After going through a few video tutorials from Lynda I have learned a lot of new things about making a proper building in SketchUp and here is a few of them!

Making parts separate from your building

Improving windows on your 3D model

When I made windows in the past I just uploaded a pre-made window from the 3D warehouse SketchUp has. I then just tried to fit it into the space I wanted, 99% of the time it didn't fit. I did make my own windows before but they never looked very good, now that I am going through a tutorial I now know how to make windows and how to fit the 3D warehouse windows to fit into the window frames I made.

Making background scenes

Lets say you make a custom kitchen for someone and you only want to present the kitchen and not the rest of the building. You can take a picture in real life of a room or something of that sort, and then upload that into SketchUp to use as a texture and put it in place of a open window between two rooms. Another thing that you would use this for is making a scene behind your windows outside,  like lets say you don't like the SketchUp view and you want to display something like your neighborhood where you would build or remodel the kitchen. Well all you have to do is take a picture with your phone of outside where the kitchen is/would be and use that to put on the outside of your windows, so that when looking around in SketchUp you can see outdoors. Like you can see here: (I did not make this, its apart of the tutorial)

Templates

I also learned how to make rimming for the walls, doors, and windows. Like instead of making a door trimming and then pulling it down to the ground you could use this tool called "Follow me" which basically lets you grab any template and have it follow your mouse to anywhere you wish, like going around the ceiling of a room, or around a door, all you have to do is select a template then use the follow me tool to pull it around a door to make a frame.

After looking around a bit for tutorials for SketchUp I remembered that there was an online teaching program called "Lynda" and I learned some new features from going to Lynda!

When I made houses in SketchUp I didn't do it right, I new that I didn't do it right, I just didn't know how to do it correctly. I had searched online in the past to see how it was really done. I knew that I had to make a blueprint first then go off of that, I didn't really know how to make a blueprint before and so didn't build the 3D models correctly. I found out how to make a blueprint using different layers to construct the walls, floors, doors, windows, and so on. From going through the lessons I know know how to properly construct a building in SketchUp.

To get in more detail on why and how I didn't do it correctly, I had made the 3D model like you would make a sculpture out of ice. You start with a big block of ice and chip away until you create something. What I did was had a block and  pulled things out of it. Now I know that I have to first create a blueprint of the building I want to make, then pull the walls up and add the detail and it would work out much better.

I found that in addition to starting with a blueprint its best to have a separate layer for almost everything, like one for interior walls, one for exterior walls, one for floors, and so on and so forth. If you have a bunch of layers for each thing you can get more detailed with your 3D model, like if you wanted to make all the floors yellow all you have to do it click one button and bam! they are all yellow. Whereas if you had done it by hand it would take you 5 times as long or more.

Here is a quick photo of a blueprint I just started:

I've made many buildings in a video game called Minecraft, and recently I decided to convert one of those into SketchUp

I decided to do this because I noticed that the 3D models I created with SketchUp from scratch didn't look very good, so I decided to go from Minecraft to SketchUp. If you have played or have seen Minecraft you know that Minecraft is made up of blocks, and those blocks are huge, 1 square meter. I couldn't re-build it exactly the same as I had in Minecraft but similar enough that you can tell that they are alike.

Here is a picture of the minecraft version (on the top) and SketchUp version (on the bottom)

A little bit about Minecraft and how it effected my getting into Architecture

I don't know if its just me but throughout the entire time I've been using SketchUp I have encountered so many errors and problems with SketchUp its not even funny. Well, I will get right down to it, about 2 weeks ago my brother asked me if I could make a 3D model of a logo in a writers curriculum. Its called "One Year Adventure Novel" and teaches you how to write a book properly. There is also a forums for it and on there he decided to make a knife and send it to the owner with it engraved with their logo .He had made the knife and needed the 3D model to send with his knife to a person who can then engrave the logo into his knife.

So I started from scratch and built the model he wanted. First I made the outline of the compass then started bringing it out and turned it into a 3D model and came up with this: https://skfb.ly/SvGZ I sent it to my brother which in turn sent it to the Engraver guy. The next day the guy replied saying that the model was built wrong and so I had to go through and figure out what I did wrong. Couldn't find anything that was amiss but re-modeled it anyway. Sent it strait to the guy and he still had problems, then I figured maybe he was having problems with the model being hollow which hadn't made a difference to me when I had it to 3D print. Anyway long story short I filled in the model and sent it to the guy again. Once more he had a problem loading it into his program.

I had one of my brothers help on this (Nicholas Harris). He figured out the problem pretty quick, the only trouble was putting it into action. Turns out the problem wasn't with the model itself it was behind it, I will explain. When you engrave something you upload a 3D model and it will cut it out, well the problem was that it had no sense of depth without a background to tell it where it should stop off. We tried several different things and sent it to the guy hoping that the problem was solved. Well, its been over a week now and no reply from the guy, so we don't know if it works or if it has another problem and just doesn't want go any further. Until further news this is the end of the post, thanks for reading!

Hello!

I have been using SketchUp a lot lately. I decided I would like to go further then where I am now. So I made terrain for the models that I made to make it look a little more realistic. I didn't know how to do this so I searched up a tutorial online and found exactly what I was looking for. The tutorial was a step by step on how to make what ever kind of terrain you would like.

Here is a link to the video that I o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DSmo_dLAmM

After playing around with different terrains I decided I would add a model to it to see what it would look like. I made a Modern House and then made a beach terrain and added the house to it and I think it turned out okay but it could have been better. The problem I had with it was making the terrain after I made the house and not before to have the house go on the terrain instead of building the terrain around it, if I had done the terrain first then it would look more like the house was built on a beach instead of a beach built around a house.

Here is what I mean, this picture is without the terrain: 

And here is a picture of it with the terrain:

One of the really awesome things about making terrain is that you can upload Google Maps/Earth and get the real life terrain and bring it into SketchUp to get a accurate size of where you want this house to be built. For example lets say you want to make a house next to you and you have a spot picked out, you open this area in SketchUp then you have the terrain of where you want the house to be. You then can build the house around the terrain and get a good sense of what it would look like in the desired spot of which you want it. If you had not done this then you would maybe like change some things when its too late and regret it. Having the terrain already there makes it easier for you to get a good sense of where you are and what you want changed before the house is already in motion to be built.

Hello once again

Today I am going to talk a little about a new program I am going to be using from here on out! SketchUp is a program that is sort of like SolidWorks but it more meant for designing houses and buildings, SolidWorks is used for engineering not for modeling buildings like what I have been using it for.

SketchUp is simple but advanced, what I mean by that is that it looks very simple but can get very advanced. SketchUp users are architects, designers, builders, makers and engineers. SketchUp allows you to draw out a shape then you can pull it into a 3D model, you can also put in the sizes you want to design the perfect home, you can drag, pull or even add furniture to see what it would look like in the real world. SketchUp also has the ability to add textures to your model to see what it might look like and get a better perspective on what you're going to put into real life. You can even upload your own textures into it or if you don't want to go to the extra trouble you can just use what it already has.

Hello once more!

A few days ago I started work on the texturing of the Model Mission. I got out grout and started painting the front side of it. After a little while, I realized I was getting low on the grout so I went into the garage to get more, well, long story short I couldn't find it and I knew I couldn't do much more because I was planning to do the entire building with grout. Anyway after that I remembered that I found a website that gives free textures, I went there and picked out a few good textures, and then I printed them out. It didn't work because the pictures were way too big. So then I had to put a bunch of them together to make it smaller, and that did the trick. Using the textures the way I did is a great solution to not having enough grout.

If you would like to find the same website and download a bunch of free textures go to www.textures.com where you can download 15 textures a day for free!

Unfortunately this means that I won't be having a 3D textures for the Mission, but I hope it will turn out good. Also if you're wondering how I got the paper textures on the foam, I used shipping label paper for that and it worked out great that way ;)

I got a brick wall texture and a brick roof texture and I made them the right size and scale to the Mission itself. Here are a few pictures of it:

I am hoping to release the tutorial on how to make this soon!

Hey guys welcome back once more!

First off I would like to say is, this is going to be a place where I will write up instructions on how to make a certain building, famous or other. Now I hope I can outline this as best I can, basically I will have downloadable PDF where you will get a how to instructions on how to make that model, plus you get a printable papers that you print out and then cut out the pieces and then you will trace them onto a foam board, and then cut those out then you put the walls of the building together. Next I will have a list of materials that you need to make it, like hot glue, paints, craft sticks, and such. I will have it all a how to and I am trying to make it as close as I can to the real thing. So far I have only 1 other model Idea beside the Mission; Zonnehoek house in Holland, which is my great great grandmas house that has a historical background in WW2, where she and her husband hid Jews in the house from the Germans. I will post more information about it as I get it. If you would like to see a cretin building here please tell me and I will consider putting it up with instructions on how to make it.

Also if you would like to read more about the Zonnehoek story you can go here: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&u=http://www.paul-schiffers.nl/&prev=search, and click on "Zonnehoek" then you can see the book my grandma wrote about it

Hello once more!

It has been a while since I posted, but that's because I have been trying to convert the 3D mission model to a 2D paper format in which I would be able to print out. I've searched everywhere to convert a 3D model to 2D, but I hadn't found what I wanted so then I got the idea of converting it in the Solidworks program it self, so I made a new part and made a 2D virtual piece of paper which I would go back and forth between the model and the virtual piece of paper and make parts where I could write down the dimensions of a face then make the face on the virtual piece of paper. So after I did a lot of this conversion I came out with 7 virtual pages on Solidworks with all the parts on them. Then I had the problem, how do I now print these out? Well after searching google and YouTube I found what I was looking for, I found a video on how to convert a 3D part or a 2D to a .DWG or .DXF file which I can print out, I will put the link here so if you want to watch it you can. But if you don't feel like watching that right now I will tell you.

Basically he had a 3D model and selected a face, then he clicked "Save" or if you want to "Save as" then instead of saving it as a .SLDPRT he saved it as a .DWG file then he opened it up in a program by Solidworks called "DraftSight" where he had that face as a 2D part of just the outlines of it. So I downloaded the program and tried it out for myself, and it worked, but then I got a little lazy so I took a screenshot and then cropped it out and made the parts that you wanted grey and the parts that you don't want white.

Hello again!

Lately I have been modeling a Mission using Solidworks and recently finished and recorded me doing it and made it into a timelapse (which can be found here) I am now converting it to printable shapes which can then be photo copied and then trace onto virtual pieces of paper which then I will make a how-to make a Mission. Information about Solidworks: Solidworks a 3D modeling program that is used for engineering, but I use it for modeling buildings and small parts that I need around the house which I will 3D print. I have made the Mission first using Solidworks because then I can get a bearing of what I later have to make a tutorial of. Picture of the mission I made using Solidworks:

Update on the website:

So basicly I am going to have free download link where you can get instructions on how to make one of the buildings I have made a tutorial of, But this will not be free forever so get it when it comes out! More updates will come in a new post

Please follow me on Instagram @BuildsByGideon where you can get updates on my progress with the models!