How to Build a Carousel in SketchUp: Step-by-Step Guide

So in this video we are going to begin to build our entire carousel. The first thing that we need to do is open a new file, so let's go to file, new from template, architectural inches template, and then we'll save as this file, file, save as, and we'll save this in our skp 101 file downloads folder in our c drive as carousel.skp and then click save. And the first thing, erase, delete our man.

For a carousel we need to build around the center origin, so I will orbit and pan my model around so this origin is in the center of my screen. So our carousel will be a nine-sided carousel, so every object we draw should be a multiple of nine. So for a base circle we should have 36 edges, which is four times nine, so let's go to circle and then let's type in 36 for our sides, click enter, and then snap to our origin in the middle and drag out wherever you want.

You don't have to snap to any sort of thing, any sort of axes, and we'll type in 15 feet, so 15 feet. Remember 15 would just be 15 inches, so we need to add the 15 feet. So let's zoom out so we can see the entirety of this circle, and we will go to our push pull tool and click on the face and push pull it up 18 inches, enter.

And before we make this a group, I will go to my select tool and click this edge and right click find center. We should have this dot up here. Now we can triple click this geometry, right click, make group.

Before we place our horses and sleighs on the top of our carousel base, let's draw some general guidelines. So let's go to our tape measure tool right here, click this, and let's go to the center point, and along the green axes we'll draw a guide right here, and then from this end point here we'll make a series of basically points with our guides. We'll go to this end point here and then drag it along the green axes.

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We'll type in 18 and then we'll do the same thing, click this point, go up six, enter for six inches, and then we'll go one more time and we'll type in four feet, enter. Now we should have a series of three points inside of this guideline. Now let's go to file import and let's import our carousel horse.skp file import.

You will notice that the horse that I imported is the horse that I created and changed and edited the colors. Your horse however should be unique to the style that you created and should be different from mine. I will click this right here and then I will delete this carousel horse.

If I open up, go back to my select key, if I open up this components dialog box and click on the house which is my in model path, you can see now that this carousel horse is now built into this model. So I can click on this horse and now I can bring this horse in. So I'm going to first put this horse right here on this third guideline and then I'll do the same thing.

I will click in my components dialog box the horse and I'll click it on this guideline. Now you can see that I put my horse both on the second and third guideline point. Now let's make some copies of the horse around my model.

We know how to make copies using the array feature in the move command and the rotate command does something similar. If we pre-select both of our horses by holding down CTRL to get our little plus or shift where we have plus and minus, we can click on both of these horses to have them both selected and then clicking on the rotate tool we can first click on this center guide point and then click on our on our point that we want to rotate around somewhere along this green axis and then we can see that we are now moving this these horses around that origin center as a specific angle. Let's type in 40 degrees for our angle and then click enter and now let's make a duplicate of these two horses and kind of somewhere in this area over here.

So to do that let's go with our rotate gizmo let's click the center point as well and then clicking anywhere along this face we can start rotating this around but this time we will select the CTRL key on our keyboard to toggle the plus symbol which means make copy and we will again type in 40 for 40 degrees. So before we copy the horses all the way around our carousel base let's bring in the sleigh. So let's go to file import and find our carousel sleigh.skp and then import.

Let's bring this in right here and this time let's find the center point this midpoint in carousel sleigh. Click this and we will move this right to this point right here. We now have our first set of sleigh and horses so now we can begin to array these around our model using the select tool.

I will select all five of these objects and then go in into the rotate tool and again clicking on this center guide point and clicking anywhere in the model we'll begin to start arraying these around and let's make a copy so we'll click our CTRL key on our keyboard and we're going to want to have this be around 120 degrees so it's one-third of 360 degrees for our circle so one-third so let's type in 120 and then using the array tool we can now we can type in x2 to make a copy of that same angle and this will generate a polar array of our objects. So there we go there's all of our objects in our carousel so let's select all of these and being careful not to select our base so we'll click and drag to the left so we're hitting everything but this base and then we'll right click make group so now we should have a group on the base in this and we'll delete these guides we'll do edit delete guides all right so i will do a zoom extents and zoom out so i'm kind of looking at kind of slightly above and i will save the model and that completes the first part of the carousel i'll see you in the next video