Learn how to add elements to your 3D models in SketchUp to create a more realistic and engaging scene. This article explains how to incorporate a variety of components, including plants, trees, and people, while also managing your file size carefully to ensure optimal performance.
Key Insights
- SketchUp offers a wide range of 3D and 2D components to enhance your models, but it's crucial to be mindful of the file size and polygon count of each element. Higher the polygon counts can potentially slow down your computer's processor speed.
- When incorporating components, it's recommended to stick to the ones authorized by SketchUp and available on their website. But when using components from other sources, it is advised to download them in an external SketchUp window first and attempt to simplify them before integrating.
- While you have the freedom to replace existing components with new ones, it's suggested to import multiple options first before committing to a replacement. This will provide you with a broader selection and contribute to a more diverse and engaging model.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
All right, now that we have our completed clubhouse and site modeling, let's add in some entourage, such as plants, trees, and people and furniture to really bring this scene to life. So SketchUp has a mixture of 3D components and 2D components in a SketchUp warehouse.
The big noticeable difference is file size. If you're managing this really small, condensed file, you wanna be careful about poly counts when you're importing things. Say if I was to go to a 3D warehouse and I was to randomly choose a 3D tree, right? There's lots of options of really nice 3D trees that other users have modeled and have built.
If I was to open up one of these, you can see that there are 22,000 polygons in this tree, and then in this tree, there are 42,000, and some ones can even be even bigger. The number of polygons in a model, for example, this one has 268,000 polygons and 14 materials. Open up, see more details.
We can see that the different layers and different attributes for a specific tree and how much information is built into this. SketchUp has given us a lot of really great 3D models that are both condensed, but also look right. For the sake of this class, I'm only gonna be using SketchUp materials that SketchUp has authorized and has put on their website and put in the Google 3D warehouse.
However, feel free to download others, but be careful of poly counts and of other sorts of materials and components that are nested into a file. It's always best to, if you're downloading a new component from a 3D warehouse, one that you haven't used before, is if you download in an external SketchUp window and then modify it and try to see if you can simplify it on your own. For this case, let's go into components.
%20(1).png)
Learn SketchUp
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
And we'll go click our little dropdown arrow and click landscape. And here we have a list of plants low poly, plants high poly, and DC landscape. Plants high poly and plants low poly are both the same folders.
If you go into one of these, you can see that there's low poly, trees 3D low poly. And then if you open up plants high poly, trees high poly have most of all the same types of trees. So the way that it is organized in SketchUp isn't the best, but it basically has kind of all of it in there.
If you look at these trees high poly and you open up this Aspen deciduous tree, you can see that there's only 3,000 polygons in this 3D model, which is a lot smaller than what you would typically get if you download from the 3D warehouse. This evergreen one has 2,000. So you really want to stick in this range of like less than 5,000.
So that way you can really maximize your computer's processor speed. If you are using a very advanced, heavily graphic centered computer, you will be able to render out shadows and things like that with these really detailed models. But for the case of this class and everyone's specs are different from the computer, we want to keep things relatively simple.
And then if you go back and you go to plant 2D high poly, you can see that there are a mixture of a bunch of 2D trees. And if you click, say, this 2D schematic palm tree, you can see there's only 24 polygons. So very clean, really simple.
When we use, when we start adding trees and plants into our model, we're gonna start with just adding 2D plants and 2D trees, and eventually we'll swap those out with some 3D components. I'll close this out for now. I will put up my tags and I will turn on my landscape tag.
You can see that we already have a lot of these palm trees that were loaded into this project from the original. If we wanted to change out these palm trees with a different palm tree, we open up this group. And if we select one of these, one object, and then go into our components and say we wanted to swap this palm tree with a person, we can select the component and right-click Replace Selected.
So it'll replace that component with the set selection. So that's a really quick way to do that. You can actually have that with multiple palm trees and say you wanna replace it with fountains.
There you go. It'll replace it based off of where the origins are for each of the models. So for the first thing that we wanna do, if we want to replace these palm trees with a different palm tree, we need to import that palm tree into our model.
So since we wanna maybe import multiple trees and then we wanna add additional trees to our model, let's go into our components and go down to landscape and go into Plants, Low Poly. And we'll go into Trees, 2D Low Poly. And let's download a few trees that we want into this model.
Let's download a palm tree. We'll download this 2D Schematic Palm Tree. We'll load this directly into our SketchUp model.
Yes, we'll click there. Then we'll delete for now. We'll do Plants, Low Poly again.
And we'll do more like an aspen type deciduous tree. We'll, how about this, 2D Schematic Maple Tree, load that into our model. And then we'll maybe bring in another tree, another 2D Trees, Low Poly, maybe a slightly larger one, this linden tree.
Okay, so I can delete these two trees that I brought in. And now let's go into this group again of palm trees. And now that we have that new palm tree selected, I will do a Control-A to select all of these palm trees and then go into my In Model Components.
I'll find that 2D Schematic Palm Tree and I'll right-click Replace Selected. And you can see that it automatically replaced all those palm trees with the new palm tree. We can go into every few of these and scale them down so they're maybe a bit more variety of sizes and shapes, some bigger, some taller, so that way it gives you some variety.
On this end over here, I would like to delete these palm trees and add in additional types of trees. So with this group still in here, let's go into this 2D Schematic Maple Tree. And let's click this.
Let's put a maple tree right here. I think this tree's a little small and so I wanna modify this component. I'll double-click and then I'll select all of it, Control-A, and I guess I'll scale this out to a size that I feel like best represents.
Maybe the trunk is a little bit smaller. So feel free to take things from, and you see that when I move that up, it didn't move the axis, so I wanna correct that axis in the right spot. Let's go move this down.
So yeah, that looks like a better size tree. Maybe I'll make it slightly taller. Now we can start placing these components around this area over here.
We can also place in this linden tree, which is a slightly smaller tree, kind of give it some depth and some character, place more of these trees up in the back. We can even place some next to our picnic benches, kind of just like filling this scene with some trees, give it some depth. And we'll add maybe a few more of these kind of accent trees up at the front, give it some more character of the park so it's not just all palm trees.
When I place all these, I didn't place them inside of any group. So I wanna do a Control-A and select everything, and then I'm gonna hold down Shift and Control to deselect elements that I don't wanna put inside of that group. So unchecking some of these components, you can do a selection window.
Now I have all of my trees selected, and I can actually select the palm trees as well. Make group, double-click into this group. I see there's a bench that I accidentally selected.
I can actually Control-C to copy, delete, escape out of that group, edit, paste in place. So it's there. And then explode these palm trees.
And now all of these trees are inside of a group, and this group is actually not in a tag. So I can actually change this tag to say trees now. So instead of there being landscape, so I'll just double-click into this group.
I can see that these palm trees are on the landscape tag. I wanna change that to be untagged as I only want this group of trees to be under trees. So I can uncheck trees.
And once I put this on the trees tag, the visibility would turn on and off. I can hence delete the landscape tag as I do not need this one anymore.
