Looks good. I'm installing SU 2025 right now. The migrate plugins plugin is working away. I like that feature. We'll see how this works.

@L-i-am Jason Bourne from the series of movies. He's hiding and on the hunt by the CIA and other sinister characters and often ends up in hiding at a house like. Or in the mind of us Americans, a European house. I suppose it is possible that Bela Lugosi could have lived there too. Bad Bauhaus (Peter Murphy) pun on my end.

@alvis Thanks!

This needs Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges on the scene. This model is my hot property in my imaginary movie studio.

Make your guideline.

Select the guideline.

Copy guideline.

Enter 1/2.

Then enter X10.

@fredep57

Fred,

Are you familiar with manufactured steel buildings? A good general knowledge will help. If not you can look up the general components of a steel building. You can find some information here.

It's laid out on a grid usually in equal feet. The rigid frame is basically like a wide flange beam with an angle. The center web is basically and extruded rectangle and the flanges are extruded rectangle. You don't have to mess with that when starting out with Sketchup.

Use that sketch, scale it and start tracing from there. Work to scale whether it be in feet or centimeters. Use a known unit.

I never designed any myself but drew countless foundation plans for steel buildings like this including elevations and site plans.

Here's some more information.

@Mike-Amos Looks great except I'm not sure about the psychedelic utility pole and the power supply going into the front of the house and porch.

Use a regular arc and Taper Maker plugin.

I exaggerated the diameter difference for clarity.

https://sketchucation.com/plugin/1516-dm_taper_maker_plugin

@Gus-R Couple of clay models of the Flexicoil trucks. Older one is on top.

@Gus-R Here's a more recent rigid frame section sample from my files.

@Rich-O-Brien I've tried putting in cars in a few renderings before and it's always "lose the car." Same thing with a gas meter I modeled.

@Rich-O-Brien said in Bending plug in:

McTwist

McTwist again like we did last summer!

@L-i-am I thought about that but so far it would have to be a skp file. I've tried exporting obj and dae but it crashes Blender. Same with an fbx export from SU to Blender. The SimLab fbx exporter worked but it imports the model as an object in Blender with no edit options as well as having these random dashed projected lines ending with a target at the end. I suppose that could work but it would require troubleshooting the object and projecting lines issue. I say this because I would assume that selling the model on say CGTrader would require at least having an fbx and blend file available alongside the skp.

@Mike-Amos said in The Larner:

@L-i-am

Agreed, has atmosphere and I look for that more than geometrical perfection.

Thanks. The cut grass looked ugly so I went with some wild grass and a meadow scatter with a trail leading to the back. I think weathering of any sort is key. Now it looks like some old guy or gal lives there.

For several years I was using Acme Brick's texture program but that required manually creating a seamless texture by changing a few brick modules. I discovered that it's been updated to an online seamless textures generator which works really well almost instantly.

You find that here: Masonry Designer | brick.com

The seamless textures can be generated under Save: Seamless Tile. The rest is self explanatory.

@Rich-O-Brien Thanks rich. It started when I was a kid. The detailing that is. There's a sort of brutalism to heavy freight components. There's also a lot of engineering and physics involved although not in drawing this up. Including a lot of metal levers and chains and early computers for the operating system, remote locomotives, radios, etc.

@Rich-O-Brien How about... this one?

The 57 Chevy is from 3D Warehouse. Modeler unknown.

@Gus-R Worked the second time. Thanks!

@Bryan-K Thanks Bryan.

Exciting new update. These are the mechanical bones of the braking system. Of course I had to be off by 10 degrees with the fulcrum bracket. Supposed to be 40 degrees and not 50 degrees but since the number "4" is right next to "5" I entered "50" instead of "40." This is all over detailed for a boxcar model anyway but I'll change it next.

It was created by Justin Horstmann. It's native Sketchup but I don't know about the shadows. You could try shooting him an email. Lots of neat stuff at his website.

If you're wondering about how I found that I just did a screenshot of one of your screenshots and did a reverse image search in Google Images.

Some different materials, grass, brick edging on sidewalk. Rendered in 18K and sized down. No AI Enhancer. Materials are from Megascans and put together with Quixel Mixer which is pretty easy. D5 Render has PBR importing.