Discover how to utilize SketchUp's features to add elements and components, such as picnic tables, trash cans, park benches, and cars to a park model. Learn how to efficiently download and place these components, adjust angles, rename elements, and alter axes to ensure optimal placement and alignment of components.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed step-by-step guide on how to download and place various components such as picnic tables, trash cans, and park benches in a park model using SketchUp's 3D warehouse tool.
- It offers a thorough explanation of how to adjust settings such as renaming components, selecting glue options, and altering axes. These changes ensure components adhere correctly to the model's geometry and align parallel to specific directions.
- The author also demonstrates how to use SketchUp's built-in rotate tool and component sampler, enabling readers to accurately place and orient elements like benches and cars within the park model.
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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 till we can find picnic table vdci-picnictable and then click download. Yes to load directly into our model and now we can place our component anywhere 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 put further up in our hill. I will undo this last one so if I select my component and then click edit first thing I want to do is I want to rename it to picnic table and then click enter and 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 in our recycling cans.
So again let's go to the 3D warehouse and then let's scroll down until we can find VDCI trash in 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 in 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 this being able to bring in this 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 means this creates an add 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 an 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 it's 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 and I want and I want this to be the same direction so I can 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 axis has the axis over one scene has the axis over here the other has the axis 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 scene now if I toggle back and forth the only thing that changes between the two are my axes so this is helpful when we want to bring in components to be aligned on 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 go into axes click here click here and then click at the same spot again making sure that our blue is completely vertical and now we can go back into our trash can and we can start placing our components parallel to our sidewalk.
I will place trash cans right here I'll go again I'll place another set of trash cans right over here and then moving around until you 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 in out of the ground in some 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 push one here I hover over this angle and I can actually rotate it around and then again I can click and move to get exactly where I want there you go now let's save our file and the next thing that I want to do is I want to bring in some park benches let's use the benches in the component sampler for this so 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 in benches within our model we can place them in various locations I'll place one here and then using the built-in rotate you can rotate this around click this again you can create more park benches throughout our park and using the built-in rotate key you can rotate and then move again put some over here I'll rotate we can also type in a specific angle that we want I want this to be 150 degrees enter now wasn't quite right let's go again let's do minus 150 and then we'll do one over here rotate around this point and then move making sure that we're not going in the blue direction and then finally 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 click this 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 of the angle so I want to make some adjustments to that but I want to bring it in first so I'll click here and then if I go into my home screen I can see that I have bike racks loaded so if I delete this bike wraps are still loaded into my current model now I can go to edit and I can change the way that it glues to so I first bring it in bringing this into the model I can click edit glue to none and then now I can place these in without it being rotating so I'm going to push one right here and then select delete this one and I'll put bring in another and snap it to bring it over here and then I will click this point in this point to match them up just like so great I will save my file and then the last component that I will add would be the car sedan so 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 and I'll click this again and I'll put one right in my parking space so I'll click right here and then 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 kind of rotate this a little bit more to kind of get a nice even amount it's not wanting me to snap so I can see that negative 92.7 is too high and 90 is too low so I will type it I will click I'll click this once and type in minus 91 which is kind of right in the middle and that seems to kind of be a perfect fit I will orbit around my model and then do a zoom extents and I will save my file so in the next video we're going to talk about face me components and we will build a component from an image I will see you in the next video.
