Building an Organic Fountain in Sketchup: Step-by-Step Guide

so in this video we're going to build a fountain. So the first thing I would like to do is let's create a new file, so make sure we save this file save and will go into our menu bar and select file. New from template.

It's going to choose your architectural template. Inches. Click that.

And then we will do a save as right away to file save as. Find your SKP 101 folder on the C drive. SKP 101 file downloads and we want to save.

This file as. Fountain. Dot SKP.

I'll click save. Now we're ready to begin modeling. First thing less eraser man eraser tool click man erase.

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So I would like our fountain to have an organic shape in Sketchup. And when we draw organic shapes, we can use the freehand tool, which is this tool right here. So the really fun tool when you want to be kind of loose and start drawing around, you can click and drag and make various lines and shapes.

If you just draw this without connecting and it'll just be a loose line. However, if you start drawing a shape and end at the point, it will automatically create a shape. However, it can get a little messy in this little spot.

For example, if I was to zoom into this corner, you can see that Sketchup join this pretty well. However, if I was to draw something like this again, it overlap my lines a little bit. If I was to draw and then over here, I kind of went over it and then I zoomed into that same corner.

You can see that, you know, Sketchup did a decent job connecting it, but there's all these loose pieces. We would have to manually go in there and kind of clean that and erase these pieces. So let's make sure when we're drawing organic shapes that we maybe end a little bit before or we kind of zoom in and connect that that final circle.

So I'm going to zoom back out to where I was at the beginning and I'm going to select all of this and then I'm going to erase it. In Sketchup 2022 Pro, there's actually a new feature utilizing the freehand line tool. If you were to draw a line and say you were unhappy with the amount of control points or some of the jagged nature of that line.

Right. You can see down here in the menu bar that control slash ALT decreases or increases segments. If I was to click the control button on my keyboard, you can see that all of a sudden I have various control points along my edge of this shape that I just drew.

And as I keep clicking control, I can start seeing that the control points get less and less and that this shape becomes has essentially less sides than before. So this is a useful tool if you want to kind of simplify some of your geometry, make it a little more cleaner versus having all those lines. So very useful tool in new Sketchup 2022 and it's really nice to see all the new added features.

All right, I'm gonna go ahead and delete all this again. I'll do control a delete. So before I draw the outline of my fountain, let's create some parameters and guidelines so we know the approximate size that we would like to draw.

So let's go to the rectangle tool and then let's go to our origin and click the origin. And then as we're dragging out, we're going to make this 16 feet by 16 feet. We can type in 16 feet, comma, 16 feet.

Enter. All right. Next, let's go to the select tool and we want to delete our face of our square.

We just have our bounding edges. We won't just go right into the freehand tool. So please, if you will, draw a small line right in the end.

I'll just make this one foot. And so now we have a space that we can start and stop our freehand shape. So I'm going to escape to end this task and then I'll go to my freehand tool, click this.

And now what I want to do is I want to create an organic shape for our fountain. So I need to start from here and end here. But I need to be careful I don't get too close to the square because Sketchup will automatically want to snap to it if you get within a few inches.

So I'm going to start here. I'm going to click. I'm going to drag out.

I'm going to start creating this organic shape, this sweeping, nice, gentle curve. So it goes around and around. And I finally want to end right there.

There we have it. There is our organic base for our fountain. So I'll go back to my select tool.

I will triple click these bounding edges and then delete and I will save my file. Now that I have the outline of my fountain, I could, you know, use our offset tool, offset out and then extrude to create the walls of my fountain and pull up. However, I would like a nice kind of rounded edge to this organic shape.

Sketchup won't allow me to do that with this extruded face. The appropriate tool would be the follow me tool, which will which will want to explore and do this in this model. So I'm going to undo what I just did.

And then I want to talk a little bit about the follow me tool. You can just watch this part while I explain a little bit in more detail, the follow me tool. So the follow me tool uses a face and an edge to extrude 3D geometry along that edge.

If I was to draw just a free form line, connected line with the free form line tool, and then I want to draw a rotated rectangle. Follow me doesn't need this face to be connected, but it helps. If I was to double click this and then move this corner right here.

And then I would select and cancel that out. If I go to my follow me tool and click this, you can see in the bottom it says follow a path with a select face. So click the profile that you want to extrude.

I would like to extrude this rectangle. So I'll first click that. Then it says move cursor along the desired extrude path.

So as I can click and draw around, you can see that there's this ghosted image of what this shape would look like. So I can click at the very end and it will automatically create that profile of the shape. So you can see this profile isn't the same size as the original rectangle.

And that was because it was based off of this angle directly perpendicular to this face. If I was to connect this all the way around, and then what I can also do is I can create an extruded shape around this shape just by doing one simple thing. I can pre-select this face, then the follow me tool, and then I can click the path.

And it will automatically generate basically this shape around the original object that I did. So that's kind of a really quick way of how to use the follow me tool. I will undo all of this.

All right, so now let's get back to our fountain. So in order to draw our 3D wall of our fountain, we need to first create the profile that we want to use to extrude that using the follow me tool. So let's move over to this area right over here.

Let's draw with the rectangle tool, click this, and we're going to do a 12 inches by 12 inches square. And then go to our push pull. Let's pull this up 18 inches.

This is going to be the height of the wall that we want to do. So 18, enter. Now let's create a slight angle to this.

We could draw a line and then delete this, or we can use the select tool or the move tool and hover over this blue line and then click and then move our cursor down. We can do this way faster. We'll do that and we'll type in 3 inches to bring that down.

And now go back to our push pull tool. We'll add some depth at this top cap. We'll pull this up, you know, 2 inches, and then we'll go to this face here.

And SketchUp has a nice feature where instead of having to retype 2 inches, if you just double click, it will use the same measurement that you previously did. If I go here, instead of typing in 2 inches, I can just double click this and it would automatically use the same measurement it previously did. And painting around and rotating around will do the same thing for this surface.

So there we have it. There is our profile shape. What we want to do next is we want to put our profile shape along the line, right? To avoid a weird shape coming out of this, like that we demonstrated in the previous kind of example of the follow me tool, we want to put it along a perpendicular line of this face.

And so because I drew this in the green red direction, I want to move this shape in that one line that I drew at the beginning, which is along the green axis. So I will click this face, go to my move tool, and then I want to move this. You see that it's connected, right? We want to make a copy of that face.

We'll click control to copy that. And then we want to move this right onto the midpoint of that line. You know, now when we extrude this, it's going to first extrude it perpendicular from this line right here, rather than based off of a weird angle.

So I can deselect this and then use my follow me tool. I can click this face first and then drag around. This gives you a little more flexibility and control to know exactly what you want the shape to do.

So I can go all the way around and then finally click there. And there we go. There's kind of our profile shape.

I will undo that and I will do the other way that we talked about where we can pre-select the face that we want to extrude around. Then we can go click the follow me tool and then click this once. It'll automatically generate that same shape.

So let's triple click our profile mass, delete, and then yeah, let's ignore all these little jitters and overlaps, you know. It's kind of SketchUp's tool to kind of how it kind of overlaps geometry and it creates some of these kind of interesting triangulations. Let's just ignore that.

We can simplify that later. We'll kind of go out. We'll triple click all of the geometry, make group, and then we will save our file.

And I will see you in the next video.