How to depress terrain according to a shape (house foundation outline)?

SketchUp Pro
1

I know the Sandbox Stamp tool, it creates a “hole” through the terrain according to the shape.

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I’m looking for slightly different behavior - depress the terrain in a flat shape, without cutting through it.

In other words, imagine you have a house on a slope, and you have earth-moving machinery that can partially cut the house into the hillside, and partially infill the missing height on the other side, creating a continuous surface that’s flat in 1 area.

So ideally a method that would “pull down” everything nearby that’s higher than the outline, and “pull up” everything nearby that’s lower than the outline.

How would you accomplish this, specifically using a “foundation outline”, NOT by manually moving faces?

Moving faces by hand is not feasible with dozens of houses, each facing in a different direction and at a different elevation.

1 Like
2

Use Stamp from the Sandbox tools.

3

I sometimes make my terrain a solid and then subtract out the cut for the foundation / etc.

It gets tricky if you need to do proper excavating and grading - then I use the sandbox tools to at least try and get some of the grade right, then I will use the solid tools.

4

Stamp cuts a hole through the terrain… I need it to depress the terrain to a flat shape.

5

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OK, I figured out how to get Stamp to NOT cut a hole but rather flatten the shape. Half the battle.

Now, how do I smooth these edges?

6

I don’t know how you were getting a hole.

You could use Vertex Tools (from the Extension Warehouse to move the neighboring vertices down to grade the terrain around the stamped flat.