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 date file save as. And save it as clubhouse dash final dash 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 dash 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.

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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 dash DM file.

And then hit open. Because this was saved in the same. Axes and origin.

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

These buttons up here. This will show where that 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 these next few lessons is to really improve the exterior site for this. As we can see this patio. It's kind of sloping and has some weird geometry.

And you know we don't have any sort of planter area to kind of correct this. We really want to kind of clean up this portion of our park. And 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 curve 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 kind of work within this. If I go to view. 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 kind of a 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 kind of our site. And then double click again until we get to this portion here where we have this as 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 kind of orbit around to the top. And let's go to our rectangle tool and draw a rectangle that encompasses this kind of this whole space.

And then we can see that this is below this element. And so let's click out so we can deselect this mass. And 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. And 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 this 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. And then delete this curved portion as we no longer need this. Now I will double click this element.

And I will copy it and then delete. 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. And then we'll go to edit, paste in place.

Now you can see it is kind of below here. So I'll do right click, make group. And then using my move tool, I will click this corner right here.

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

And so we can see that there's a height difference between here and here. So let's double click into this group. I have that 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 click of the H key. Now that we're in here, I will push pull tool down.

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

Now let's go to our offset tool and let's 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. And 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 key. And then find a corner where we like where we want our axes to kind of redirect that. And now when we draw, it will snap to the red over there and along the red here.

And now we can delete this, these lines. And we can go back to our push pull tool and 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, my dialog box. And kind of drag this to around 15 and hitting soften coplanar to clean up all these extra lines. The lines don't get deleted but rather hidden.

We can always see that again if we go to view hidden geometry. We can see these additional lines and we are able to click in between these. Versus if we go uncheck hidden geometry, now we can collect 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 that we want to do is we want to apply some materials to this curved planter.

We'll double click again into our group and go into our material dialog box. And let's first find a concrete texture for the walls of our planter. We'll go to asphalt and concrete.

And 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 I'm going to do create material which will use this as the baseline.

And I will call this planter concrete wall. And I will select okay. All these colors look good.

You can adjust the colors and you can always go back to this and adjust it later. So I will hit okay. And 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 all the surface. As you can see I do not want to paint this now and I do not like how these lines look on the top. So let's create another material for these two surfaces.

So I want to go back to my asphalt and concrete and select this concrete polished old. I will hit create material and again I will rename this as planter concrete top. And I will hit okay.

And now if I go to edit in my options you can see here I have this little button that says match color on screen. So this is a handy tool where I can match this texture with 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 off of what I clicked. Now I am able to paint this surface that material that relates to the same color but does not have those little recessed lines. And the final thing would be to create a material for this top surface.

We will go back to our select and go into landscape, fencing, and vegetation. And we will scroll all the way down to vegetation juniper. You can do a duplicate of this as well and we can call this planter ground cover.

And you know you can make the texture larger, maybe change the color and hit okay. And then you can paint this material. We will use our select key and close out of this and 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 I will save this as community park-park-working-myinitials. We know that this is an in progress file.

And I will go to save and now we have completed the planter. We will tackle some other site things in our next video. I will see you in the next video.