Learn how to create more aesthetic 3D models by adding and modifying elements such as trees and plants. This article instructs on how to adjust colors, swap out materials, scale the sizes, and make various adjustments to achieve a desired look.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to add and modify 3D elements such as trees and plants to make 3D models more aesthetic. This includes swapping out materials, adjusting colors, and scaling sizes.
- By using various tools such as material paint bucket, eyedropper, and scale uniformly, one can create more realistic and aesthetically pleasing models. Different types of trees like palm, medium, and big trees can be incorporated into the model.
- Adjusting components like the origin point, axes, and line thickness can help improve the overall look of the model. Also, being aware of the processing time of software like SketchUp when working with complex elements such as trees is important for efficient modelling.
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So you can see we created a bunch of plants and trees into the model. If we wanted to maybe modify the colors of these things, you can go into your material paint bucket tool, eyedropper, and you can maybe add some transparencies to these. You know, there's lots of elements of modifying these truity trees to make them a little bit more aesthetic inside of our park.
Now if we wanted to bring in some 3D trees, we can do that same process of swapping out the materials. We brought in three 2D trees, so let's bring in three 3D trees, a palm tree, a medium tree, and a big tree, so we can swap those kind of three things out. If we don't know the sizes, we can always scale them and change them after they've been brought in.
So let's go back to our components dialog box and go into landscape, plants, low poly, bring in our 3D SketchUp Warehouse pop-up window, and let's go into trees, 3D, low poly, and here let's find a palm tree. Let's bring in this tropical fan palm tree. Let's double check to see what the poly count is, and that looks good.
We'll bring that in, and just bring it in right there, and we'll delete, and then let's go back into plants, low poly, and let's find into trees, 3D, poly. Let's find a nice kind of leafy tree. Let's use this aspen deciduous tree.
We'll bring this one in. That's kind of more of that kind of larger tree. We'll bring that, and then we'll delete it, and then we'll bring in one final tree.
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Let's go back to our trees, 3D, low poly, and let's find a evergreen magnolia tree. Let's bring in this one right here. Okay, that's more of a kind of your like medium tree.
Now we brought those three trees in, we can actually select all of our linden trees, and we can replace these ones with the magnolia tree that we just brought in. We'll go to our components dialog box, and go to in model. We'll find that 3D tree, the magnolia tree.
We'll right click replace selected. So you can see that automatically replaced those. We feel like this is a little bit too big.
We can actually double click into this component, control A, and then scale uniformly by holding down control to kind of get to a right size that we feel comfortable with, just like that. And then next, we can swap out all of these larger maple trees. Put H to toggle, hide rest of model.
We'll select these trees, and then we'll go into our aspen deciduous, right click replace selected. And again, these are all a little bit large, so we'll double click into one of these components, control A, S to scale, and then holding down control to talk to scale uniformly, find a kind of a right size that that's a little bit bigger than the trees, but not too too big. And you can see here that the origin is way above, so when it was placed down there, it wasn't placed on the origin.
So let's place our origin in a correct spot, and escape. Now you can see that when I hide rest of model, that all of these trees are floating in the air. So let's go double click into this component, and let's move these down to right where that that one is, and let's adjust our axes one more time to be down here.
All right, now we have a bunch of 3D trees in our model. See, it's starting to kind of fill up the space. You know, we can make some different adjustments.
Like I feel that this tree, the trunk is a little bit too tall, so maybe I'll do some modifications to this. I'll scale this on the blue scale in the middle. I'll bring it up to like there, and then I'll close out of that group.
I'll select all, and I'll move it down to the origin. You know, we can always modify materials, right? We can make these leaves to be more transparent, and same, and we can make the the aspen trunk maybe a little bit darker, maybe more of a of a brown type color, give us some more kind of tonal qualities. Maybe make these leaves a little bit more transparent as well.
Yeah, so now we got some 3D trees in our model. The last thing that we wanted to switch out was any remaining trees that have not been swapped, such as the palm trees and this last other deciduous aspen tree. I'll quickly replace, then all these palm trees.
I'll select the palm trees one last time. I'll go find our new palm tree, our coconut palm, tropical fan palm, and then replace selected. You see these palm trees got a lot smaller than the other ones, so I want to modify this, and I want to go CTRL A, and I want to scale up uniformly.
Not uniformly, because if you do uniformly, it moves the origin, but if you just do do kind of a little bit to the left and a little bit to the right, trying to see if we can keep it somewhat right at that origin spot, so we don't have to like really change it. Click ace to see what scale this is looking like for the building. You know, maybe it doesn't need to be that tall.
Maybe it's a little bit a little bit smaller. Maybe this trunk is a little bit too, you know, chunky, so we can we can scale it down like this, and then we can pull it up, you know, so it's roughly kind of right like around there. There we go.
I'll escape, and now we have these 3D trees in the model, and as you can see, I start spinning around, and start seeing all these kind of layers, and it takes a minute for it to regenerate, and that's normal for SketchUp to kind of process. However, once you start turning shadows on, things will take a lot longer to kind of move and update, so be careful when you have trees on, and when you don't. One thing to kind of speed that up is you can see that I have the thick lines on the edges.
I can go into my styles setting, and go into edit, and then clicking on this edge settings, I can actually turn off profiles, and that kind of thins up some of those lines, so you're not seeing those profiles and some of that thickness. All right, just double checking one last thing to make sure that these trees are on the appropriate tag. We turn that on and off, so we can see everything kind of turns up with it.
Let's make sure that our other tags are right. We got furniture, which is our park benches, and our interior furniture. I feel like these trash cans should also be under furniture, so let's select both of those and move those to furniture.
Turn off furniture. We'll turn off trees. Architecture would be the clubhouse and the carousel, and our pergola should also be under architecture.
This would be under furniture, and our fountain should be under architecture as well, and our monument sign should be under architecture as well, and then all of this should just be generically under untagged for our base site. We may want to group all these together, so that way they are in one group. You can see here how this boundary line is a lot larger, and that's because these axes, these origin lines, it creates boundaries around where we have these origins.
So to clean those up, you would have to modify each one of these groups and do all that, but it's not a big deal if it's out like this. Okay, I'll turn on everything that we have right now. We've got trees, furniture, entourage.
We don't need to have the annotations on because that's part of the annotation for the clubhouse, and I will now save my file, and I will see you in the next video as we start bringing in 2D and 3D plants.