How to Modify a Concrete Slab and Add Materials to a Retaining Wall

Creating a Polished Concrete Slab Extension: Modifying the Concrete Slab and Adding Materials to the Retaining Wall

Discover the process of modifying a concrete slab within a 3D design model, including creating a larger flat area in front of door swings, cleaning up additional geometries, and applying new material textures. This article provides a step-by-step guide to improve the design and aesthetics of your 3D model.

Key Insights

  • The modification of a 3D concrete slab involves several steps such as creating a larger flat area in front of door swings, moving geometries along the axis for proper alignment, and removing excess lines to clean up the model.
  • You can improve the model's appearance by applying concrete primary material, hiding hidden geometries, and creating new materials for additional features like a retaining wall.
  • The article also highlights how to adjust the position of materials on different faces, create a concrete material for the top portions, and match color for consistent texture throughout the 3D model.

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All right, one final thing that I want to do to modify this concrete slab, if I go to view hidden geometry, is I can see that I only have a slight small area that's flat in front of these doors. I want to make that larger to come out at least three feet in front of the door swings. So I can double click into this group again until we get only our concrete slab portion.

Now I'll create a selection window only to select these lines right here. So I'll click and drag to have a selection window. I can see that I only grabbed these two, so I'll hold down control on my keyboard to select these final portions and then holding down shift deselect shift and control and I can go to my move tool and selecting just one point on edge I can move this along the red axis three feet.

And then now as I orbit around I can see that I create a flat portion over here. However, there are some additional geometry moves that need to be cleaned up. I can erase this line and this line and then auto fold this portion to here.

There's also an additional line that I can modify by moving this and hitting down along the red I can snap to basically this portion here and then down along the blue down here. So I kind of reduce an additional line. There's all kinds of things that we can do to kind of clean up these additional pieces but that should be good enough.

I would click h to view the rest and I can see that I made some quite improvements to creating a flat landing at top. I can control a to select all and I have this concrete primary material selected. Go to my material paint bucket tool and then paint.

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I can select view to hide hidden geometry to see how this looks and I think that looks really nice. The one final thing to fix this would be to modify this portion to move this over three feet as well. So opening up by hidden geometry again, double click this landscape portion.

I can select this edge and then move this edge three feet and that aligns perfectly with this and that modified all this to match. Now hit CTRL to close out and hit escape on my keyboard and now the last thing I would like to do in this model is add materials to this retaining wall. I will go to my view and uncheck hidden geometry and now let's create a new material for our CMU block.

Because we created this in eight inch segments we can go into our brick cladding and we can see that we have a cinder block material. If we click this material and then hit the plus create material we can call this retaining wall side because we want our side to be this material but not our top. But as we can see the standard size for this material is one foot six inches by eight inches.

If I hit okay and I start applying that material to this retaining wall I'm going to paint back to my paint bucket you can see that this size is not the correct size that I want. If I go back into edit this retaining wall side and if I was to like really look at this I can see that there are six courses high and three courses wide. We know that there are eight inches per block so six courses is 48 inches.

I will uncheck the lock aspect radio and type 48 inches for the high and then three courses wide of 16 inches block is also 48 inches. Type 48 inches enter so you can see this is automatically adjusted the perfect height for all of these. So I can continue to control a and paint the rest of this.

Like I said before I did not like the on the top being this block material so I will want to modify that but before I do that let's adjust the position of these materials. We can adjust materials of the positions by selecting this face and then right click texture position and we can move this position to be exactly where we want it to be. We don't want there to be a vertical line in between so we can move it and then select outside of it to end that move.

We can do the same thing to this one texture position and you can see it automatically adjusted select out this one looks good this one looks good this one looks good this one also looks good and this one just needs a slight adjustment texture position and move this to be right there and select out now I can see that I have a nice materiality on this wall. The last thing that I want to do is create a concrete material for the top so again I'll go back to my select and go into asphalt and concrete select our polished concrete old and do our plus create material we will call this retaining wall pop and we'll change our material size to be six inches we get a or six feet so we get a little bit more texture to it and then I will select okay and now I will paint this surface in this surface in this surface in this surface all the way around and then to match this same color we can go into edit click our match color on screen and select the color that we would like to match to match that color with that I will select out of my wall and you can see now as I clear out of all my groups that we have this nice retaining wall with this nice texture pattern now I will save my file and in the next video we are going to build our exterior pergola we have completed all of our exterior site modifications and now we'll just add some finishing touches to our community park I'll see you in the next video

photo of Derek McFarland

Derek McFarland

SketchUp Pro Instructor

Over the course of the last 10 years of my architectural experience and training, Derek has developed a very strong set of skills and talents towards architecture, design and visualization. Derek grew up in an architectural family with his father owning his own practice in custom home design. Throughout the years, Derek has had the opportunity to work and be involved at his father's architecture office, dealing with clients, visiting job sites, and contributing in design and production works. Recently, Derek has built up an incredible resume of architecture experiences working at firms such as HOK in San Francisco, GENSLER in Los Angeles, and RNT, ALTEVERS Associated, HMC, and currently as the lead designer at FPBA in San Diego. Derek has specialized in the realm of architectural design and digital design.

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