often when drawing and correcting the model one is faced with a straight line being made up of multiple vectors. When changing a 2D shape into a 3D object this leads to unwanted vector artefacts on the extruded shape's sides. Getting rid of them is made easy with the Weld tool, which joins two vectors into a single vector.
The final plugin was the Bezier Curves. The need for this tool was quite specific and related to the land contours. I recieved from the real estate agent a PDF of the land contours which was not in vector format and therefore not something that Sketchup was able to interact with. However I could load the image into sketchup and then use the Bezier Curves tool to overlay the surveyors levels. This was a great time and cost saver.
Now I was armed with a tool creating a concept that would illustrate the design properly would now be possible.
To make sketchup a little easier to use they have a concept of plugins which can perform programmatic tasks on the model which would take far too long to perform manually. Three were particularly useful, these were Solid Inspector, Weld and Bezier Curves.
As Sketchup is about 3D it works best when your objects are solids. That is there are no gaps or holes which prevent the use of solid tools for trimming, subtracting or intersecting two or more solids. Solid Inspector is a quick way to identify where shapes need fixing to become solids.
When drawing in sketchup each line is recorded as individual vectors. Often when drawing and correcting the model one is faced with a straight line being made up of multiple vectors. When changing a 2D shape into a 3D object this leads to unwanted vector artefacts on the extruded shape's sides. Getting rid of them is made easy with the Weld tool, which joins two vectors into a single vector.
The louvre clip on the left has a curve that has been welded in the one on the right
The final plugin was the Bezier Curves. The need for this tool was quite specific and related to the land contours. I recieved from the real estate agent a PDF of the land contours which was not in vector format and therefore not something that Sketchup was able to interact with. However I could load the image into sketchup and then use the Bezier Curves tool to overlay the surveyors levels. This was a great time and cost saver.
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