How to Create a Sloping Walkway in SketchUp for Topography Cleanup

Creating a Sloping Walkway for a Seamless Connection

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. Next thing that we should do is to create a ramp going down this direction to connect this existing concrete to our new patio.

So let's double click this group till we get to this individual element. So what we want to do is let's go to hit h to hide rest of model and let's draw a line from this point along the green axis to right there. So 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 and hit escape and now I want to explode this and explode this into individual elements. So to get this to slope down there are a few different ways to do it.

One way would be to you know rotate this element kind of hover in this hit this corner hit this first point and then rotate it to snap to here. However, all these don't line up great. 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 that there if I was to move a point down here along the blue it'll start triangling this like a mess and I'll 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 and then let's just click this one face and move I hit the m key for move and move to snap right here and then I will hit h to see rest of model and I want to be able to snap I'm going to select this edge And then use my move tool and click this point and move it along the green 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 and I would do the same thing on this side select this edge and move to this corner right here Okay and now I want to Deselect all and select my move Tool and only select this end point and then and hitting the up arrow on the keyboard to lock in the blue direction Hold down shift And hit and then click this end point right down here And i'll do the same thing over here Select this end point Along the blue direction up arrow hold down shift to lock And then I will do one final move is to move this line along this point along the green axes to right here Now I have a slope that that basically hits in between both of these with just one line in between What I can do is I could flip this line Either this direction or this direction whatever I think works the best. I think this direction Is the best so I now what I can do is I can Triple click this geometry right click make group Double click the group Hit h to hide rest of model I will Select all of these and then right click intersect face with model Now we'll see these curves and I can physically simply just 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 make group Now it's all together and I can select Control a to select all and then explode to manually soft soften each of these uh Edges so when we have so we don't have this these sharp Lines, we can go to our erase tool and then we see in our bottom left Control equals toggle soften smooth.

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If I hit control all this will soften edge and I can actually soften each of these corners And 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 do my create new material and I will name this as concrete Primary for our primary concrete for our building. I want to make this texture a little bit larger So maybe say six feet and I'll change this color to be a slightly Kind of reddish Orange kind of brown type of color. I'll select.

Okay And now I will do a control 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 and geometry and I can see that I have a nice Sloping walkway up into our flat patio. So that's one way to kind of simply modify These various levels of concrete to create a really clean look You

photo of Derek McFarland

Derek McFarland

SketchUp Pro Instructor

Over the course of the last 10 years of my architectural experience and training, Derek has developed a very strong set of skills and talents towards architecture, design and visualization. Derek grew up in an architectural family with his father owning his own practice in custom home design. Throughout the years, Derek has had the opportunity to work and be involved at his father's architecture office, dealing with clients, visiting job sites, and contributing in design and production works. Recently, Derek has built up an incredible resume of architecture experiences working at firms such as HOK in San Francisco, GENSLER in Los Angeles, and RNT, ALTEVERS Associated, HMC, and currently as the lead designer at FPBA in San Diego. Derek has specialized in the realm of architectural design and digital design.

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