Stamping Architectural Objects onto Toposurface in SketchUp

Let's continue to stamp our architectural objects onto our toposurface. So let's zoom out so we can see our carousel.

We want to stamp this base onto our topography. However, the stamp tool, once we click our first object, is going to want to think about all the geometry that's in that object and figure out what it wants to stamp onto this. Because there's a lot of components and objects in this thing, like it may take a while, and it may ultimately crash your program.

So the best thing to do is just to give it the minimal amount of information for it to stamp. So with this object selected, I will right click explode. Then with all these objects that are exploded, we'll hold down shift to deselect the base and then delete the rest.

Now zooming out a bit so I can see both my topography surface and my object, I will click on the stamp tool and then click on my object I want to stamp and then click on the surface of where I want that object profile to be stamped to. And then I want to leave a little bit of space above the side right about there. Now I want to scale this again.

So selection tool, select this curved edge and then go into my scale tool. I could rotate down to the bottom and then pull this up to about 0.01. I see that this geometry is blue and I want it to be white so I can right click reverse face, right click reverse face. Next I want these edges to be softened, but before I soften those edges, I need to bring in my carousel to align with this edge.

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Otherwise I wouldn't be able to find that. So I'm going to click my carousel, my components dialog box, and bring it right over in here. And I want to snap it right to a point.

Find a point that matches with the geometry right there. And now I want to soften these base edges. So I don't want to triple click everything because if I soften everything it's going to remove these over here.

So I want to just soften this. If I select this whole thing and then deselect the carousel, I would only select these objects. I could also use my selection window and select and dragging to the right only select this object.

Then I can drag my slider over to soften those edges. That looks pretty good. I'll click this and erase this.

And next I will do the same thing for my fountain. Again the fountain has complex geometry so I want to clean that up. I will right click explode, delete this fountain, triple click this base, delete that, delete the surface, delete the lily pads, and I'll make this a group.

Now this is a little bit simpler of geometry so I can use this as my stamp. And then I'm going to go drag this up a little bit. I do want to create a slight pad for my fountain.

I don't need to flatten this. Again you can reverse these faces so they're all showing up white and you can delete these lines. Click once to break it and then double click to select the rest of them and then delete.

Because if you were to double click this it will select all of that surface. If I click this and deselect I can also do the same thing. And then selecting my fountain in my components dialog box I'll bring it in right into here and find a point to snap right on an edge that matches.

If I zoom out a bit you can see that there are two faces overlapping each other. You may see some jitters but just in case let's hide this element and then delete this face right here and then edit, unhide, last. Now zooming out I'm going to see if I see some of my toposurface geometry that's giving me some trouble.

I can see that I have some complicated geometry over here so I'm going to want to double click, triple click into this view hidden geometry and I'm going to start flipping some faces to kind of create a you know some better geometry. And this is kind of all trial and error and you can sort of tell by the way the the colors are looking with the with the geometry to get a nice kind of cleaner look. When you have like a sharp edge like this going up it would be a little bit cleaner if it was rotated around so there's a nice angle down.

All right and then again just kind of moving around the model to see where we might want to modify some of these lines to create some clean geometry. I think this is looking pretty good. All right I'll go to view, edit, uncheck the hidden geometry.

I will zoom extents, delete this old fountain and I will save my file. Now finally let's bring in our real world geometry and drape it onto our model. Let's bring in the actual line work for our site and because we have a 3D terrain we can drape 2D line work onto a three-dimensional topography and we'll show you how to do that.

Let's go to file, import and we're going to import siteplan.dwg. I've also provided a SketchUp file in case you are using an older version of SketchUp that does not allow dwg imports. For our case we will use the dwg and I'll show you how that works. If you click options you can see that there's various boxes that we can check and change on what type of geometry gets imported into the model.

This is primarily useful for CAD files that have three dimensionality to it. For the case of this it's just line work. We'll click import and then we'll click close and so what the CAD file does versus the SketchUp file is it doesn't allow you to move the CAD file around while it's being imported.

It just places it right where it's supposed to be. Fortunately for this case we have it set up in the right spot however it is below our surface and not above it. We need to click our CAD file and then move a point and then along the blue axes drag it till it's above everything and then we will explode.

Go to our select tool, right click, explode. So it's just lines and while these lines are selected we are going to use the drape tool which will drape these lines onto our toposurface. We'll click the drape and now it's asking us what surface we want to drape these to and here we'll click this surface.

As you can see SketchUp automatically created surfaces and split it apart with this geometry. This is a really powerful tool of adding two-dimensional lines onto a three-dimensional surface. It can be used multiple ways whether it be on a facade of a building like we just did topography or many other situations.

Now I'll orbit down so I can select this CAD file or these CAD lines and delete those lines. Now let's paint this surface various materials. So this is the fun part.

Let's close our components, our softened edges, and our shadows and open our materials. Let's open landscaping, fencing, and vegetation. I'm going to slide this down a little bit bigger so we can see all these.

Let's find some materials. Let's go to grass light green and paint areas on this topography that are grass like this area and this area, this area, this area, this area, and we have a little planter island that we'll paint. This little buffer.

Excellent. Now let's go to asphalt and concrete. Let's go to black top old two and we'll use that to paint the road and the street.

Clicking around, we might have to zoom in at these triangle areas get a little small. Start filling in all of this asphalt and then now let's go to polish concrete old and paint the concrete areas. It's looking very nice.

I want to create a nice little kind of bark mulch for this for this planter area. Let's go to back to landscaping, fencing, and vegetation. Let's find sand, pea gravel, small aggregate, gravel, bark.

Let's do this one right here. That looks nice. Let's pan around and I think we want to do some more concrete over here so I'll click my ALT to select this concrete and paint that.

Excellent. Let's do a zoom extents and let's save our file. Alright, in the next video we are going to talk about components and bring in more elements into our park.

I will see you in the next video.