My firm is on a residential house project, we have all of our section planes and CDs create for the main bulk of our CD package… NOW we need to move on to interiors.
What I have done is reference the model into a NEW sketchup file (to wipe the scenes) and now we are sectioning for elevations. As you can see from the photo, the amount of section planes is getting unmanageable, is there a simple method to get 4 elevations of a room? Perhaps a plugin that gives me a camera in the middle of a room to shoot all 4 orthographic views of one room?
Right now I am mapping out what sections see particular elevations. How do other architectural firms handles this?
It would require some manual work but Eneroth Align View could be used to aim the camera precisely onto the sides of the room to make interior elevations. You’d need to position it in the center of the room manually first, and do this in perspective mode as you cannot move the camera back and forth in parallel projection mode. Once the camera is positioned at the center of the room though you can can switch to parallel projection, use Look Around to roughly point it to the various sides and use the plugin to precisely align it.
You can ‘mimic’ the section cut by placing the camera with the ‘Position Camera’ tool:
Activate the tool, and drag into a direction. Set the camera on parallel and then zoom out. Make a scene for use in LayOut.
Don’t forget to trow in ‘Align View’ (to desired inner face if needed), and then in ‘Parallel Projection’ zooming and panning will position the wall (a perfect section cut) on screen as you wish.
p.s. dragging the ‘Camera Position’ also inferences with axes colors. Just dragging in a direction along axis without a specific target may be enough. Then > parallel projection > zoom and pan.
p.s. in X-Ray style you can pick your camera start position as a fly on the inner wall to then drag in the opposite wall direction “along axis”. Saves you time and hassle.
The problem with align view is how it moves the camera. If you use it you may no longer have the camera inside the room and instead do need all the section planes. I created the align view extension much so I could align the camera direction without changing its position.
Or you can create a component fr9m a room, export the room to a file with right click save as command and have a template file with 4 elevations and scenes, that you use to insert the component. Then you can send to layout, increase the detail on that particular room and right click save as the component again and reload it into your main file.
You can enhance the workflow by saving out and reloading with some helping pluginss like eneroth’s reference manager.
You may be right about the align view command. I’ll have to test that in both parallel and perspective. But thing is, you don’t need it for the axes colors are honored while dragging the camera. Zooming and panning let you do the rest.
A quick elevation within a 1m cube. I have used the camera tool to click and drag from the endpoint of the edge standing up in the middle to the midpoint of the edges drawn on the faces and set them as scenes. This makes the camera rotate on the spot and point to the same level on the walls. Basically setting a tripod in the middle of the room. Just trying to demo how the native camera can be controlled.
align view is ‘build in’ the dragging, no need to right-click and ‘align view’, just zoom out.
as soon as you pivot/orbit, the ‘mimic’ section cut is gone…
for pan, one can simply type the height of the camera
Despite using SketchUp for a number of years, fairly intensely, I’ve never used the Position Camera tool until just now. I’ve read about the tool, but never been prompted to experiment with it. I’m glad this topic pushed me to try. How cool!
This trick is handy for quick elevations but I lose the ability to fill my section cuts with a color. I need this feature to be able to ‘steal’ details from the room.
Edit the style to set the back face to a color of your liking, or ‘paint the backfaces with a pattern/color/texture per element.
To steal section cuts: place a section cut, rightclick and select ‘create group from slice’ . This solution is not dynamic and only steals the linework of the section, not the elevation itself.
? Didn’t know that!