Seeking advice

J-O

Dear all,

I’m quite new to SU world so please forgive me if I raise obvious points or redirect me to the correct streams.

I have an old house.
The walls have sometimes uneven measures due to different thickness of plaster applied over the years.
I sometimes know the exact positioning of hidden elements like wooden beams, iron beams, electric wires, plumbing… and sometimes not.
The house has multiple floors.

I’ve taken up the challenge to map my house in Sketchup.
Via this work I’d like to achieve several goals:

Have a central repository of the measurements of all the elements of the house in a single model, including flooring, wall texture, non-movable furnitures…
Make a photo-realistic rendering of the house
Simulate renovations and transformations
Issue 3D sketches and precise 2D architectural plans (as-is – to-be) to be submitted to the local authorities to get official agreement on transformations

In this context, can you please give me some advice?

A) Objects to be used
1)When should I use layers?
a. For a given level/floor?
b. For a given room?
c. For electricity, plumbing, alarm…?
d. For a given material (wood, bricks, tiles…)?
e. For movable furniture?
f. Others?
2) What should I include on a layer?
a. If there is a layer for a given level of the house, should I attach the floors and ceilings respectively to different levels?
b. If there is a layer per room, should the walls separating 2 rooms be split into 2 parts to respectively belong to a given room?
c. Can we assign multiple layers to an Object?
3) When should I make a group vs. make a component?
4) In case of components what naming convention do you advise?
5) Should the walls of a given layer be defined as one entity or as many entities as perpendicular intersections with hidden edges?
6) Are there other elements than the ones mentioned above more relevant for this exercise?

B) Measures to be recorded
As for the measures themselves, I’ve chosen to round them to 0.5 cm.
When the walls of a room were originally parallel but are now not perfectly parallel due to the wall cover (plaster…), I’ve taken the average distance to keep them parallel on the drawing unless the offset was bigger than 2cm.

Should I dimension the walls with their original thicknesses and top them with layers of plaster or just represent the actual average thickness?

As I want to issue 2D architectural drawings out of the 3D model, what’s the best practice in this domain using Sketchup?

C) Transformations
For transformations modifying the structure of the house, how should I store them in sketchup?
How can I turn them on & off and issue the as-is and to-be views?
Should I put them on the same layers as the actual?

Sorry to come-up with so many questions but I’ve already invested days in mapping some parts of the house. Before going further with the rest, I want to learn from your advices to avoid redoing that job again in the future.

Thanks and Best Regards,

J-O

boofredlay

Let me guess, you are an engineer?

I appreciate your ambition on modeling your house but to start out thinking about this much information and detail straight off will drive you bonkers.

You are new to SU so I would suggest you start modeling some small things to get used to the program first. Try modeling one of your tables or a cabinet and ask specific questions about those here. Then when you feel comfortable with the basics start on your house.

I think you would be hard pressed to find the answers to all your questions in this thread.

Start off with the New to Google SketchUp tutorials, they will help quite a bit.
http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/training/videos.html

Just my two cents worth.

dsarchs

I completely agree with Boofredlay that you should start out with something simpler to get accustomed to SU before modeling a whole, detailed house. Having said that, here are a couple of thoughts:

Sketchup uses groups more than layers -- Group every object that you would like to have distinct from it's surroundings (nested groups are fine)
Components are a way of instancing copies of a thing. If you want the exact same object throughout the model use a component (windows, light fixtures, stair treads, columns). The benefit is that if you edit one of these they will all be identically updated. Use groups for organizing more variable information.
Use layers for different sets of things that you would want to have displayed independently of one another, such as phases of a project, mechanical/electrical systems, furniture, landscaping, cars, etc. This is much less important than groups, but it will allow different options of things in the same model as well as improve cpu performance (by not having to show things like landscaping while modeling the windows of the house).
I have never met a planning department that will accept 3d (or even 2d digital) drawings to permit anything. You will need to come up with a printed set of drawings which leads to...
Don't use sketchup for everything. It is great at modeling but bad at things like renderings and detail drawings. Use a dedicated rendering program (I prefer Thea or it's free counterpart kerkythea) and CAD drafting software (AutoCAD is the standard but there are plenty of options -- some free).

Good luck.

J-O

Hi guys,

Thanks for your answers.
Even though I'm quite new to SU, I have experience on Catia for 3D and MSVisio for 2D.
After spending so much time measuring the house in all directions and storing all this in 2D Visio, I found SU and started all over again.

So far I've modelled in detail the facade and 2 floors. I’ve used mainly nested groups and components.
I made choices: e.g. have separate groups for walls belonging to different floors. But, following that choice I don’t know what to do for staircase walls. Should I split them artificially at floor intersection, should I assign them to layers, or define attributes and create scenarios to turn them on and off?...

I discover new features every day, fantastic Plugins…
I see great models posted on the site and I understand there is more than one way to achieve a given result.
Viewed the magnitude of the task, I’m challenging the choices I made so far and seek help for this.
Indeed it would be a pity to spend time on layers when attributes and scenes are more appropriate or define objects in a way that we can’t interact with them later on.

Therefore I came up with my long list of questions that I recognize I should have chopped in pieces beforehand.

From your advice I will consider layers for time dependant activities (phases of renovation) and nature of objects (mechanical/electrical systems, furniture…).
But how to filter on a combination of the 2: electrical renovation only, plumbing renovation only… ?
What is the best for tagging floor levels to show them individually?
Can we combine layers and attributes and hide/show based on a combination of those values?

Thanks again,

J-O

dsarchs

In no particular order:

For walls I model the exterior as a continuous group (balloon framing) making any different material a different group. The interior face of the exterior wall can later be 'painted' a more suitable material. By the way, although I generally like keeping each group a distinct material it's not a big deal to mix them as you can -- in the above example -- select the interior material, right-click, and choose select all with similar material. Even with 2 materials this keeps the exterior wall mesh unified for easier adjustment if needed. If someone has a better way I'd love to hear it, by the way.
For interior walls I do per-floor wall groups. Stairs are treated no differently -- they are usually a combination of exterior and interior walls -- so the exterior wall will stretch continuously while the interior wall will be split by the floor. Obviously there will be exceptions, but this is generally the route I take.

As for showing electrical only, mechanical only, etc., I would just place these on there own separate layers. The scene views can be very powerful and perform like a filter would. Instead of using scenes to locate the camera, you can turn off the camera location of a scene and instead have it save which layers are on/off, which objects are hidden, where sections occur, etc. So you might have a scene called "electrical renovation" to instantly show the applicable layers and conveniently hidden geometry.

Also, for setting layers -- be sure to leave the actual objects/meshes on layer 0 and only move the parent group/component to the layer, otherwise when you turn off a certain layer you might unknowingly turn off nested geometry.

The last two tips I have would be:
start setting EVERYTHING to a shortcut as you start to use that command. It can be a really pain in the ass -- and really slow you down -- to have to dig through menus. Sketchup was designed to be using shortcuts.
Use the 'hide rest of model' command (set to a shortcut when editing groups/components to make it MUCH easier.

Wo3Dan

@dsarchs said:

......So you might have a scene called "electrical renovation" to instantly show the applicable layers and conveniently hidden geometry.....

J-O, be aware that saving hidden/unhidden geometry in scenes don't stick with nested geometry. Only top level groups and components do save properly in scenes and keep their hidden or unhidden settings.

Mike Lucey

J-O,

I would suggest that you might consider showing samples of what you are doing, either full or partial drawings / models.

I personally find it much easier to offer advise on a SU situation when looking at the drawing / model. My eyes start to glaze over a bit when reading long lists and I imagine the same goes for some others here.

Just a thought!

Mike