ATTN: Landscape Architects! Share your workflow & tips...

[patrickbateman]

How do you guys use styles in your modeling?

For me I have found most of the styles other than the basic ones kind of pointless for my purposes. I pretty much just use standard and some of the night ones that go along with Podium. Other than that am I missing anything by not incorporating styles into my renderings?

I also find myself not really incorporating scenes into my workflow and I'm sure I could benefit there, it's just not something I ever did really. I will occasionally add one for night but in general I wing it and just place the camera in various spots and render. I'm sure I could benefit from setting up some standard views. How do you incorporate scenes?

[brodie]

If you're rendering, I don't think there's much purpose in styles. I'll swap between the different face styles sometimes but that's about it. For example, going to monochrome to and turning hidden lines on to get a better idea of massing and polygon count, that sort of thing. And on a rare occasion I've turned on Color by Axis to be sure certain lines are on axis. Sometimes I've used Hidden line mode to create an image I'll overlay over a rendering to display the edges - not very photoreal but can be useful.

I don't use scenes much other than to pick a view to render and then keeping it. It helps to choose a few options and then quickly switch between them weighing the pros and cons of each view before picking a final to render. If you ever have to give your models to someone unfamiliar with SU, I also use scenes to help them navigate and turn layers on and off.

-Brodie

[onzki]

I also work in a landscape firm (Hong Kong) and my workflow for a usual masterplan with 3 days deadline:

1. Importing CAD file. About 1 to 5 min. depending on scale.
2. Putting CAD layers to one layer, deleting unnecessary stuff (retain those for reference, to be hidden later)- about 5-10 seconds
3. Group & flatten (free plug in) the site plan, delete old one- about few minutes (save first, I can sense a Bug splat coming!)- This is my base plan later on.
4. [option 1] search and close all broken lines, what used to be a smooth circles that became dodecagons, a trial and error procedure that will test every man's patience . zoom in and in till you see those microscopic broken links.. and sometimes it's not there, so go somewhere else. Oh man, I really hope SKU team and Autodesk team will have a small chat to improve this mess. -takes about an entire day for a big site
5. [option 2] if CAD is really too messy- I just lock that flattened layer and redraw all the lines and curves- if you are fast, lines appear to be more neat, and faces look cleaner, born from sketchup I call this my brute force manual method.
6. After the hard work comes the easy and fun part- sketchup modeling:) From this neat base plan, I will derive all other site components- roads, kerbs, buildings, pole light, bollard, site furnitures, etc. with proper layer names. I work on it from other sketchup instance (I call it parts/temporary file). Once a part is finished, I'll snap it back to where my base plan is- (I call it my assembly area). In this process, I just use simple scene style, showing only the layer I need. - composition takes about a day.
7. Boss comes in finally either to select views or do his favorite revisions
8. Softscape. All got individual layers. Hedges (if any) takes time especially on curved/classical English garden style.
   If I still have time, I round/ bevel top edges (free plugin).. it appears softer.
9. Scenes and export to JPG/avi.

In short, cleaning up CAD file is the hardest part and modeling is the fun part:) Actually, I tried once to do all roads and kerb/curb modeling first in CAD, then import to SKU (since those are my usual bottlenecks). But it didn't work for me (image below).

[elons1992]

Hello,
Thanks for sharing your views.
I use SketchUp for architecture purpose and as I'm new here with limited knowledge of Sketchup i'm always eager to learn new things here. Hope you will share more things with us in future.

[jason14]

@patrickbateman said:

I consider myself a good sketchup modeler but nowhere near as advanced as some of the stuff on here. I just started a position where I do a lot of sketchup work for a [anchor= goto=http://www.edgedesign.ae/2016/02/28/dubai-architecture-firms/:fhp7w6k7]Dubai architecture firms[/anchor:fhp7w6k7](I was mainly hired because of my sketchup skills and experience). I am trying to get as advanced and efficient as possible and am looking for new techniques, must have plugins, extensions, and general things to make my life easier and models looking better. There are so many ruby plugins I don't know which ones I should install.

Right now I am using SU Podium extensively for rendering. I have been playing around with Land F/X and haven't really explored it yet but I have been using it for CAD cleanup before importing to sketchup and it works well. When working with topo I have had to go back and forth between CAD and sketchup a lot since editing topo in sketchup is difficult so I find myself importing topo, running sandbox tools, then going back to cad to fix things and doing it again a few times to get things right. I'm sure there's a better way.

I am really impress after reading your work and experience your write in your post that you do lot of sketch up work for a landscape Architecture. I am pretty sure after you visit on the above given blog you can suggest us some different thing and different work that we can do in our Blog.