Learn how to draw water and lily pads to add realism to a fountain design using SketchUp. This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide on separating grouped designs, creating copies, selecting materials, and using various tools to achieve the desired look.
Key Insights
- The tutorial demonstrates how to separate grouped items in SketchUp by employing the explode function. This is particularly useful for isolating the base and walls of the fountain model.
- Creating a realistic water effect involves making a copy of the fountain base, moving it upwards, and applying the appropriate water material. The tutorial emphasizes the use of transparency in materials to enhance the visual effect.
- Drawing lily pads on the water surface involves the pie tool, which creates closed objects that resemble the natural shape of lily pads. Additionally, the tutorial showcases how to add depth to the lily pads and apply suitable vegetation materials for enhanced realism.
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.
So in this video, we are going to draw water and lily pads for our fountain. So in order to draw water, we need to copy the bottom of our fountain and bring it up.
Because this is all grouped together, we want to separate the two groups, the walls and the base. So I'm going to right click, explode. This will undo the group.
So I'll explode. And now I want to double click on the base, right click, make group, and triple click on all this, the walls, right click, make group. Now these two pieces are separate.
Now I want to make a copy of this base. So I'm going to go to the move tool. And then hovering over this, I will select control, which will add a plus, and then I can drag this up.
I'll drag it up, say one foot, two inches. You can orbit to the bottom of your fountain to make sure you made a copy rather than you move the original space. But control and then plus the move will create a copy.
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Next, I'll go to the paint bucket tool right here. And once I click this, you will notice that the materials dialog box will automatically open. I want to find a nice water material for this, for this face.
So I'll click this toolbar and then find water. You will see some of these materials will have a diagonal line going through. The diagonal line refers to transparency.
If I click this, you can notice that I can see the bottom of the fountain because this material is transparent. If I click this water pool, there's no line. This will create a solid.
If I go back to the transparency one and then material that and I go to edit, you can see that there's the opacity level right here allows me to change it from solid to that. So that's how you can kind of edit the opacity of a material. So yeah, let's go back to the original water pool light and click to make that on correct material.
I'll go ahead and save my file. The next thing that we want to do is draw some lily pads. And to do that, I will use the pie tool, which is right here.
So the pie tool acts like the arc tool. I'll draw one down here so you can see. First, you're going to draw your your line, and then you're going to draw your angle.
And instead of it just being an arc, it will be an closed face and closed object. So it looks like, you know, Pac-Man or lily pad. So I'm going to delete this, triple click, delete.
And I want to draw some lily pads just on this on the surface of this water using the pie tool. So I'm going to zoom in and we can make these as big or as small as we want. So, you know, I'll draw first line and then we'll draw it around to kind of get to 90 percent.
I'll just, you know, then I'll click escape to end that one. I'll start over here, do a little bit, do a slightly smaller one. I kind of need to zoom in because it'll snap at certain points that may not get you the right distance that you want.
And again, you know, we can make these with the standard sides. If I go back to here and click this, you can notice that it says 12 sides. I can change this to 20 sides, make it, you know, more of a precise circle versus that on the 12 sided.
So one thing to note is when you have a decent amount of sides to your geometry, your, your models start becoming larger and it can be more challenging to work with if everything is within like, you know, hundreds of sides. So typically between 10 and 25, 30, your computer can handle that fairly easily. Next, we'll use the push pull tool to add some depth to each of these.
So I'm going to pull this up one half inch, so one forward slash two inches. And then like we did previously, we can just double click and it'll copy the same move. It'll copy in both direction and distance.
Next, I'll go up to my, my selection tool and draw a selection window and drag to the right to select all that's within that. And I will hold down shift to deselect the pieces that I don't want to group the pedestal, the fountain, the water base, just the lily pads. And I will right click, make group.
Oh, I noticed I didn't extrude this last one. So I can double click this group and go into the push pull and double click to copy that same move. Now all of our lily pads are within a group.
So let's go ahead and add some materials and colors to these lily pads. I'll go back to my paint bucket tool. And I want to go to vegetation, landscaping, fencing, and vegetation right here.
And I'm going to look at some materials. See if there's any sort of nice kind of color and vegetation that would, that would work well for a lily pad. This vegetation blur too seems nice.
I want to click that. I want to click right there on those lily pads. You know what? I think that kind of looks a little, not the best.
Maybe I'll try this vegetation blur one. Oh yeah, that looks much better. I like that as my material for my lily pads.
So I will zoom extents, save file, and there we go. There is our fountain with water feature and lily pads. So in the next video, we are going to look at making unique materials and applying those materials to some koi fish that we'll place inside of our fountain.
I'll see you in the next video.