Explore the process of adding thickness to modeled plates and adjusting the sizes of bolts in a 3D model. This article provides a detailed, step-by-step walkthrough of various techniques, including adjusting component axes, aligning elements, duplicating groups, and applying materials and textures to your 3D model.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to add thickness to modeled plates in a 3D model using the push-pull tool, and adjusting the sizes of bolts to achieve the desired aesthetic.
- It also explores the process of aligning elements in the model by drawing guides, moving components to snap to these guides, and duplicating groups to mirror designed elements on both sides of the model.
- The tutorial later delves into the application of materials and textures to the 3D model, including modifying the color, saturation, and texture size, allowing for a more realistic finish.
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Now that we have all of our plates modeled and grouped, let's add some thicknesses to each of these. We'll go into each one of these plates, and what I want to do is add some thickness to this right here. I want this to be a one-quarter-inch thick metal plate, so I could Push/Pull this up one-quarter inch.
However, you can see that our bolts are now below, but if we went underneath, then our origin is not going to be on the bottom corner. I want to go up, so what I'm going to do is go up and type 0.25 inches. Then I'll close out of this, and then let's hover down to the bottom of our plate and select our bolt component. Since these are components, if we double-click into the component, you can modify them all. So let's move this up. We'll double-click, select H to isolate this, and move this up to 0.25 inches as well. Then let's modify our component axes. We do not have any sort of guides yet, so let's just quickly draw a guide so we know where we want to center this and align. Let's change this axis to right there in the middle along the same red and green.
Now that our axis is on the top—and yes, I want to change the axis—this has moved all of these bolts to the top. So then what I can do is double-click on each of these bolts, and I can add some thickness to the bolt heads. I want these bolt heads to be 0.5 inches. Then Escape. You can see now that I have these bolt heads. I'm realizing aesthetically, I think these bolt heads are a little bit too thick, so I want these to be a little bit smaller. I'll make them.
Let me check to see if… Mmm, you know what? I actually prefer them to be larger. So I will go to Edit > Undo, Edit > Undo back to the 0.5. Now I'll go to Edit > Delete Guides. I want to get rid of my X-ray views now.
I don't want to see the X-rays anymore. I will go to View > Face Style, uncheck X-ray. Now let's go do that same thickness to each of these. So double-click this group and Push/Pull this 0.25 inches. Then to here, we'll Push/Pull this one 0.25. Escape to close out of that. Then we'll go to this plate, Push/Pull up 0.25,0.25 Enter. All right, now we have all of our plates in the appropriate thicknesses that we like. The next step is to place these on our model. Just for kicks, let's import our structural truss drawing so we can see this upper truss as a reference to know where each of these go. We see that A goes here and the inverse of A goes on the other side, and then likewise B, C, D, E, F. So let's start with A. We're going to click this bottom point right here of our plate and select the corner right here.
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We know that, facing off of this dimension here, it's one-inch spacing from here and one-inch spacing from here, and there's a lot of depth on the bottom side. We'll move this point to this corner, and we'll move this one inch. Then just to double-check, we'll move this back up to here. Then we'll do a guide from here offset one inch so that we have that to match. Then we'll move this one final time to here. Okay, and again, I'm going to add another guideline to this truss—one inch—knowing that I want these to all align based off of this, and I can go ahead and do that to each one of these beams just so that we can make sure that whenever we place those, they're placed appropriately. So I'm just doing one-inch guides off of each of these major lines. You can see that when I do it once, it automatically snaps to that dimension.
It's kind of a SketchUp smart feature. Then here I actually want to make a centerline on this point. I know that these are six-inch members, so I can do three. All right, so I'll continue with that. Now let's go do B. So B is down on the bottom. This time I'm going to select this point right here and use the Move tool. Now I want to position that right on one of these intersections of guides that I drew. Perfect. Then I will go back to my template, and let's go do C. C is our bottom plate right here. We'll go to C, and go to the center point—midpoint in group—and we will position this kind of right here. Then we will move this along the green axis to snap to that guide. Let's do D. D, as we note, is this plate right here and this plate. We'll go to D and click this point right here. We know that somewhere along the line right here, we don't have an exact dimension on how far the spacing is, but we do know that this should be at least one inch off of this face. So I'll move this corner to go right there. Okay, now let's do our final two pieces.
We'll click this component or this group and then move from that corner, holding down Shift to pan all the way to this intersection of these guides and click. Then finally, we will do this piece right here. We'll use our Move tool and move that to this point. We don't have an actual dimension on the side of these, so I will move this along the guide until it hits the center, just like that. I will zoom out, and now I see that I have all of our plates. I want to basically mirror these to this side. So what I can do is make a selection window and select all of these elements. I'll right-click, make group, and then do a Move. Hitting my CTRL key to make a copy, I'll move it down to anywhere along the red. Then right-click > Flip Along > Red. Then we'll move this to snap directly to there. We will double-click this group of these plates, delete this one and this one. Now I can group these two pieces together, then double-click into this group and then Explode all of these individuals. Now we have all of those plates that are all grouped together. We have our truss. I'm going to go to Edit > Delete Guides. Now we can delete this JPEG image and this JPEG image. Let's select our entire truss and move this truss so that this point right here is on our origin. When we place this component into our model, we know where our origin is going to be—right on that corner. Let's add this finally.
Let's add some materials to each of our plates. We'll double-click into our plates and go to Materials > Select. Let's go into Metal, and let's choose—we have a metal aluminum anodized, aluminum, metal seamed steel texture, metal silver, brushed stainless, metal rough. Let's click Metal Rough. Let's do a CTRL+A to select all and then paint. We can go in there.
We can adjust this color. We can actually rename it to call this—call this "Truss Plate Metal." Then we'll go to Edit, and we can actually change the color. We can turn down the saturation so there's no color tint to the metal—basically zero—and we can darken this to more of a black-type color. You can adjust the size of this pattern texture to maybe make it a little bit smaller.
We'll make it four inches. Actually, let's make it a little bit bigger—say 10 inches. Then, if we would like, we can modify these components. We can also change the texture of these components. We'll CTRL+A to select all of that material, go back into our Metal Rough, paint these, and then we can call this "Bolt Metal." You can modify the color of these—maybe just slightly darker. Maybe there's kind of a two-tone color to this. We can figure out what color we like for that. Then Escape to close out, and we can see that we have our truss. We've got these nice black braces on the front side. However, the last thing I would like to do is rotate this so that it’s actually vertical now instead of on the ground.
So I'll do a CTRL+H to select all, and then using my Rotate tool, I will select this point here. I want to rotate around the origin until we get the red gizmo. We may have to pan down lower so we can see that horizon. Then rotate this 90, Enter. One final thing:
Let's add these base plates back to the backside. We can click this point here, and along the green, select this point. Then we can Flip Along Green Axes. I can see that was the wrong move, so I'm going to undo that. Let me double-click into this group, and I can see that I actually want to Flip Along the Blue, not the Green, as that's where it’s currently been modeled. So I'll right-click > Flip Along > Blue. Then let's double-check to make sure that this is flush on this face—and it is. Now I have my origin right here on the corner, and that's a good spot. Now this is going to be our new final truss. So our Clubhouse Truss Plates—we don't need to resave over that anymore. We actually want to resave over our truss file.
So let's go to File > Save As, and let's save this as this double—let's click our Clubhouse Structural Truss, and let's do truss-complete.skp. We know we have our complete truss that has all of our plates and everything on it and in the right orientation. One click Save. Excellent. Now—
We've completed our truss. In the next video, we will place this truss into our model, and we'll continue to model some interior elements of our clubhouse. I will see you in the next video.
