Take a deeper look at creating animations and exploring visual styles in Sketchup. This article focuses on understanding the nuances of creating a walkthrough, saving files correctly, and using different design styles to visualize architectural structures.
Key Insights:
- The process of creating a walkthrough in Sketchup involves saving files for different stages of the project, such as a save for a park and another for the animation.
- Sketchup offers a range of design styles which are useful for creating different artistic looks for your architectural structures. These styles can generate sketch-like images, enhancing perspectives of your design.
- Understanding the interaction of different elements in a Sketchup model, such as shadows and textures, is crucial. For example, if an image texture is applied onto a hidden surface, the objects in the image (like trees) will not cast a shadow.
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and now we get to do the fun stuff. We're going to look at Scenes, animations, and creating a walkthrough in SketchUp. But before we go any further, I would like to save this file as a “Save As, ” so go to File > Save As.
Let’s go to our SKP 101 File Downloads folder. Let’s save this file as “community-park-yourinitials, ” then click Save. After that, I will do another Save As and name the file “community-park-animation, ” using a dash between “park” and “animation, ” then click Save. Now we have two saved versions: one for our park and one for our new animation file.
Before we begin to build our animation, let's talk a little bit about visual styles in SketchUp. If we go to Window > Default Tray and check Styles*, it will appear at the bottom of the tray. When we opened the original Architectural Inches template, the Architectural Design style that it's currently using was automatically loaded at the same time as our base units.
By going down this dropdown menu and exploring the various design styles, we can experiment with different artistic looks for our building. These are fun and quick ways to create sketchy, hand-drawn image styles and perspectives of your design.
As you may notice, the closer you zoom in, the more detail you'll see in your model. The farther away you are, the more the model appears like a brush-stroke rendering with general outlines of your design. Feel free to explore the many different styles available.
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There are some really nice style presets for building competitions—like “Pencil on Light Brown.” There are so many to choose from.
I could look at these for days, just exploring the various ways this park looks. But for now, let’s go to our Default Styles and click Shaded*. This is our basic design view with a white sky and white background.
We also have the Landscape Architecture Style*, which is another nice option. This one shows a ground plane and a sky.
Let’s use this style for our animation. Let’s open our Shadows Dialog Box and turn shadows on. Go to the Shadows panel and check Shadows*.
Here I see that shadows are casting along the ground. I want to turn that off, so I’ll uncheck On Ground*.
You may have noticed that our trees are not casting any shadows. That’s because the trees are image textures applied to a hidden surface. Since the surface holding the image is hidden, the trees will not cast a shadow.
