Creating a Beautiful Community Park with a Curved Planter: Step-by-Step Guide

Now that we have completed our clubhouse, the next step will be to bring this into our community park.

So let's first save. Make sure that we save this file in our latest dated file. Use Save As, and save it as clubhouse–final–your initials.

My initials are DM, and make sure we save that and replace. Next, let's open up the community park start file. Go to File > Open.

In your SKP 201 file downloads folder, open community park–start and hit Open.

As you can see, we have the original clubhouse. If you go into our Components dialog box and hit In Model,

Learn SketchUp

• Nationally accredited
• Create your own portfolio
• Free student software
• Learn at your convenience
• Authorized Autodesk training center

Learn More

We can see that we have clubhouse in here. So that means that this is a component. We can replace this component with our final model.

Go to right-click, and then Reload. And we want to replace it with a different file.

So hit Yes. And now, going into our SKP 201 file downloads folder, let's click our clubhouse–final–DM file.

Then hit Open. Because this was saved using the same axes and origin,

It will be automatically placed in the same location. We do have our sections on here, and when we transferred over, those got turned on and off. We can adjust that by clicking the buttons up here.

This will show where the section is, and this will turn that section on and off. And there we have our clubhouse inside of our community park.

The next thing that we want to work on in these next few lessons is to really improve the exterior site for this. As we can see, this patio is kind of sloping and has some weird geometry.

And you know, we don’t have any planter area to fix this. We really want to clean up this portion of our park and use more realistic modeling tools.

We're going to add a planter right here, where we will build a curved retaining wall along here.

We will flatten this patio. We will create an exterior pergola right over here next to our building. And we will add some more realistic landscaping around.

And then we will button up our final class with creating some really beautiful images and exports—3D views of our building in the exterior site. So let's first start by building in this curved planter right in this area.

I want to turn off some of my tags so I don't get in the way of modeling. So I'll go to Tags and turn off my Landscape, which is my trees, and turn off my Entourage, which is people and cars.

And now I'm able to work within this. If I go to View and click Hidden Geometry,

You can see that there are all kinds of triangulations and curves throughout this. We need to make this into more of a flat surface. We can create planter walls and extrude it.

There are a few ways that we can create a flat planter. However, I want to show you one way which I think is the most efficient. If you go to View and uncheck Hidden Geometry,

Let's double click into this group of our site. And then double click again until we get to this portion here where we have this as an isolated group. We can use our Sandbox tools to project this sloping topography surface onto a flat plane.

So let's draw a plane. Let's orbit around to the top. Then go to our Rectangle tool and draw a rectangle that encompasses this whole space.

Then we can see that this is below this element. So let's click outside to deselect this mass. Then let's click Use Selected Object to create a flat foundation

Or Project or Drop Edges from a selected face onto a terrain. Let's use this tool, which is the Drape tool. You can see in the bottom left it says "Select the entities you wish to drape."

We wish to drape this entity. We'll click, and now it says "Select the mesh on which you wish to drape."

We will click this. And as you can see, it has created a surface in the exact same position that is flat, which is exactly what we want to do.

We'll then go to our Erase tool and erase these extra lines. Then delete this curved portion as we no longer need it. Now I will double click this element,

And I will copy it, delete it, and paste. I want to be able to paste that in the same location, but I want to close out of this group.

So either hitting Escape or clicking out. We can go back into this element in this view. Then we'll go to Edit > Paste in Place.

Now you can see it is kind of below here. So I'll right-click > Make Group. Then, using my Move tool, I will click this corner right here,

And I will move it along the blue direction right to the endpoint in the group, which is right on our foundation of our clubhouse. Now you can see this is where it's at.

We can see that there's a height difference between here and here. So let's double click into this group. I have the shortcut H to hide and unhide the rest of the model.

You can view that by going into View > Component Edit > Hide Rest of Model to do it manually. Or, because I created that shortcut key H, I'm able to do that with a single press of the H key. Now that we're in here, I will use the Push/Pull tool down.

You can see that this wants to snap to about 1 foot 4 inches. I want this to go below. So I will orbit underneath and type in 2 feet.

Now let's go to our Offset tool and offset this top plane 4 inches. We can create some walls that will go up a little bit higher. We do not need the walls that go up against the building.

So I will hit H to hide the rest of the model. Then I will draw a line along here, along the magenta. As you can see, our axes are not aligned.

We can correct our axes by hitting the Axes tool. Then find a corner where we want to redirect the axes. Now when we draw, it will snap to the red axis both ways.

Now we can delete these lines. We can go back to our Push/Pull tool and Push/Pull this element up 6 inches. Now that we have the planter walls that are larger than our planter ground,

If I triple click my geometry, I can go to Soften Edges in the dialog box and drag this to around 15, and hit Soften Coplanar to clean up all these extra lines. The lines don't get deleted, but rather hidden.

We can always see them again if we go to View > Hidden Geometry. We can see these additional lines and are able to click in between them. Versus if we uncheck Hidden Geometry, now we can select this entire surface.

Now let's hit Escape to close out. We can see that we have this nice planter that fits perfectly in our site. The next thing we want to do is apply some materials to this curved planter.

We'll double click again into our group and go into our Material dialog box. Let's first find a concrete texture for the walls of our planter. We'll go to Asphalt and Concrete.

Feel free to choose your own materials or import your own. But for this case, I'm going to use Concrete Scored Jointless as my material. So I'm going to hit this and then choose Create Material to use it as the baseline.

I will call this Planter Concrete Wall. Then I will select OK. All these colors look good.

You can adjust the colors and always go back to this later. So I will hit OK. Now I will triple click my geometry and then go to my Paint Bucket tool.

Seeing that I have this Planter Concrete Wall selected, I can now paint the entire surface. As you can see, I do not want to paint this top surface right now, and I don’t like how these lines look on the top. So let's create another material for these two top surfaces.

So I’ll go back to Asphalt and Concrete and select Concrete Polished Old. I will hit Create Material, and again I will rename this as Planter Concrete Top. I will hit OK.

Now if I go to Edit in my options, you can see a little button that says Match Color on Screen. This is a handy tool where I can match this texture to a specific color. I want to match it to this lighter color right here.

You can see that the material automatically adjusted its color based on what I clicked. Now I am able to paint this surface with a material that has the same color but does not have those little recessed lines. The final thing would be to create a material for this top surface.

We will go back to Select and go into Landscape, Fencing, and Vegetation. We will scroll all the way down to Vegetation Juniper. You can do a duplicate of this and call it Planter Ground Cover.

You can make the texture larger, maybe change the color, and hit OK. Then you can paint this material. We will use our Select key and close out of this. Now we can see that we have a nice planter with some materials.

I will now save my file. I will go to File > Save As and save this as community park–working–myinitials. We know that this is an in-progress file.

Then I will hit Save. Now we have completed the planter. We will tackle some other site improvements in our next video. I will see you in the next video.