Delve into the creative process of constructing a welcome sign in SketchUp. This guide offers a detailed walkthrough of making the sign's curve top, adding a profile border, and incorporating 3D text.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step process to create a curve top on a sign in SketchUp using the push-pull tool, the two-point arc tool, the tape measure tool to create guides, and the eraser tool.
- Adding a profile border around the sign face can be achieved through the pie tool and the follow me tool. This process also involves using the tape measure tool to create a guide and the select tool to click the desired face.
- The final step of the guide involves using the 3D text tool to add personalized text to the sign. The author advises using the tape measure tool to create a center guideline for accurate placement of the text and then scaling and coloring the text to suit personal preferences.
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So in this video, we are going to finish our welcome sign. First, I would like to add a curve top to our sign.
Because we have already made this into a group, and I want to edit this group, what I could do is I could double click, and I can solely work in this group without affecting anything else. And the only thing I can select inside here would be objects that are in this group. However, if I clicked out of this group, it would end that.
So I'll go back and double click into this group. Then I actually want to make this board one inch thicker. So I would go to my push pull tool, and push pull this plane out in this direction, so it gets thick, and type in one, enter.
Then I'll orbit back around, and I want to go make a curve at the top of this, but I need to find the center point, and also the edge points first. So what I can do is, let's go ahead and make some guides. If I go to my tape measure tool, I can click on this edge here, and I want to go in eight inches.
And then on this side, I want to do the same thing, going this way, eight inches. And now, going with my two point arc tool, clicking this, I can click this point, where the X is, and this intersection at this X. And then going up in the blue direction, type in six inches, and then click enter for the bulge. Then I will go to the push pull tool, and push pull this face two inches.
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And then I will go to edit, delete guides, and then the eraser tool to erase this edge, and this edge. The next thing I want to do is, I want to create a profile border around the sign face. So I will go to the tape measure tool again, and I want to bring up a guide one inch from the bottom.
So I'll go up and type in one. And now, I want to use the pie tool to create a half circle shape that I would then use the follow me tool to extrude my shape all the way around the profile of my sign. So I will go to this pie tool, and then in this red direction where we're showing, I will click on this edge.
And if I want to lock this face, remember, I can hold shift, and it will lock this gizmo in that direction where it's at. Like if I'm in this green, and I click hold down shift, it'll lock it in this plane. So in this red direction, hold down shift.
I'll go along my grid line, right in the center right here. And then I would go down, and then dragging around this half circle, so it stops right here. And then, remember we learned about the follow me tool when we did our fountain, that we can first select the plane that we want to follow around, and then click the follow me tool, and then click the object or profile that we want to follow around that edge.
And it will automatically generate this curved, kind of beveled edge around our sign face. I'll orbit around, and I'll do the same thing on this side. I'll use my tape measure tool to create a guide.
One, enter, and then using the pie tool, and along the red, holding down shift, and then along this grid line, go down to that edge, and then drag up and around to create that half circle. And again, select tool, click the face, and the follow me tool, click the profile. It will automatically create that shape.
And then I will do edit, delete guides. Now I can select outside of my group, and I can now select the objects for my sign without messing anything up. So going into the groups is a very helpful practical tool to kind of modify elements in a model.
It also works if we have multiple groups inside of a group. Like if I was to group all four of these, right click, make group, and then I went double click, and then I'm inside this, and then I can double click again, and I can go inside. So I can be inside of a group, inside of a group, inside of a group, and it works very well.
I will right click, explode, to undo that last group. And now I will save my file. All right.
Now the final step is to add 3D text that gives our park our name. So I will be using my name, but I would like you to write your own name on your sign. Before we build our 3D text, I would like to place a guideline down the center of my sign so that we can place it exactly in the center.
So I will go to the tape measure tool, and then I will click this point here. Along the red axes, I will hold down shift to lock it, and then hover over the center right there to find the center point of that face. Now let's generate our 3D text.
I will go to the 3D text tool and click this, and this place 3D text box opens up. Here's where we can type in the letters and words that we want to show. We talked about this when we did the recycling can.
We did the little recycling icon. So this one, I will type in Derek, capital D, lowercase e-r-e-k. And I'm using Bauhaus93 as my font of choice.
You can use many different fonts. I want this to be filled, my alignment to be center. I think I want my height to be six inches, and I want my thickness to be one half inch.
If you have a short first name and a short last name, you can probably fit both your names in one line, or you can just do one for each line, which is what I want to do. So I will do Derek, and you can see Derek comes in nicely. I want it to snap to this guideline.
However, it doesn't snap to that. So I have to place it on this plane itself, and then we'll move it after. So once I put it down here, I can zoom in, and then I can go to my move tool and find the midpoint, and then drag along the red and snap to the line.
There we go. And I'll zoom back out, and I will go back to my 3D text tool, and I'll type in my last name, McFarland, and then all this still looks good. And click place, place this right around here, zoom in, find the center point, midpoint in McFarland, drag and snap right there.
And then finally, we want to say park. So I will do 3D text again, type in capital P-A-R-K, place right here, and I'll orbit down so I can see midpoint in park, and snap right there. And you may want to move some of these things.
If I go to the move tool, move up, I can kind of space these out accordingly to get the right distance that I want. Now I want to select all three of these words, and then right click, make group. And I kind of feel that this is a little bit too big.
So I can actually use the scale tool, select the scale button, and then I can actually scale this. And by holding down control, I can scale uniformly. I want to get a right size because I'm actually thinking that I want to put the VDCI logo at the top.
So by scaling it down slightly and then using the move tool and then moving down, right there is a good spot. So let's paint these letters a nice color for a park. Go to my select cursor and deselect that and go to materials, then paint bucket, and let's find a nice color.
So I will select this menu bar and go to colors. And I'm thinking I want a nice kind of blue, green color. And let's do this color H07, click that, and then click this group.
Because all of those words were grouped together, it would, you do one click and it changes all that into one. I want to delete this guide, so I'll go to my eraser tool, erase that guide, and then let's bring in the VDCI CAD teacher logo. And to do this, we could go to file, import, and find the VDCI logo.skp file in our skp101 downloads folder.
Or we can go to the 3D warehouse and we have actually pre-uploaded the logo into the shared 3D warehouse. So by clicking this icon, this is 3D warehouse. This would open the 3D warehouse.
And then in the search bar at the top, let's type in VDCI logo and enter. And then under models, we can see the VDCI logo. I can click this icon right here to directly download into my SketchUp model.
I will select yes. And as it is downloading, I want to prepare this, put it right here on our sign. This might be a little bit too large, so I can go to my scale tool and I can, you know, scale uniformly by clicking center.
That's like a good size right there. And now I will zoom extents, deselect, I will save my file. And there we have it.
That is all we need to do for our welcome sign. It is complete. Great job.
Now I will see you in the next video as we tackle the carousel.
