Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Architectural Design with SketchUp
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Several of SketchUp’s built-in features support this workflow, in particular:
Font and dimension settings—As mentioned in Chapter 2, these can be customized
to the user’s liking. Dimensions also display nicely and are easily readable in 3D space.
Shadow settings—SketchUp has a built-in shadow feature that allows for display of
accurate date- and location-based shadows. Particularly architectural models benefit from
the display of shadows—surface features are enhanced by giving them the perception of
depth, and buildings look more realistic when “the sun gets turned on.” (See Figure 5.1.)
Figure 5.1: Building without and with shadows enabled
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Fog—The Fog window in SketchUp lets you specify a distance from the view beyond
which the view’s background will fade away in what looks like fog. As we will see later,
this feature is actually quite useful beyond simply making your scenes look “foggy.”
Styles—Most customization options for SketchUp’s views are available as Styles. These
can contain custom lines, backgrounds, or watermarks. Many excellent styles have been
premade and ship with SketchUp or are downloadable from the Internet. Styles can also be
saved within animation tabs, which allows for multiple styles to be used in the same model.
Styles are applied from the Styles window—where you can also make customizations
and edits (see Figure 5.2).
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Figure 5.2: The Styles window