Welcome to Day 6 of My 30 Days of Architectural Design In SketchUp Challenge! This is a series where I challenge myself to spend one hour on architectural design in SketchUp daily. On Day 5, we began modeling doors and windows, and the model was coming into place.
Day 6 – Finishing Up
Day 6 was almost like an extension of Day 5. Since I only drew the initial couple of doors and windows on Day 5, I spent most of Day 6 completing the model and placing doors and windows in the rest of the openings to get some practice.
I was somewhat lazy when doing this, though. If I were trying to be perfect, I definitely would have drawn each window from scratch and used the component functions more.
Instead, I followed what the instructor did, copy-pasted many windows, and scaled them to fit. This method is imperfect, as scaling the window will skew the dimensions depending on how big the change is.
But the critical point is to think about what you need. The instructor used the lazy method because many of the windows he was scaling were hidden from view in the final renders.
In my own custom projects, that is something to consider as well. If my side views are blocked by neighbors and will not be seen in the renders, the skewed window sizes won’t matter too much.
However, since I plan to do interior renderings, too, I would probably be better off ensuring my original draft includes lots of preset window sizes, so I only have to create a few from scratch. This would also make future changes like applying materials to the windows easier.
Stairs and Railings
After finishing up with the windows and doors, I moved on to the following two videos in the course, which talked about creating railings and stairs.
Building railings was quite simple. The instructor was modeling simple glass railings, so all I did was create rectangular prisms that were 5 mm thick.
Modeling the stairs, however, was a more nuanced process. The process continues to test the skills I learned early in the course using the Rectangle, Push/Pull, and Group tools. It started with creating a rectangle, making it a group, and then pushing it out to make it into your initial step. Then make this first step a component and copy-paste how many steps you need. Then create a platform and repeat the first step if there are more stairs.
For the stairs in this course, the instructor also has us create a diagonal slab underneath the steps to support them which was done in pretty easily. Simply make all the steps into another group and then use the Line tool to connect the bottom points of the steps to create a face. Then push the face out to the width of the stairs.
Feeling Sick
It is at the end of this article that I want to mention that Day 7 will be delayed. I am technically writing this article two days late as the work done for Day 6 was not from yesterday nor today, but the day before yesterday. I have unfortunately come down with a cold that has made it impossible to do anything, which means this series will be delayed until I recover.
Although it feels bad that I couldn’t do architectural design in SketchUp for 30 days in a row, it doesn’t mean I failed. As long as I continue and spend 30 days working on My 30 Days of Architectural Design In SketchUp Challenge, I’ll consider it a success.
I will do my best to recover and be back soon with more content!