Hey, what is up, nation?
In this session I'm gonna be modeling an icosahedron in SketchUp.
All right, so I started this video and I was gonna make a geodesic dome, or a
buckyball. And what I realized is that a lot of people are starting their own
tutorials with icosahedrons, but nobody shows you how to make a icosahedrons.
So I figured "hey, I'll do that before I do this!", and this is actually
based off of a Sketchup tutorial from the Sketchup skill builder. So kudos are
those guys I'll link to that in the description below. But I figured I'd have
a different spin on it. Maybe you'd learn it differently when I do it. So I figured,
I'd do it anyway! But yeah. So we're gonna start here with the polygon tool. You can
see here, I have side selected. And I saw icosahedron is a 20-sided shape where
all of the sides are triangular, they're all equal triangles. So to do that we're
gonna start with a triangle. We're gonna make sure we're in the green axis here.
I'm just gonna make a shape. I'm going to flip this face that the white faces up,
make that a component, and just call this "face". So all of the edges are exactly the
same. So we can keep them the same. And then I'm just gonna scale this, so that
the face here is 1 ft. Just so that we have a point of reference. I'm gonna
choose the polygon tool again, and the shape that makes this up is a...pentagon
So we're going to select five for this Pentagon. I'm just gonna make a
shape going again in the green direction, select this shape, make it a group and go
into this group. Select the tape measure tool, choose our line that's parallel,
select that. And we want that to be one foot. So that we now have the Pentagon is
the same...has sides that are the same width as
the trangle we made. So just gonna move this so that the wrinkles here. Now the
thing we wanted to do is make a vertical line at our axis here, so this is also
the center point of our Pentagon. I'm going to choose the arc tool here, not
the to point or if three-point arc just the or the PI. We're just going to choose
the regular arc tool. And then I'm going to hit the right arrow key here to lock
to the red axis. I'm going to choose this as my center point for my arc, and then
choose the triangle here, and then it'll start to draw an arc. You can see that we
get an intersection point right there. So what we want to do then, is choose Q for
the rotate tool, hit the right arrow, and then rotate this triangle up, until it
intersects. You may have to zoom am using the mouse wheel here to zoom in. It looks
like something's not quite right. This should be right there, but it's not. So
let's try that again. Again here, and just make sure that we are selecting that
point. Choose this again. You just have to be careful like maybe I
chose something different. There we go! That looks better. Okay so now we have
that arc. You just want to be a little bit careful about how you do that. Now we
don't actually need this Pentagon anymore. So I'm gonna delete it. I'm gonna
hit Q 4 the rotate tool, hit the plus era so I can stay on the state lock, so that
blue axis. Choose this here. Now you can see I'm rotating, but I'm gonna hit
control to make a copy, and then rotate that. So that it's here. Hit the asterisk
symbol, you can also use X for multiply, but I prefer asterisks. And then hit 4. So I have
these guys. And then you may just want to double check, make sure you don't have an
extra face at your starting line. So now we have this guy. Looks pretty good.
Now what we're gonna do is select these three faces, choose the green axis...just
rotate that down. Blue, just rotating this around. And then we want to go to the red,
see if this works. So there we go! We have that shape, so I just did three little
rotates there to try to get that shape. Since they're all these are equal, I'm
just trying to get that to move around. So that we...all the angles are the same
and everything so you just have to rotate. So that they all line up. So we
have this trifecta going on. And then I'm just gonna take this guy, these two. And...
actually, let me take all three. Select the midpoint. I hit Q there to do the
rotate, and then we're gonna rotate it again. Hit control. Actually I just need
these two. Right, so here hit that control, x2. No, so you can actually do that
again x3. No, so x4. That's money. So you have that. I think we
have a duplicate face there. So I'm just gonna delete it. And then come in with
this top piece. And this should be fairly simple. I'm gonna copy that down, select
all my groups, flip along blue direction, so it'll just reverse that.
And then we just want to make sure that this is in the center. So I'm just gonna
put it here. And then move it down some just a holding shift here to keep that.
I'm gonna hit Q for rotate, choose this midpoint. I'll suppress the plus arrow
there. And then we're just gonna rotate to here. So that's our icosahedron.
Pretty simple! And because of the way that I built this you can actually do
some cool stuff. If I want to, since these are all components, and that's how we
constructed it. We can actually make some voids if we want. Which is an offset tool
here. Kind of cool! So hopefully this helped! If you like this video, please
don't forget to like, subscribe and share this video with your friends! And as
always happy hacking! All right, designers! Just because this episode of designer
hacks is over doesn't mean we're leaving you out in the cold!
Tony's got tones of great content available at designerhacks.com, so
join design nation right now, and we'll see you on the next episode of designer hacks!