Placing Architecture on Top of Toposurface: A Step-by-Step Guide

So in this video we are going to place our architecture on top of our toposurface. Because our toposurface is slanted and angled all the way across our site, we need to use the Stamp tool right here to create a flat surface underneath our architecture and then we can drop our top of our toposurface with our Select tool, click this, right-click, Explode.

Now I'm going to deselect this and go to my Stamp tool and then first click on the clubhouse and if I zoom in you can see this red outline appear around my clubhouse. This is the offset distance for our Stamp tool. When we click this we will create a pad that's one foot offset from the ground.

So essentially we'll be kind of angling down from each of these corners to our base of foundation. If I look at my Measurements box down here, offset is set to one foot. I can change this by typing in three feet which would adjust that to three feet, but I'm happy with the distance of one foot.

So I will click my topography and you can see that all of a sudden I have this pad start appearing. I know that this site is sloping this direction so this is our high point in this corner. So I want this high point to roughly be just slightly above this corner just like this.

But before I drop my building I need to do some cleanup to this pad. I can see that there's a broken piece right here and there's some other geometry that needs to be cleaned up so let's do that right now. I will zoom in and orbit and pan around. I see this angle right here is giving me some issues, so I'm going to go to my Eraser tool.

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I'm going to erase this line and then it looks like I can auto-fill this triangle. So I'll go to Line, click from this point to this point to auto-fill that. Again I see an opening right here.

I think that's an opening. I can turn down and look underneath it and see that it's not an opening, but I want to soften this corner. So what I can do is I can go to my Eraser tool and clicking Control, which toggles soften and smooth.

I can smooth this corner. I'm going to orbit around and look to see if there are any other areas on the site that are having some issues. I can see right here I need to auto-fill this triangle.

Click here to here to create that and then there's some geometry here that needs some cleanup. So I could erase this line in between and then I could generate a triangle right here, and then I can erase or soften this edge right here. I can see that this geometry doesn't quite line up and if you zoom in you can see that I've created a little bit of a gap right here. So let's go to View, Hidden Geometry and yeah you can see that my topography has a line right here and these aren't matching up.

We need to be very careful when we're working with SketchUp that we match all of our lines together. So I will erase this line and I will connect a line from here to here, and then I'll go to View, uncheck my Hidden Geometry, and with my Eraser tool clicking Control to soften edges and soften right here.

Then we got a nice clean corner. Now we'll orbit and pan around and do the same things here. Soften this edge and this edge; now that's looking really good.

We can now bring down our building. Go into my Select tool. I can orbit and pan and select my building and then using the Move tool select this corner or any corner that you want to match to. So I'm going to click here and then infer the blue. If I hold down shift it'll lock it in the blue axes and I can go all the way down until I hit this point.

I will go to my Select tool and then deselect my clubhouse. One thing to note that I didn't realize when I was first drawing my pad is these are our restrooms and there's a very high hillside right up against the clubhouse. I don't like this steep, so I'm going to modify my topography by using the Scale tool.

I will click this surface, this angled surface, and then clicking my Scale tool I will orbit underneath my topography until I can see the blue scale about opposite point and I want this to be zero, but if I type in zero it says invalid scale and if I click this and try to find a point to snap to, it doesn't want to snap to anything that's even close to zero. I got negative.11, so what I can do is I want it to be a little bit less of a slope, but I don't want it to be inverted. We want it to be positive, so I can type in.001 and that'll give me a very close angle without being inverted. Now I will triple-click this geometry and then go to the Soften Edges in my Default Tray, making sure that my Soften Coplanar is checked.

You can see that all of a sudden it cleans up a lot of these flat lines and then clicking and dragging I can change my geometry from being very fragmented to smooth; right around the 60-degree mark is a target. So that looks pretty darn good, so I'm gonna save this file now. But as I orbit around my model I can see a few areas—this line kind of shows up here and here, and you can kind of see that it's a little bit of a sharp angle, not as clean as what I would like. So let's spend some time really smoothing out this topography surface. We will be doing this quite often in many projects where we have these complex topography and terrain and we want to modify it to create a very smooth and nice looking surface.

So let's go back up to View, Hidden Geometry, then we can kind of see areas where we have these sharp angles. I think this is a good point right here. One thing to note is we did learn that we could flip these angles upon surfaces using this Flip Edge tool, but we can't do it in these angles because this is fragmented into five. It's not a complete triangle and we can't do it here as well, so what I want to do is I can manually flip it by erasing this line and breaking apart this geometry and then auto-filling it with the Line tool. Click this point to this point. Now I've created two triangles and I can go into my Eraser, clicking Control to soften this line.

One other tool that we can use is we can actually merge points and joints that are close together. I can go to my Move tool and I can click this point and merge it. You can see that I can move it all around and I can click this point to merge those two. I'm going to go to View, Hidden Geometry and uncheck this to see where we're at, see if there are any areas that need to be fixed.

I see this corner needs some help, so I'm going to View, Hidden Geometry again and this point here. Let's see if we can flip some of these lines. Again, we run into that same issue, but I feel like it's this line right here that needs some help, so I can flip this one right there. Again let's rotate around to this edge over here and let's flip this one to clean up that geometry. Let's go to View, Hidden Geometry and now that looks a lot cleaner. You can continue spending some time cleaning this up as much as you would like, but for now my model seems at a pretty good spot to stop.

Next let's stamp our Welcome Sign. So let's go to the Stamp tool and click on our Welcome Sign. We can see that we have a one-foot offset around our Welcome Sign and then let's click our toposurface, and then zooming in we want this to have a slight mound—not too big—right around there. We can kind of eyeball that; that looks pretty good.

And then going up to our Select tool, select this Welcome Sign model, zooming in we're going to move, click a point, then zoom out, pan down, and within the blue direction snap right there. Next I don't want to soften or smooth these edges because I want to leave this kind of mound intact as part of the design. Maybe we can change this as a different material. This is all I want to do in this video.

Let's save our file and in the next video we are going to stamp our carousel and fountain and then drape our site plan lines onto our toposurface. I will see you in the next video.