A SketchUp Landscape & Graphics workflow, because landscape architecture isn't just
planting trees and tree symbols in CAD. As you know, it's the whole story-telling process.
Hey guys, this is Aaron, and that was Eric Sargeant with his Basecamp 2018 presentation
Software to Deliverable. Eric's going to spend some time in that video talking about his
experience using SketchUp in the landscape architecture market and to just kind of showcase
some of the work he has done. It's pretty cool. There are a lot of good examples of
SketchUp being used and some really cool models - some good stuff that he shows. What I ended
up taking out of that was some different ways to use SketchUp in landscape architecture.
So, I'm going to look at a model today, in preparation for Eric's video launching later
this week, that is maybe a tip you might be able to use if you do landscape architecture.
So let's hop right in. Alright so in this model I have just this little park, and I
have some 2d trees on here. So one of the things that happens in landscape architecture,
maybe more than other use cases of SketchUp, is models get heavy. It happens everywhere,
but I think it is easy in landscape because if you want to put some details into something
like a tree, you can pretty quickly go from a 2d drawing like this or a face me component
to thousands, if not millions, of faces if you're drawing things like leaves and
that kind of thing. So, I have a quick tip on, basically, a way to save yourself some
heartache with those kind of models. So, in here, you can see - I have - my landscape
is all grouped together. Then, on top of that I have components for my different types of
trees. I have one, two, three different types of trees and then I have some bushes here
and I made components out of each of these. Now, because of the way I have it set up,
it's going to be really easy for me to switch between my 2d, like this, and my 3d face me
components. And then I have another layer which is my "render ready" layer which will show
the rendered trees. These are all high-poly, lots of surfaces, but they'll be good if I
want to go out to rendering. So, just looking at how I did that, each one of these components
actually contains a bunch of different things to be drawn, so I'm going to look at one.
We're going to burrow into one component. So, we're looking right here. I have this
one - this is called "tree 1" - I'm going to double-click that. So right now, all I
have is this component turned on. You can see when I select it, up here in my entity
info, that's going to show up in the 2d trees layer. So as I toggle 2d trees on and off,
that comes and goes. Oops. Separate from that, on the 3d trees layer, I stuck my face me
component. So you see here 3d trees. So as I have that turned on, it's going to give
me my face me tree. So this is maybe where I would look around the model and see if the
trees are filling up the space, is it too much, is it too little? That sort of thing.
I can do that with my face me. Then, separate from that, I have a render trees layer. If
I turn that on, this is where I get my more - my high-poly - you can see it is already
causing SketchUp to lag a little bit. I am not on the most powerful computer in the world
right now, and this is actually slowing it down a little bit. But it's a high-poly, this
is what maybe I would want to send out if I was actually doing some rendering or something
like that. Or maybe I want to do a nice shadow study where it's going to put realistic shadows
on the ground, something like that. The nice thing about doing it this way - there are
a couple of advantages to doing this approach - one is that by having everything on separate
layers, I can really quickly toggle between the amount of detail I need. So if I'm going
to do something like a fly-through or something like that, my face me trees might be enough.
I'm just going to kind of look through here. What does this section look like with the
trees, how is that going to look? I know I am not getting the most accurate. This is
not exactly the way the trees are going to end up looking, but I can get a feel for how
those types of trees in those locations are going to go. I have my 2d trees of course,
so if I wanted to print out a just a layout - or I wanted to send something to layout
to make a document or something like that, I could go with that. Then, of course, finally,
I have this render trees which is something like I said, I could do something like my
actual rendering, or shadow studies, something like that; but not something I want to work
in all the time. This allows me to quickly toggle to whatever is going to be best, what's
going to be quickest. Keep SketchUp snappy with my 2d trees and only show my 3d trees
when I need them. The nice thing about doing it the way I did, where all of these pieces
are in one spot, is if I want to take one of these, and say I want to copy it - I can
just stick it over here - and in copying that one component then, I've actually made a new
instance of each of those different tree types. So I don't have to go, drag in three different
components in there, they're all in one piece and I just toggle them using my layers. So
there you go, quick tip for landscape architecture, if you're going to use multiple tree types,
different levels of detail: nestle them all together. Stick them in one component, and
just use your layers to toggle between them. Hope that's something helpful, hope you enjoy
Eric's video later this week. Let us know what you thought. If you liked this tip, or
if you have your own landscape architecture tips, leave them down below. Let us know how
we did; maybe subscribe or like. I like making these videos, but we like making them a lot
more when there's something you want to see. Thank you.