Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Architectural Design with SketchUp
4. After clicking OK, the plugin gets to work. Be patient at this point because this could take
some time. You can follow its progress at the bottom of the screen, if you like. When
everything is done, you should see something that looks like the image shown here.
5. As you can see, the sphere has been sliced evenly into planes
in both the horizontal and the vertical direction. In addition,
copies of all of these planar elements have been placed
onto the ground next to the sphere, ready to be printed or
exported. Everything is color-coded and neatly labeled. The
image here shows a close-up of one of the slices.
You can now export the slices as DXF shapes if you have the
Pro version of SketchUp (or if you have a DXF exporter plugin
installed). If you instead want to print the shapes, switch the
camera mode to Parallel Projection and go into Top view before
printing (you can do both in the Camera menu).
Example 4.5: Making a Terrain Model
A common task for architects and landscape designers is to create a 3D site model. This is
often done by slicing up a site horizontally (at equally spaced elevations), fabricating contoured
slices, and then assembling the terrain model. We again use the Slicer plugin to
accomplish this task.
1. A benefit of using SketchUp is that we can get any terrain imported into our model
through SketchUp’s location tools. Unless Google’s terrain model is too coarse or inaccurate,
there should be no need to find alternate data sources. To locate your model,
click on the “Add location . . .” tool on the main toolbar.
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