Google Sketchup Architecture for Place Based Scholarship

Google Sketchup Architecture for Place-Based Scholarship

Modeling places is a multi-faceted art, involving many tools and resources. Depending on our intentions, there are many different pathways through technology that may lead us to develop a useful representation. This tutorial examines one of those pathways, and demonstrates several of the most important aspects of the modeling place-modeling process. Our task is two-fold: First to develop a framework understanding the site modeling problem in a formal way; the second is to develop some useful skills for organizing our own site information for the purpose of our studio project. The formal understandidng will serve us in many situations where our intentions may be different from the ones stated for this problem. THe formal understanding will also put us into a position to evaluate software tools and their combination as new capabilities emerge (as they do quite rapidly. The software-specific techniques covered in this tutorial will provide us with a solid functional understanding of a very powerful and free set of tools: Google Earth and Google Sketchup.

We will begin by developing a clear intention which will direct our choices of infomation and tools and our strategy for organizing the informtion we cather and that we create. Our statement of intention also provides a framework for tinjking critically about the process and the result. The next step will be to express our purpose in terms of a conceptual model that defines the critical things and relationships that our model must be able to represent. We will then find existing data to represent the concepts in our model, and we will organize these as a data model that will allow us to make modifications and organize and experiment with ideas about alternative futures. Finally, we will take a look at how the information that we have created can be integrated with other ideas that our colleagues and the greater community may have regarding the same place, or places nearby.

References

Modeling for Decision Support and Scholarship

Google Sketchup Basics

Design Intentions

We are working with a team on a design for a campus on one of Boston's Harbor Islands. This design will call for the addition of several program elements that will be worked on by different members of our team. The design components involve the placement of new buildings, plantings and rearrangement of the groundplan (e.g. rearrangement of circulation and ground cover.)

Each of the program elements of the plan will have multiple scenarios that will be evaluated in terms of their suitibility in the local microclimate. Furthermore, we will want to integrate the intependent program element projects together into a single model to examine issues of thre aesthetic quality of he aggregate result in terms of visual connectivity between the project elements and with the broder context, including the Boston Skyline.

Obtaining Site Data from Google Earth

Google Earth provides several capabilities that are of interest ro us. First, it provides access to a repository of terrain elevation and groundplan imagery. It also provides a mechanism for visualizing vaey large landscapes, including 3d models. The Image Overaly function in Google Earth provides fairly basic but effective tools for georeferncing images. This allows us to fairly esily put our project plan into context, and a fun way to share your work with others. IN this sense, the Google Earth Viewer provides rough authoring tools. To see a project that exploits google earth's authoring capabilities in an urban planning project, see The Author's Google Earth Trainset.

To download a KMZ file containing a georeferenced site plan, Click Here.

The very coolest part of the Google Earth repository is that it is interoperable with a more sophisticated 3D authoring tool, Google Sketchup. We will begin our modeling process by zooming into a proposed development site in Google Earth. Don;t be too greedy, just zoom into a proposed development lot and its imediate surroundings, then, in sketchup, use Tools->Google-Earth->Get Current View in Sketchup to capture the scene. Later on, we will see how this establishes the correct georeferencing of our Sketchup Model, which will prove very useful for sharing models.

Fluency in Design Representation

Becomiong fluent in any expressive medium can take a little practice but it a requirement for anyone who aspires to mastery. In the area of 3d modeling, the chief barriers to fluency boil down to these problems:

Understand the Relationship of Entities, Layers and Groups
Become very comfortable in moving to a particular place and orientation within our model.
Develop habits of organizing information in our models so that we will our models will behave predictably and reliably even as they become very complicated.

Understanding Layers and Groups

It is very important to develop a rational structutre for your model. A 3d model will have a lot of geometry in it. We should understand how to use Layers organize our geometry thematically and how Groups let us structure our objects as an Object Hierarchy. Many people have to learn these things the hard way, by observing how, after a model becomes just a little complicated, the confusion caused by a poor structure will lead to a situation where it is easier to throw away the whole model and start over, than it is to track down and fix problems that arise from not structuring the model well in the first place.

Explore the Basic Layers, Groups and Entities of your Model

The key ideas to get out of this are that Layers can be used to control the visibility of groups of objects. YOu may have many groups organized in one or more layers. Groups are made up of primitive entities. The current layer is selected by punching the radio button next to it in the layers window. Although you may put primitieve entities in any layer you want, this can lead to confusion as the eintities in a group may be in one layer, and the group itself may be in another. If you don;t understand this, you will end up with a model where parts seem to appear and disappear unpredictably. Therefore, it is best to Use Layers to control the visibility of Grouped geometry But keep the default layer, Layer 0, active and draw all of your primitive geometry on layer 0.

See that your model has a Terrain layer and a Snapshot Layer.
Turn the layers on and off.
Try to turn off Lasyer zero.
Click on the image in your model to select it
Right Click on the image it and choose Entity Info and note how you could change the layer that this group is on.
Double click inside the group and then get entity info on the individual entities that make up the edges and faces of the ground plan. Note that the individual compoments are on Layer 0.

Becoming Comfortable with Locating your Cursor and Orientation in your Model

In all 3d modeling packages, controling the location of your cursor and the orientation of your model is critical to being able to represent the forms that are in your imagination. The challenge is that our computer screen is two dimensional, and yet we need to be able to place geometry in a 3d space. IN some modeling software packages, you control the placement of your drawing tools by constraining the mouse movement to specific planes or by setting up constraints to movement with snap settings that are adjusted according to layers and types of geometry. SketchUp, on the other hand, is designed so that most of your control of cursor movement can be controlled without taking your hand off of the mouse -- without frequent adjustment of a snap settings dialog. SketchUp's dependence on inferences, as opposed to explicit (and complex) menus of snap options and reference planes is a distinction that makes SketchUp a quick productivity tool whith which users can become very quick and fluent.

The cursor in SketchUp tends to jump to nearby vertices, edges and faces. These inferences can help us and also be very frustrating if our cursor jumps to locations that aren't where we want our cursor or new geometry to snap. As it happens, these snaps are much easier to deal with when we are zoomed in, and much more difficult to control if we are zoomed out. For this reason you often have to zoom in close to locate one end of a line, and then in the midst of drawing, zoom out with the middle scroll wheel, perhaps shifting the center of the view by double-clicking the scroll wheel to get to where you want to place the other end of the line, where you would zoom in again to place the other end exactly where you want it.

The fact that other geometry that is visible in the model can be frustrating, but you should realize that you can control what objects are attracting your mouse by reorienting your view so that the area behind your work is not filled with detail. Of course it is also good to have your model organized so that you can selectively make detail disappear by turning off layers or hiding objects.

Sketchup also uses the axes in the model to help to infer the direction of our movements in 3-space. For example, if we want to create a vertical line, we can drag in the direction of the Blue Axis. This can be confounded if there is a lot of detail behind the cursor that is attracting inferences. So, if we want to draw an inference from the blue axis, it if helpful to change the oriantation of the model by obiting to an elevation view so that we can pull our line up into the sky without anything behind it. We still may have problems if the orientation of our model in our window is such that the blue and green axes are in-line with eachother. Therefore, in order to comfortably control the movement of our cursor in Sketchup we must be aware of how the orientation of our model may at times enhance or confound Sketchup's Inference Engine.

Examine Model Info, and Turn off Angle Snapping

Use Window->Model Info and shoose Units, to take a look at some of the fundamental properties of how geometry gets created. I recommend that you Turn Off Angle and Length Snapping. These snapping settings can be helpful, but they can also be annoying if you are not using them intentionally.

Keeping Things Flat: Modeling on the Ground Plan Image

One of the important thing about sketchup is the way that it can do elegant things like extruding and dividing polygons, pulling up peaked roofs, and things like that. In order for these things to work, it is important to keep the bases of things flat and horizontal, and to keep their edges square if we intend them to be square. This is very difficult to do if we are atempting to make buildings on our terrain surface, since there are many areas on the terrain that are not horizontal. This is where the our ground plan layer comes in handy. YOu should do most of your basic modeling of buildings on the groundplan layer, then move your buildings to the terrain layer when they are roughly finished. THe building models may be adjusted when you get them to the terrain.

Another very useful use of the groundplan layer is for modeling of objects that you intend to use in Google Earth. Since Google Earth automatically drapes models onto the terrain surface, you should make sure that the absolute heigth of the foot of the building is at 0 -- the height of the ground plan.

Beginning a Model and Understanding Groups

We want to explore a few schemes for locating a tall building with a groundfloor cafe. We will start by making our building with a naive approach to groups. Then we will get smart and think about how to use groups and layers.

Creating the Development Parcel

Turn off visibility of all layers but your Snapshot Layer.
Make Layer 0 your active layer.
Lets define the extent of our development parcel by tracing the block outline with the pencil tool.
first we can practice controlling the length of our lot baseline using the Value Control Box
Note how you can use inferences to make lines perpendicular and how you can lock in inferences by holding the shift key.
When you are through creating your lot, you can use Get Info to see its area.
Use Window->Materials to apply a grass pattern to your parcel.

Creating a Building

Now lets put a building on our parcel.
Use the Rectangle Tool to put a building footprint on your parcel.
Then use the Push-Pull Tool to extrude the building.
Triple-click on the building to select all of its faces. Note that the ground plan is considered to be part of your building. Ick!
Tilt your drawing up and notice that you have cut a hole in ythe ground plan. This is not good!
Use COntrol Z to undo everything you just did.

What you have just observed is that if you are not careful, entities in your sketchup model will stick to eachother in awkward ways. This is why it is important for you to understand how to use groups and to be careful about grouping the entities you make, and how to control the group context of the things that you are creating as you go along. Now lets do it right.

Group your Parcel

Note that your building lot is made of several entities: edges and a face. You can click on these and get info on each one.
Triple-Click to select all of the entities that are connected to the parcel face.
Now lets group the parcel by right-licking and choosing Group

Layers provide a means of organizing the objects in your model thematically. There is one potentially confusing thing that can happen in sketchup when the individual entities in a group are in a differnt layer than the group itself. This is why you shoiuls always draw all of your entities on Layer Zero, and use layers, only to organize grouped objects.

Make a Parcels Layer

Create a new layer named Parcels
Use Entity Info to place your parcel group on this layer.
Go inside of your group, and inspect the individual entities. Observe that they are on Layer 0.

Make sure Layer 0 is your active layer.
With no group open, use the Draw Tool in conjunction with Inferences and the Value COntrol Box to make a building footprint in an apropriate place on your parcel..
Triple-Click on your building to select all connected geometry.
Group all of the geometry and name the new group "Beergarden".
Make a new Layer named Buildings and use entity info to move your Beergarden onto this new layer.
Lets try to put a window in the building. First do this editng outside the context of the building group.
Draw a rectangle on the side of the building, and then delete its face. It doesn't make a window!
Go inside the context of your beergarden group and make your window. Now when you delete the face, you make a window. Great.
just for fun, bisect the roof of the beergarden by connecting the midpoints of two ends and then using the Move tool to pull up the roof peak in the blue direction.
Turn off your Ground Plan and turn on your Terrain and move your building up the Blue Axis so that it sits on the terrain.

Playing with Benches, Trees and Microclimate

Now for a slight diversion. We want to enjoy a nice beer in the shade in the summer time, but we would rather be in the sun in the winter time. So we will investigate some different schemes for organizing our patio with trees and benches. We can use thes scehmes to explore and communicate some ideas about the plusses and minuses of each scenario with regard to microclimate. This will let us explore the use of components and shadow studies; but more importantly how we can create and manage complex hierachies of groups using the Outliner Window. We will explore components in the next tutorial.

Use the components window to grab a bench and pull it into your model near the beergarden.
Make a layer called Furniture and move this component to this layer.
Note that all of the primitive geometry of sketchup components is on the default layer. This makes it so that your layer scheme doesnt not have to create a lot of new layers when you import someone elses component.
Make a new layer named Vegetation, and plant some trees from the components window. Be sure that your trees are assigned to the vegetation layer.
Now play with the shadow settings to take a look at how your scheme works with regard to the solar system.

Working with Object Hierarchies

Our aim is to create several beergarden schemes and to compare the microclimate qualities of each one. We have created one beergarden scenario that includes a berrgarden, Trees and Benches. This model has a layer schema that lets us manage which pof these meaningful classes of objects is visible. Now we will make a group of this entire schema by selecting all of the trees, our beergarden and the benches and group them together. If we make a copy of this group, then we will effectively made a new instance of the beergarden scheme, and we can rearrange the elements as an experiment. The Object Outliner window in Sketchup provides a nice interface for look at and working with object hierarchies. IN the end we will see how, by understanding the way that groups and layers work together to control visibility of pieces of our model, you will understand how to deal with very complex systems of 3d ideas without having a nervous breakdown.

Select your tree, your bench and your building with a shift-click and group them. Name this group, Scheme A.
Turn off all of the layers in your model except for the Terrain and your new Buildings layer, and the Vegetation layer.
Open your Outliner window. Note that you see the objects fror your TIN and your Scheme A. The Scheme A group can be opened to see its children (trees, buildings and benches.)
Note that if you turn on one of the other layers, a lot of new stuff will appear in the outliner window.
Select your Scheme A layer, and use File->CopyChoose Edit->Paste-in-Place to make a copy of Scheme A right on top of the original.
Now rename one of your Scheme A models as Scheme B.
right-click and Hide Scheme A
Now rearrange the building trees and benches in Scheme A.
Note that you can now hide and unhide these schemes to look at them independently, AND each of the scemes reacts in a predictable way to the flicking on and off of your tematic layers!
One set of geometric representations and two othogonal semantic controls!

Suggested Exercises:

Here are some things we did in lab that I haven't had time to write up yet:

Explore how Scenes are yet another level of organization in your model

Make two scenes that reflect a shadow scenatio in the morning and afternoon respectively.
Adjust these scenes so that they don't reset the Camera Position or the "Hidden" status of objects.
Now you can now set your camera in a spot, and watch the shadows move over each of your schemes.
Make some animations!