As a newcomer to 3D modeling, creating a new model from scratch is definitely a challenge for me. My childhood house is an old apartment building that can be divided into 2 parts. The first part is the latter portion of the house: a long rectangle house with a fairly standard roof. (fig 1) The second part is three identical blocks of houses that have windows and doors. (fig 2)
My challenge is the unique roof shape of the second part. There is a triangle shape in the middle of the little roof that puzzles me for a long time. I end up separating the block of the house into three identical parts with two parts having a downward roof shape and the middle one having an upper triangle shape. Then I add a line in the middle and move the position of two points to create the triangle shape. However, since the roof I created is divided into 3 parts, it is difficult for me to extend my roof. Every time I try to extend the roof, the roof structure messes up completely thus it is a compromise I have to make.
Nevertheless, SketchUp is a great tool for me to find the right texture and color pattern for my childhood house. I remember clearly that the house has a picky wall in the very middle. Luckily, SketchUp has a material called Brick Basket which I think captures the essence of that picky wall. Also, the translucent glass material makes the window looks more realistic.
A tip that helps me a lot is select –> group –> copy & paste. Since there is a lot of similarity in my childhood house. Creating several groups and copy-pasting into different positions is a great way to increase efficiency. Moreover, grouping can help me to easily to achieve some symmetric features of the house instead of aligning all the elements by hand.
Triangles..who knew that they would be so difficult to make?!
I felt every word of your paragraph about creating the roof– it was tough.