Adding Picnic Tables, Trash Cans, Benches, Bike Racks, and Cars to Your Park Model

All right, in this video we are going to bring in some more elements and components into our park. Let's go into the 3D warehouse where we will download the picnic table.

Let's search VDCI in the search bar and click Enter, and then click Models and then let's scroll down until we find Picnic Table VDCI-PicnicTable and then click Download. Click Yes to load directly into our model, and now we can place our component anywhere in our park. I will choose to place it right here so I'll do a zoom window to look into this leg right here and you can see that it goes into my toposurface.

Look at that; this is even more apparent if we place it further up our hill. I will undo this last one so if I select my component and then click Edit, and the first thing I want to do is rename it to Picnic Table and then click Enter. Then if we go to the Edit TAB right here you can see that there are a few options. One option says glue to None, Any, Horizontal, Vertical, or Sloped.

If I select Any and then go back to my Select and click my picnic table you can see now that my picnic table starts moving around based off of the existing geometry. This is because SketchUp is automatically generating the best angle for my picnic table to have all four legs on the ground. I can place another picnic table right here and click again and put in another one.

Let me think right here and then we can do pan and rotate around. You can see even better as I start gluing it into my carousel roof that it wants to kind of rotate around these faces. We'll add in a few more feel free to as many as you like to your park.

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3D text also comes into our model with glue to Any already selected. If we ever want to change that we can go back to Edit and then change glue to Any or None or any of these other options and you can play around with each one of these things too. Next let's bring in our trash and our recycling cans.

So again let's go to the 3D warehouse and then let's scroll down until we find VDCI Trash and Recycling and download. I will click Yes to load this directly into my SketchUp model. I will place one over here to the side and then I will delete that and I'll go into my Select window in my Components dialog box and scroll down until I can find VDCI Trash Can.

Let's go into Edit and again let's rename this Trash Can and Recycle Can. I just deleted the VDCI then click Enter. Before we place our trash cans I would like to change the axes direction so that they are placed parallel to our sidewalks.

As you can see right now they're coming in parallel to our origin and our axes. I want our axes to be parallel to our street so we'll make an additional scene that shows one scene where the axes are this direction and another scene where the axes follow along the edge of the sidewalk. So I will click Escape to end this task of loading the recycling bin and then let's add a new scene.

So to do that let's go to Window, Default Tray, Scenes. You can see the scene dialog box comes in at the bottom. If you click this plus button this creates and adds a scene.

So I will click this add scene and if you click on this little arrow and a plus this will add more details to our scenes. I will close some of these dialog boxes so I have more room and you can see there are many different options for this scene. I will uncheck Include in animation because we don't want the scene to be something that we can create an animation from; it's just to toggle the axes in different directions.

I will rename this to True North Axes and then click Enter. All these other options are the same but we can use scenes to control different visibility settings for our model such as camera location, your visible Tags, and Layers. Certain layers have different types of styles, certain layers have shadows on and off, or the shadows change so it gives you a lot of flexibility in creating multiple different types of view templates essentially.

All right so now I will update the scene based off of the settings that I set and then update and then I will go into my axes on my large tool set right here and I'm going to want to create an axis that's along this line. Because I know that this is kind of not flat I do know that my clubhouse is parallel to that sidewalk and I know it is flat so I will click on one point here and then click on another point here and then a third point which is going to show the other direction. I want this to be the same direction so I'll click a third point right here and now you can see that I've created an axis that's parallel to the sidewalk. I will go into this add scene button I can click this add scene or I could right-click on the scene top up here, right-click add to add a scene and this comes into Scene Two and I can rename this as Project North Axes and click Enter making sure that my Include animation is turned off.

I now have two scenes and if I toggle back and forth you can see that one scene has the axes over here and the other has the axes over here. You can see that it's moving between both of these because I have Camera Location turned on. If I deselect Camera Location and then update, and then click on Project North Axes, uncheck Camera Location and then update the scene, now if I toggle back and forth, the only things that change between the two are my axes. This is helpful when we want to bring in components aligned to specific axes such as the recycling can. Now, going into Project North Axes, we can go back into our components and click on the trash can, and now you can see that our trash cans are upside down, and that is because we drew our axes down rather than up. So let's click Escape, undo this, and let's fix these axes, making sure that our blue axis is pointing up. So I'll go into Axes, click here, click here, and then click at the same spot again, making sure that our blue is completely vertical. Now we can go back into our trash can and start placing our components parallel to our sidewalk.

I will place trash cans right here. I'll go again and place another set of trash cans right over here, and then move around until I find some good locations. I'll place another set right here. I think that looks pretty good for some trash cans. We don't need to change the Glue To option for the trash cans because I do not want these coming out of the ground at weird angles, so we can leave it as is.

I'm going to place a few more and I want to use the built-in Rotate tool, so I'll push one here, hover over this angle, and I can actually rotate it around. Again, I can click and move it to exactly where I want. There you go; now let's save our file. The next thing that I want to do is bring in some park benches. Let's use the benches in the Component Sampler for this. If we go into this drop-down menu, we can click on Component Sampler, and this shows many SketchUp pre-loaded components that we use in our model. One such component is Bench by SketchUp. If we click this, we can start bringing benches into our model. We can place them in various locations. I'll place one here, and then using the built-in Rotate tool, you can rotate this around. Click this again, and you can create more park benches throughout our park. Using the built-in Rotate tool again, you can rotate and move another one. I'll put some over here, rotate—we can also type in a specific angle that we want. I want this to be 150 degrees, Enter. That wasn't quite right; let's go again, let's do minus 150. Then we'll do one over here, rotate around this point, and then move, making sure we're not going in the blue direction. Just like that, I have five park benches in my model. You can place more if you would like.

Next, let's place some bike racks. I'll click Bike Racks in my Components dialog box right here. As I bring this in, you can see that the bike rack wants to change based off the angle, so I want to make some adjustments to that, but I'll bring it in first. I'll click here, and then if I go into my home screen, I can see that I have bike racks loaded. If I delete this, bike racks are still loaded into my current model. Now I can go to Edit and change the way it glues. After bringing this into the model, I can click Edit, Glue to None, and now I can place these without it rotating. I'm going to push one right here and then select and delete this one, bring in another, and snap it over here. Then I'll click this point and this point to match them up, just like so. Great, I'll save my file.

The last component that I'll add is the Car Sedan. We go to Navigation, and then Component Sampler. We'll scroll down until we find Car Sedan, and here we can place a few cars in our model. I'll place one right over here, click this again, and put one right in my parking space. I'll click right here, rotate around the center point—I may need to move this again. You can see that the wheel is slightly sunken in. You can actually rotate this a little bit more to get a nice even alignment. It's not letting me snap precisely, so I can see that negative 92.7 is too high and 90 is too low, so I'll click this once and type in minus 91, which is right in the middle. That seems to be a perfect fit. I'll orbit around my model, perform a Zoom Extents, and I'll save my file. In the next video, we're going to talk about Face Me components, and we will build a component from an image. I'll see you in the next video.