Landscape Design with Sketchup

See also: gardens, using-sketchup

Sketchup is a tool for creating geometry.

Nascent process

From the Sketchup landscape design course

1. Base modeling
2. Terrain & grading
3. Materials & textures
4. Site furnishings & entourage
5. Vegetation
6. Context modeling
7. Optimisation, collaboration and revisions

The above represents starting from a flatish base layer and working up.

1. Start in 2D
2. Geolocate
   • Use the feature and then perform tidy ups e.g
   • Explore using the terrain map as the working space
   • Hide/reveal the satellite image as required
3. Improve the terrain

4. Add established features

   • e.g. build 3d models of existing buildings and plants

Practice

• sketchup-fundamentals-practice - results of Sketchup practice course

Process ideas

1. Start in 2D

   Use the 2D view to give a top-down view to start.

2. Group almost everything, group early

Concepts

Geometry created in Sketchup consists of three things: endpoints; edges; faces. Most features are focused on changing some combination of these.

Developing a homestead model

Aim is to practice the process by providing a model we can use to aid our design work for the homestead.

Requirements/functionality:

• Develop a process for creating a model, including objects
• Terrain, including dams, berms/swales and general land contours
• Using views and shadows to design new additions.
• practice generating various design (planning) outputs

Process

• Use the "landscape metres" template
• Switch to top down view
• Use locate feature and configure
• High mesh density
• Change to Digital Globe image provider (more recent image)
• Boundary information
• Source information from Queensland globe
• Create a 2d surface for the boundary (check the entity info for square metres for approximate check) This approach is manual, would be better to be able to do an import.
• Make surface opaque by editing View / Face style / x-ray
• Alternatively import PDF plans, scale, and then map over the top
• Other sources
  • Elvis - elevation and depth - foundation spatial data - not that useful, order offline data
  • Queensland Globe more update to date than following

  • Historical Queensland Property Boundaries

    Description and link to service that can provide historical (2016) property boundaries

At this stage, two new tags/layers are created. 2d and 3d.

Misc tasks

1. Create surface from location import
2. How to limit that surface to a specific area