This tutorial will guide you through the steps to create a ramp in a 3D model of a patio, focusing on key techniques such as drawing lines, adjusting elements, and applying textures. The process involves creating groups of elements, moving and rotating them to achieve the desired slope, and refining the model for a clean, professional appearance.
Key Insights
- The tutorial begins with the creation of a line along the green axis, which marks the point where the ramp will slope down. This is followed by creating groups and exploding them into individual elements for easier manipulation.
- Instead of moving each individual element to create a slope, the tutorial suggests an easier approach. This involves deleting an element, drawing a rectangle on the top, and moving it to snap on the desired point, thus creating a slope easily.
- The final steps involve refining the model by intersecting faces, deleting excess lines, and softening edges. Additionally, a new material is created for the concrete slab and a texture is applied for a more realistic appearance.
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Alright, in this video we are going to finish with our topography cleanup. The next thing we should do is create a ramp going down in this direction to connect this existing concrete to our new patio.
So let's double-click this group until we get to this individual element. What we want to do is hit H to hide the rest of the model and draw a line from this point along the green axis to right there. This is where we want this element to slope down.
So let's create a group here and a group here. I will hit Escape twice, and now I want to explode this and explode this into individual elements. To get this to slope down, there are a few different ways to do it.
One way would be to rotate this element—hover over this, click this corner, click this first point, and then rotate it to snap it to here. However, all of these don’t line up well. So the other way would be to go to each individual and start moving things down, but then, as you can see, if I go to View > Hidden Geometry and move a point down here along the blue axis, it’ll start creating messy triangulation, and I’d have to do this for each individual element.
So both of those ways are not ideal. The easiest way to do this would be to delete this element and just draw a simple rectangle on the top right up here. Then let's click this one face and move—I hit the M key for Move—and snap right here. Then I will hit H to see the rest of the model. I want to be able to snap. I'm going to select this edge, then use my Move tool, click this point, and move it along the green axis. I'll hold down Shift to snap in the green direction to snap right at this corner. This is where I want to bring down this element here. I would do the same thing on this side: select this edge and move to this corner right here.
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Okay, and now I want to deselect all and select my Move tool and only select this endpoint. Then, hitting the up arrow on the keyboard to lock in the blue direction, hold down Shift and click this endpoint right down here. I'll do the same thing over here—select this endpoint, lock in the blue direction with the up arrow, hold down Shift, and then I will do one final move to move this line along this point, along the green axis, to right here. Now I have a slope that basically connects both of these with just one line in between. What I can do is flip this line either in this direction or that direction—whatever I think works best. I think this direction is best.
Now what I can do is triple-click this geometry, right-click, and Make Group. Double-click the group, hit H to hide the rest of the model. I will select all of these and then right-click and choose Intersect Faces with Model. Now we'll see these curves, and I can simply delete these excess lines. I can triple-click this line and delete. And there we have our simple concrete walkway.
I would like to join all three of these components, so I can select all three, right-click, and Make Group. Now it's all together. I can press CTRL+A to select all and then explode and manually soften each of these edges so we don't have these sharp lines. We can go to our Erase tool, and then we see in our bottom left: CTRL = toggles Soften/Smooth.
If I hit CTRL, all of this will soften edges, and I can soften each of these corners. Now let's create a new material for all of this concrete slab. I will go to Asphalt and Concrete and select this Polished Concrete Old. I'll create a new material and name this Concrete Primary for our primary concrete for the building. I want to make this texture a little bit larger—maybe around six feet—and I'll change this color to be kind of a reddish-orange or brown type of color. I'll select OK.
Now I will do a CTRL+A on my keyboard to select all, and then I will click to paint all that material. I will now deselect, and then go to my View > Hidden Geometry, and I can see that I have a nice sloping walkway up into our flat patio. So that's one way to simply modify these various levels of concrete to create a really clean look.
