No worries, just step back a little and limit yourself to a specific zone.įor this project, I decided to concentrated on the castle first and ignore the town altogether for the moment. Popping stuff out of the ground is so much fun that you easily go way over the top and realize after a moment that you’ve raised so many blocks at once that it makes it too complicated to actually edit them. This is the part where one can really get excited and go too fast. It only took a few minutes to draw the overall geometry of the castle walls and towers on top of the drawing and with the push tool (God bless the push tool and anyone who invented it) the whole structure came to life out of the ground as giant mushrooms. The next step was probably the most exhilarating one. I now had a scaled floor-plan to work from. Using the measure tool, I measured and entered the target size I wanted to achieve on the keyboard and validated the resize model dialog box. I then zoomed in to a section of the drawing for which I had a fairly good idea of the real size it should have. First step was to setup the scale for the document: Window->Model Info->Units, I always work in decimal because that’s what I’m used to. Now that I got a general idea of the project, I imported the drawing in Sketchup and placed it as a picture on the ground plane. In the meantime, my youngest daughter, who never looses an occasion to draw, picked up some paper and decided to do just like daddy and did her own town planning. Once finished, I scanned the drawing to use it as a reference in Sketchup. A river was definitely a great feature to incorporate and here is the resulting sketch. For that I needed some kind of planning, a map would be great I thought and I started drawing a top down map of a fictional medieval city on a sheet of paper. So, I sat down at my computer and thought it would be nice to build a small city with fortified walls and a castle attached. Since I’m fond of medieval stuff and had already taken my kids to visit several European castles, which didn’t fail at captivating them just as it did with me when I was a small child, I choose to build some sort of castle. When some weeks ago my eldest daughter got an assignment in school to build a simple model with Sketchup, it enticed me to start a project to demonstrate my kids the possibilities of the program. It’s just not every day that one can stumble in such a nice piece of software which by the way is free. Not that I was new to 3D, but its ease of use, intuitive interface and philosophy just impressed me to a degree that seldom happened in those past many years of my computer wandering. When I first bumped into Sketchup some time ago, it immediately got me hooked.
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