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, 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 where I want that object profile to be stamped. 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 Select 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 in 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 by dragging to the right to 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 simpler geometry so I can use this as my stamp. And then I'm going to 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.

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 triple-click into this, View, Hidden Geometry, and I'm going to start flipping some faces to create some better geometry. And this is all trial and error, and you can sort of tell by the way the colors are looking with the geometry to get a nice cleaner look. When you have a sharp edge like this going up, it would be 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, Hidden Geometry and uncheck it.

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. I'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 them. For this case it's just line work. We'll click import and then we'll click close. 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 axis drag it until it's above everything and then we will Explode it.

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 tool and now it's asking us what surface we want to drape these onto, 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 for adding two-dimensional lines onto a three-dimensional surface. It can be used multiple ways whether it be on a facade of a building, topography like we just did, 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 with various materials. So this is the fun part.

Let's close our Components, Soften Edges, and 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 Blacktop Old Two and we'll use that to paint the road and the street.

Clicking around, we might have to zoom in as 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 bark mulch for this planter area. Let's go 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 more concrete over here so I'll click ALT to select this concrete and paint that.

Excellent. Let's do a Zoom Extents and let's save our file. All right, 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.