Using Sketchup for the first time was a bit of a learning curve for me – it took a while to really even figure out how to navigate, let alone make three-dimensional objects that looked like my house in any way. As I got more familiar with it, however, I found that making the overall shape of my house wasn’t so difficult, especially once I learned how to use the push/pull tool to give the roof and sides their shape. On the other hand, I struggled with the smaller details. In particular, I wasn’t sure how to get things even, like the angles of the roof on either side, or the spacing of the windows.
I also found that the “sticky” nature of Sketchup made it difficult to fine-tune the specific objects I wanted too without accidentally connecting/moving things I didn’t mean to. One of the compromises I had to make as a result was to leave some of the awkward uneven spacing of objects, and not try to edit things on a very small scale.
Thinking from a humanistic perspective, I could see this being a very useful tool for representing forms in a much more interactive way. As a visual learner, I really benefit from being able to see something and interact with it rather than hear it described. That makes tools like this very useful for both teaching and learning things in more interactive and helpful ways. In research, I could see software like this being useful in recreating landscapes that are now lost in order to try and discover the ways a physical environment may shape or have been shaped by history.
Finally, one tip that I would give is to use a mouse for the purposes of navigating! I had a really tough time using my keypad on my laptop.
Hadn’t really thought about how this could be used to look at how certain landscapes were shaped over time, interesting ideas all of these!
Your house looks incredible! I also had a hard time with tiny details and spacing, so I’m glad to know that I wasn’t alone in this struggle. Thank you for the tip on the mouse!
Having seen this house in person, I got to say it looks really accurate! I am curious about how you created the windows… did you copy/paste one by one? Or was there a way to generate multiple duplicates at once?
I also struggled with that “sticky”-ness a lot, and was a little frustrated that we couldn’t disable it somehow. Also agree that 3D modeling historical environments is an awesome application.