Hey, what is up, nation?
In this session I'm gonna be letting you know what you
shouldn't be doing with your site models.
All right, so I've imported a few different projects from the 3D warehouse
with different ways of dealing with topography. And I just wanted to describe
why I don't think you should be using topography this way? Or making your
topography this way. Or your slopes. If that's a better term for you. But what
you can see here is that someone took a surveying information, or data they got
from somewhere else that has topography. The topographic lines. And they just sort
of like, put it in, and then extruded each of those up. And this is a great method
for...if you're physically modeling. Because it's really hard to get slopes.
Unless you're gonna, like, use clay or something like that. But in 3D, it's so
much easier, that you don't have to. And I think in this aspect the topography is
really distracting for me. I think, you know, the architecture is so neat, that
why have all this weird organic geometry going on. Why not just have the focus be
on the building. So if your site is something like this, I do have lots of
videos that talk about how to fix that, or how to model your contours. But I'm
just gonna like, really quickly show you how you can make some topography in
Sketchup. So if you have something like this, I'm gonna delete those lines. So
let's say, we're gonna use the bottom of each of these. So here...
okay...just don't look like this.
Okay, so we just need to leave that guy.
Okay. So I think that is pretty...pretty good. So I have the lines, I've just need
to leave this guy. Okay, so I have my contours, and if you have a survey or
something, these will come already. But basically you just select those lines, go
to draw -> sandbox, and there's an option for contours. Or from contours. And
Sketchup will generate the slope for you. Know it's doing a little bit of weird
things with the texture. But the topography itself is more true to what's
in the real world. And it becomes less distracting, versus this sort of step
topography. The second thing that I've noticed is that a lot of models just
have a flat land. And that's fine. If it is generally flat. But in this particular
instance, there's like this berm. And there's these sharp lines. And I think
it's just misleading. And I think you can just soften that those kind of things a
little bit. If it is mostly flat, and then there is this sort of berm. So what I
would do, is select these lines, where the corners and things are. I'd used the
round corner plug-in by Fredo. Here I have it set to two feet. So you just come
in, and then you hit Enter. You can see that it's softened all of that geometry.
So now it is more accurate to what would be in the real world, because you don't
have these straight angles when you are dealing with ground. So just a little tip
to, sort of, bring more life to your 3D models. And then I've also seen a bunch
of...there's a bunch of methods for people just making their own topography. This is
triangulation. Some...this person may have just sort of like drawn a bunch of
triangles, to try to get what they were looking for. And this person made a grid
and then it looks like they started to to move things up and down. And the
method I'm going to show you, you can do this for either of these options. But I'm
just gonna do at once. Just to simplify things a little bit.
So you have to sit through this twice. But what we're gonna do, is first I'm gonna
show you how to get rid of all these lines, so you can sort of like smooth
things out. Because this doesn't really mean anything. It's useful for you if
you're modeling, but if you're doing a presentation, these lines don't mean
anything. Like a typography line makes sense. Because it means something. It's an
increment. It's a level showing the verticality. But these aren't necessarily
showing that. So, first, if you have this sort of like triangulated mesh, is you
want to come in. I'm just gonna select all of this. Go to my default tray. If you
don't have that, you want to go to window -> default tray, and this will say "show tray"
instead of "hide tray". And then you also want to make sure "soften edges" is
checked. So you have that. Then you can come over here to this little slider. And
you can use that. As you can see here, that by using the slider, you're putting
it at its max setting, it turns a lot of these lines to dash lines. Which means
that they are hidden lines. But there are some lines that didn't quite go away. So
what I'm gonna do is hit E for the eraser tool, and then hold down control.
And just mouse over each of these lines. And it's gonna hide those lines. So this
is already looking a lot better. But you can see, there's some like weird...this
looks like a low poly, in which essentially it is. It looks like a low
poly typography. And that's kind of distracting in some respects, because the
lights hitting in weird ways. So what I'm gonna do, is I'm actually gonna re-topology this.
So, I'm gonna copy this off to the side. Come in here. I just want the
topo here. Make this a component. And you should give it an actual name for this.
I'm not. So gonna come into this, group. Actually I
don't need to do that. Just yet. I can hit the R for rectangle tool, and
I'm going to draw this rectangle. I hit the up arrow to lock it to the blue axis,
and then choose this opposite corner. And then just hit "select all of that plane".
Then hit S for scale, control to just make that a little bit bigger than the
area that I am cutting just to make sure that it cuts through everything. Make
this a group. Hit M for move, and control to make a copy. Press the up arrow just
to make sure that I'm locked to that blue axis at two feet. You can see that
in the bottom right corner. And then hit the asterisk symbol, 30. So now I have 30
little planes, that are each 2 feet apart. Select everything. You can also hit
cntr+A. Actually you can't. Because this stuff over here, it will be selected.
So I'm just gonna select all this stuff, right-click, go to intersect faces with
selection. So I have all that stuff. I'm just gonna select these planes. And you
can see that now I have a bunch of typography. There's a little bit of
weirdness going on down here. So you can do that eraser tool again. If you want to
get rid of some of these lines. I don't need that, the thing that I had before.
This thing. You don't necessarily need it. I'm gonna actually explode this. Said I
have one piece. I started these edges basically. Go to select, all with same
material. I'm going to delete. Now there may be a little bit of cleanup, depending
on how well your model was from the beginning. So I just had to leave that
one line, everything else looks okay. I'm just gonna select everything. Go to draw ->
sandbox, from contours. Like we did before. And you can see that I get a...
another box. Are another topography here. Now the difference here is that this is
a lot smoother than this. So you're not getting all those weird highlights and
shadows that we were getting before. So, and because the building is here, that
may or may not make a difference. Depending on what you're doing. If you
want to, you can always manually come in and delete some of this stuff. Come in
here. I can always just delete. So I'm using the eraser tool and just getting
rid of these interior little shapes. So they don't conflict with my model, since
I already have all that stuff. But if I turn "hidden geometry" off, you then have
your two topo lines. So it now has meaning, because it's showing the
verticality at two feet each. You can always turn that off if you want. By
hiding those edges. And you don't have all those weird highlights and shadows
that are going on with this model. 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
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so join design nation right now, and we'll see you on the next episode of designer hacks!