CPSC 3710 Project - Spring 2010

The making of

I used Google Sketchup to recreate the exterior of my house. I found it quite interesting in how I could manipulate the image in any desired fashion using the tools available. At first I thought the number of tools given would be too few but I found the tools provided more than powerful to do the tasks I required. Sometimes the tasks I needed to perform took some thinking or trial and error before I got the correct.

Difficulties

Believe it or not, I found the greatest difficulty in finding an object which I wanted to recreate. I at first thought of doing the new high school located on the West side but it was not completed on the exterior and I did not think it would make a tidy project. I looked around at other possibilities but final settled on creating my house simply because it was easy to access if I needed a quick look that the pictures did not offer. Difficulties I ran into while working on the project came up with the roof. The roof is not a simple roof with easy angles but instead combines many roof lines into one another which made it challenging in some occassions to come up with an effective method of getting Sketchup to do what I wanted. A major error on my part happened when I made the portion of the roof which is above the front window just 2 cm's lower on the right side than the left. Granted one could not notice the fault from any pictures provided but I had to fix it or the trim would not align properly. This involved grabbing all of the lines and faces of that portion of the roof, pulling it away from the main structure and then recreating that portion of the roof.

Interesting features

I decided to use one of Sketchup's more unique tools such as their "follow-me" tool. I used this tool to create the deadbolt, doorknob, and eavestroughing. It allows a user to build a simple 2-dimensional model of something and then have sketchup "follow" the users mouse around another object. In the case of the eavestroughing it allowed me to create the shape I desired if looking from the side and then drag it around the house where eavestroughing was installed. The windows were another object I took some time on. They involved offsetting the pane of glass deeper inside of the frame than the outside edge. I achieved this by making a box inside of a box, then connecting the two via angled lines and hiding the face of the larger box. It gave the window depth like is seen on modern PVC windows.

Other Pictures, including the original

Links to other pictures can be found here.