I remember using some sort of program back in middle school (sometime around 2011) to create wonky structures that barely resembled buildings. I vaguely remember that it had something to do with Google, so it might have been SketchUp. Regardless of the specific program, my middle school experience mainly consisted of pushing and pulling geometrical shapes into unrecognizable forms or seeing how much chaos I could stack onto the human provided for scale. And while quite fun, this prior experience did not help much when I attempted to tackle the task of creating my childhood house. The current task proved to be equally fun as what I remembered but much more difficult.
Making the roofs was one of the hardest things for me. I got some pointers from one tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQSyofKyKIQ&t=862s and started assembling several roofs. But then I realized that some of the roofs overlapped in my real house, and forcefully pushing one block into another wasn’t working. So I started from scratch again and checked out a different video https://youtu.be/sQSyofKyKIQ. I wish I had watched the second video first because it made my roofs look so much better. I didn’t realize that I could add a couple extra lines and then push the roof out by itself to make it look more realistic.
By the time I was somewhat satisfied with how things were looking, I was getting quite tired of it all. So I skimped on the details of the windows, didn’t even try creating a chimney, and just settled with the misshapen archway entrance. I also eyeballed everything and didn’t even attempt to scale my house correctly. So some parts ended up being too big while others were much too small. I also did not explore the painting options to see if there were more varieties and just used what I found first. But I did realize that the color I had been originally using for the house walls was called “Helen_Skin” and made the connection that it was the skin tone for the scale human. And most likely due to this color, a friend thought I had made the Simpson house. So I changed the walls to a beige color.
I think SketchUp could be a cool tool for students to use when learning about historical sites or architecture. Having to create something really forces you to examine your reference source closely from all sorts of angles.
