About My House Project on Sketch up

How easy/hard was it?

In the process of making my house into 3D version, the easy part is to make the two sided roof house that we’ve learned in class, as well as the base of the house. The hardest part is to figure out how to make the pyramid roofs and how to put different roofs together. I only have the front photos of the house, it was also kind of hard to really have a correct scale of the whole house. Working with trackpad was also a little bit struggle, since it was hard to scale in and out while making the model.

What elements particularly bogged me down?

As I mentioned before, I only the the photo from the front side of my house, so I have to figure out the relative position based on only one side, which took me a while to figure out. They roof was the most complicated part, since it is composed of several roofs with different shape and scale. Initially, I tried to make the roofs connected to each and just making them on top of each other. But then I found out it was really easy for the structured that are attached together to be transformed together even if I only selected part of the structure. So I decided to divide the roofs into several different houses with its own base, and make them in different places that won’t stick them together. After making all structures with roofs, I used the lasso tool to select the whole structure and move the pieces together to make the houses.

What compromises did I have to make?

The selection tool was also handy for me to delete some walls and lines that I don’t need anymore in the process of putting all pieces together. And then I figured out it is easy to delete the whole surface even though I only wanted to delete a single line. So I have to leave some black lines on the backside of the house, which is a little bit obvious if you rotate the house and observe it on a different angle.

Another compromise was that I only have the front side photo of my house, so I was not sure how many windows there were on each side of the house. Therefore, I used the perspective as a person living inside the house to think about the positions of the window, which somewhat might not be accurate since it will be totally different looking from inside versus outside.

Humanistic use for this tool?

I had use this tool in my high school for one of the engineering classes, and we used sketch up to make some structures. I think this tool will be really useful for teaching if there’s some 3D structures involved for the students to understand and learn. For example, a history teacher can use a 3D model of the Rome city to show the daily life of Rome people. A architecture professor can use the tool to mock a building. A lab assistant in high school can print Pokemon models made with sketch up using 3D printer to trigger the interests of kids learning 3D modeling. Sketch up is a really useful tool, and there are lots of potentials to be discovered.

Some tips

1. The lasso tool will come in handy if you want to select a bunch of things at the same time, but notice the view angle while you are selecting. You might select something that you don’t want if the view of selection included the structure.
2. The selection tool is useful if you want to select a single line or surface.
3. You can use the move tool to only select a point and move them, which is how I made the pyramid roof.