Hey, what is up, nation?
In this session, I'm gonna be teaching you how you can
make your own terrain using Sketchup.
Okay, so I've made a ton of videos
on making contours or turning contours into 3D terrain,
how to turn 3D terrain into contours.
But today I'm gonna show you just a few,
if you want to make your own terrain
without any attachment to anything like a survey
or anything like that.
If you just want to make your own terrain.
How to do that.
So what we're gonna do is start by making a rectangle.
So I'm gonna hit R here.
Let start of my origin.
I'm just gonna make a square right here.
Now I have this style turned on,
yours may look a little different depending on
what style you have activated.
Just for now, let's just choose...let's use this style.
So I'm gonna do two little examples here.
I'm gonna take this line,
I just selected it, hit M for move.
And then I'm gonna hit control to bring it
all the way to this side.
Now I just put a line on top of another line so it seems silly.
But if you hit "Divide", and hit four or even five,
you'll get equally spaced lines.
So you have five equally spaced lines
without having to measure, to calculate how much it is.
Now I think we may be working a very small scale here.
Do you feed that's not too bad?
And then I'm gonna do the same thing in this direction.
So I just selected those lines, hit M for move.
And then when I started to move, I hit control to make a copy.
And then divide five,
and then that way I get a grid, five by five grid.
And what I'm gonna do here really quickly,
is take this off to the side,
and I'm gonna make these into triangles.
So I'm essentially subdividing S.
Just really quick.
And I'm gonna show you the difference that this makes,
at least initially.
So you have that.
And then what I'm gonna do, is do the same thing.
But I'm going to delete these lines in the middle,
And show you a quick way that you can do this
if you have artisan.
So three little options here.
What we're going to be using today is the sandbox tools,
that come with SketchUp Pro.
So if you have that open,
if you don't have this little window,
just right-click in an open area.
And scroll down towards the sandbox and click that,
and you'll get this little menu here.
Within the sandbox tools
that we're gonna be using a tool called "smooth".
So if you click "smooth", you can see you get this huge circle.
It has a radius down the bottom.
So if I change this to, let's say, one foot,
the circle is much smaller.
And now when I select in a particular area,
I get these little points, it selects them,
and allows me to very gently pull them up and down.
And I can start to make terrain this way.
Now what you can see here,
is that this actually starts to triangulate.
But we have some like square pieces,
some triangulated pieces.
But what this version over here gets me,
is that it's gonna be consistent.
No matter what.
It's not gonna make any extra faces or anything.
What I want to demonstrate just through those two things,
is that you actually don't even have to subdivide.
If you just do those little squares,
when you go and you move,
when a triangle is needed,
it will make a triangle automatically for you.
So you're saving polygons, if you don't actually need them.
So it may make sense for you
to just make squares to save on the polygon count.
So you have that guy.
And then if you don't want to actually just like do
the multi or the divide trick that I just showed you,
if you have artisan you can actually click this guy.
And then in your artisan toolbox, there is this
second thing that says "subdivide selection".
You just actually click that a few times
and get subdivision is that way.
Now you don't get to select how many subdivides it is.
It just does it in 2/4, so you start here with one
and then it makes like four bigger boxes.
And then those four boxes get turned into another four boxes.
And it just does that.
And so here I did five.
You can't really control that when you use artisan to subdivide.
But you have this really cool feature
to make your own topography.
And when you're using the smooth tool,
if you press while you're moving,
if you hold "shift", you can see that that turns to pink.
That is in the perpendicular direction.
So that's a nice little tip.
And then you can just change the radius
so that as you're doing this,
you can make things as dynamic or as broad.
As you need.
So, for instance, let's just make a bunch of these really quick.
So let's say I wanted to do like a crater in the middle here.
I would do that it's select smooth.
I'm gonna choose...let's start at a larger radius.
So let's go to five.
So what I want to do is just bring this down a little bit,
these like edges down, all around the edge.
And you can snap or inference here too.
So if you bring this down,
you can snap to like this point over here
as long as it's not being moved with everything else.
And so, you can see how really useful this becomes
if you're doing any sort of art in Sketchup that needs terrain.
Maybe you don't have like an actual terrain.
That like a physical place that you want to take the train from.
Maybe you just want to make it up.
And you want there to be hills,
and you wanna be able to control where everything is.
Let's change this to 2.
So we have like a peak here around.
Maybe I'll just bring these down so it's more circular.
Right, and then we can bring these guys
in the middle down to get our crater.
This is probably looking more like it's a low poly crater, which is fine.
So there you go!
You have some kind of like crater form in the middle here.
Which is really cool.
So once you have this, you may not want to see
all these little triangulated faces.
You may want it to feel smoother.
So what you can do, is you can triple-click into this.
Then right-click go to some soft and smooth edges.
And then you have this little slider here.
And as much as you want it to be softened,
you may want to...I have hidden geometry on...
so I'm gonna turn that off just so I can see what it looks like.
You can soften geometry to the level that you want.
So this is the softest that we can go with this.
And you can see these like little jagged pieces are showing up.
That job profile that is showing up.
So you can turn that off as well.
If you want to use this for any sort of art,
you can also...there's like an extra line here...
If you soften coplanar that I'll get rid of those coplanar lines.
So hopefully this helped.
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And as always, happy hacking!