Railway Station model

[tmcgartland]

I am awaiting the arrival of the a scanned copy of the original drawings of a local, now demolished railway station. The plans are drawn in imperial scale of 1:40feet. I am keen to maintain as much accuracy as possible and would like to known if anyone with experience, can guide me on the best way to use these drawings to speed up the modelling process.

[L i am]

Hi, I have to make some assumptions here. Import the drawing into Sketchup. there should be some known dimensions within the drawing or use the drawn scale if it has one. Measure a known distance with the tape measure. My second assumption is that you will be using metric, I would suggest millimeters, so you would import the imperial plan drawing into a metric mm template. Now scale the drawing by selecting the drawing using the 's' shortcut on your keyboard. scale by moving one of the diagonal corner points (which is uniform scale) you can either play around with the scale until you finally get your known imperial measurement and measure it so it reads in millimeters the correct conversion to millimeters. Or you can calculate the scale on your calculator and type in the scale factor directly.

So now the short version:
So forget about the 1:40 thing altogether. Say you can find some measurement in the drawing that is 10 foot then scale it so that 10 ftmeasurement reads with the tape measure as 3048mm then you have done your job and you can build from the plan without having to measure anything.

If you are drawing in imperial then simply scale the underlay drawing in an imperial drawing template till the tape measure reads correctly i.e. 10ft reads as 10ft
Cheers

[Jean Lemire]

Hi folks.

In fact, it is really simple.

Import the file into SketchUp (SU). Don't bother with the 1:40 scale.

Find a line that is shown with a written dimension on the drawing. Lets pretend that the shown dimension is 50 feet.

Select the Tape Measure Tool.

Measure the chosen line by clicking on one end and then clicking on the opposite end with the left mouse button (LMB). Remember, a click is a press and then a release of the LMB. Don't press the LMB on one end then slide the mouse to the opposite end and then release the LMB. This won't work.

Once you have done the second click, the Dimension Window (DW) shall show a value which is what SU sees as the length of the measured line. Don't bother what is the actual number. Immediately type the correct value of 50 feet. If your model is set to use feet as the basic unit, you can type only 50 without any suffix to specify the unit. SU uses the default unit which is feet, thus correct. If you have already set the units as anything else than feet, type 50' to let SU know that 50 shall be taken as feet instead of your default unit. Don't click in the MW, it becomes automatically active when needed, like in this case, and await an eventual input. Conclude your typing by pressing the Return key or the Enter key to tell SU that you have finished entering the value.

You shall get a pop-up window asking you if you want to resize the model. Click Yes. The model will be resized so that the measured line is now 50 feet as it should be in real life.

If the resizing is very drastic, the model may become very small or very large and you may seem to be lost in 3D space. Don't worry, use the Zoom extend button to see the whole model.

Choose whatever unit you want like mm, for example.

Save the model and you are ready to go.

Just ideas.