Enhancing Park Aesthetics with 3D Trees: A Step-by-Step Guide

So you can see we created many plants and trees in the model. If we wanted to maybe modify the colors of these things, you can go into your material paint bucket tool, eyedropper, and you can add some transparency to these. You know, there are lots of elements to modifying these trees to make them a little bit more aesthetic inside of our park.

Now, if we wanted to bring in some 3D trees, we can follow the same process of swapping out the materials. We brought in three 2D trees, so let's now bring in three 3D trees: a palm tree, a medium tree, and a big tree, so we can swap those three out. If we don't know the sizes, we can always scale them and change them after they've been brought in.

So let's go back to our components dialog box and go into landscape, plants, low poly, bring in our 3D SketchUp Warehouse pop-up window, and let's go into trees, 3D, low poly, and here let's find a palm tree. Let's bring in this tropical fan palm tree. Let's double-check to see what the poly count is, and that looks good.

We'll bring that in right here, delete it, and then let's go back into plants, low poly, and let's find trees, 3D, poly. Let's find a nice kind of leafy tree. Let's use this aspen deciduous tree.

We'll bring this one in. That's kind of more of that kind of larger tree. We'll bring that in, and then we'll delete it, and then we'll bring in one final tree.

Learn SketchUp

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

Learn More

Let's go back to our trees, 3D, low poly, and let's find an evergreen magnolia tree. Let's bring in this one right here. Okay, that's more of a kind of your like medium tree.

Now, we brought those three trees in, we can actually select all of our linden trees, and we can replace these ones with the magnolia tree that we just brought in. We'll go to our components dialog box, and go to in model. We'll find that 3D tree, the magnolia tree.

We'll right-click and select 'replace selected.' So you can see that automatically replaced those. We feel like this is a bit too big.

We can double-click into this component, press CTRL+A, then scale uniformly by holding down the control key to get it to the right size that we feel comfortable with, just like that. Next, we can swap out all of these larger maple trees. Press H to toggle 'hide rest of model.'

We'll select these trees, and then we'll go into our aspen deciduous, right-click, and select 'replace selected.' And again, these are all a bit large, so we'll double-click into one of these components, press CTRL+A, then S to scale, and then hold down control to scale uniformly, finding the right size that's a little bigger than the trees but not too big. You can see here that the origin is way above, so when it was placed down there, it wasn't placed on the origin.

So let's place our origin in the correct spot, and escape. Now you can see that when I hide rest of model, that all of these trees are floating in the air. So let's double-click into this component, and let's move these down to right where that one is, and let's adjust our axes one more time to be down here.

Alright, now we have many 3D trees in our model. It's starting to fill up the space. We can make some different adjustments.

I feel that this tree's trunk is a little too tall, so maybe I'll do some modifications to this. I'll scale this along the blue axis in the middle. I'll bring it up to like there, and then I'll close out of that group.

I'll select all, and I'll move it down to the origin. We can always modify materials, right? We can make these leaves more transparent, and same with the aspen trunk. Maybe make it a little bit darker, more of a brown color, giving us some more tonal qualities. Maybe make these leaves a little more transparent as well.

Yeah, so now we got some 3D trees in our model. The last thing that we wanted to switch out was any remaining trees that have not been swapped such as the palm trees and this last other deciduous aspen tree. I'll quickly replace all these palm trees.

I'll select the palm trees one last time. I'll go find our new palm tree, our coconut palm, tropical fan palm, and then replace selected. You see these palm trees got a lot smaller than the other ones, so I want to modify this, and I want to go CTRL+A, and I want to scale up uniformly.

Not uniformly, because if you do uniformly, it moves the origin, but if you just do kind of a little bit to the left and a little bit to the right, trying to see if we can keep it somewhat right at that origin spot, so we don't have to really change it. Click escape to see what scale this is looking like for the building. Maybe it doesn't need to be that tall.

Maybe it's a little bit smaller. Maybe this trunk is a little too chunky, so we can scale it down like this, and then we can pull it up, so it's roughly kind of right like around there. There we go.

I'll escape, and now we have these 3D trees in the model, and as you can see, I start spinning around, and I start seeing all these kind of layers, and it takes a minute for it to regenerate. That's normal for SketchUp to process. However, once you start turning shadows on, things will take a lot longer to move and update, so be careful when you have trees on, and when you don't. One thing to kind of speed that up is you can see that I have thick lines on the edges.

I can go into my styles settings, and go into edit, and then by clicking on these edge settings, I can turn off profiles, and that kind of thins up some of those lines, so you're not seeing those profiles and some of that thickness. Alright, just double-checking one last thing to ensure that these trees are on the appropriate tag. We turn that on and off, so we can see everything kind of turns up with it.

Let's make sure that our other tags are correct. We’ve got furniture, which is our park benches and our interior furniture. I feel that these trash cans should also be under 'furniture, ' so let's select both of them and move them to 'furniture.'

Turn off 'furniture.' We'll turn off 'trees.' Architecture would be the clubhouse and the carousel, and our pergola should also be under 'architecture.'

This would be under 'furniture, ' and our fountain should be under 'architecture' as well, and our monument sign should be under 'architecture' as well. Then all of this should just be generically under untagged for our base site. We may want to group all these together, so they are in one group. You can see here how this boundary line is a lot larger, and that's because these axes, these origin lines, create boundaries around where we have these origins.

So to clean those up, you would need to modify each of these groups. It's not a big deal if it's out like this. Okay, I'll turn on everything that we have right now. We've got trees, furniture, entourage.

We don't need to have the annotations on because that's part of the annotation for the clubhouse, and I will now save my file, and I will see you in the next video as we start bringing in 2D and 3D plants.