Building a Carousel: Adding Stairs, Columns, and Center Object

Welcome back to part two as we build our carousel. The first thing that we need to do is let's hide this group of objects as we want to start modeling parts of this carousel and this will kind of get in the way of that. So let's right-click, Hide and then let's delete some of these guidelines.

We don't want to go up to Edit, Delete Guides because this will delete the center point as well. We only want to delete these. So let's go to the Eraser tool and we'll erase this one, this one, this one, and this one, leaving this in place.

So let's draw some stairs all the way around our carousel. So let's kind of orbit around and pan to this point right here where this red axis intersects our base. And let's go to the Line tool and clicking here, this end point in group, we'll drag out along the red axis four feet and then hit ENTER.

We're going to make a series of stairs in this profile. We'll go up six inches and then we'll go back to the left 11 inches, Enter, six in the blue direction, Enter, then 11 in the red direction, and then six inches going up. And then we'll go along the red axis and then meet the end point.

And then we'll go down to close our face and this should automatically create this as a solid face. So this is a perfect profile to now use the Follow Me tool to go all the way around. However, because this model is in a group, we're not able to use the one click and then the Follow Me tool.

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We'll have to actually draw in a circle over this. So let's go to our Circle tool. We'll click the circle and making sure that our sides continue to say 36.

And then we will make a circle going up against the green axis. We will click this and now we should have an identical circle on top of this base. So pre-selecting this face, we can now go to the Follow Me tool, click this and then click the profile that we want to follow around that preselected face.

And now let's go to the Select tool. You can also hit the space bar on the keyboard and that'll automatically go out to the Select tool. So that's an easy kind of trick to do.

So I select this top face and we'll delete. And then we will triple-click this geometry and Make Group. If this geometry comes in blue, you will want to right-click and Reverse Faces.

If your geometry looks like this, you'll want to reverse the faces to be white. And now let's save our model. The next thing I would like to do is add a large center object in the middle of a carousel right here.

So let's make this object a nine-sided object. When we go to the Polygon tool right here, we'll type in nine for nine sides. We'll click the center guide point and using the green axis, we will type in six feet.

And now going to our Push/Pull tool, we will select this face and we'll go four feet. You can see in my tool tips down the bottom that Control equals Toggle Create New Starting Face. If I click Control on my keyboard, you can now see a plus next to my Push/Pull command.

Now if I pull that up, you can see that I'm making a duplicate surface with the line across. And I can drag this up four feet, four feet and hit ENTER. You can see that I create a chain of edges around the center of this mass.

Now let's use the Auto-Fold command to scale that chain of edges to create a more unique type of shape. So going to my Select tool and clicking this once, I can select this edge and then go into my Scale command and clicking one of these diagonal sides. I can start pulling this out and then clicking Control to scale around the center.

I can click once and now typing in the bottom right-hand corner 0.85, I can scale this to be 0.85 of the overall shape. And now let's go to the Select tool, click this top edge and then right-click, Find Center to create that dot that we want.

And now I will triple-click this, right-click, Make Group. The next thing I would like to do is add a series of columns around the outside of the carousel. So orbiting around till I am next to the green axis over here, I will go to my Tape Measure tool and I will add some guides.

So I will click the Tape Measure tool and then clicking this point, which is right off of the green axis. I will go along the green axis and I will type in 10 feet, Enter. This is a nice point right here for our column.

So let's go to our Circle tool. And as you can see, the circle is still set to 36 sides. We don't need 36 sides for this circle.

So let's change this to 12. So it's always important while using SketchUp to only use the number of sides we need for circles, polygons or arcs. Anything in excess will just create more geometry and make our file sizes a lot larger.

So I will click on this guide point right here and drag it out to create two inches for our radius for a four-inch diameter column. Now let's go to the Push/Pull tool and we will extrude this circle up 8 feet, Enter.

And now let's Select tool, triple-click, right-click, Make Group. Now let's array this column around our object. We will pan and orbit so we can kind of see this overall view.

And let's go to the Rotate tool. While this column is selected, we'll go to Rotate and then we'll click the center point. And because we've already created these little notches in this object, we can just go from point A to point B and then click and Control to make a copy.

We'll click that once. And now if you can count how many that we have, 1,2, 3,4, 5,6, 7,8, we can type x8, Enter.

And there we have our 9 columns all the way around our model. And then we'll orbit down. I'll deselect this and I will save our model.

And this is enough for this video and we will pick up with the final part of the carousel where we will change some materials and add our top.