Trying to create a bath

Hi guys. I Have only been using sketchup for a few weeks now. I am a carpenter and me and my partner have just bought our first house. we are having lots of building work done on the house and I’m trying to create a model of the house to show my partner as she cant visualise what I’m describing. I have created the floor plan and 3D model for the house with no problems. The bathroom is going to be very tight for measurements so i wanted to create the exact dimensions of the bath we want but I have now gotten stuck with the model. I have the shape and all the measurements are correct but I cant join it all together and create a face for the outside. Can anyone make any suggestions please. Thank you

without any extra plugin, you can simply check the sandbox toolbar, first button, “from contour”

with plugins… maybe some curviloft from fredo6, or I’m sure someone will mention working with quads :slight_smile:

edit : I taught SU to someone making lagoon swimming pools, and we did them with sandbox. basically trace all the outlines like you did, place them like you did, and using sandbox should create the shape.

you could also probably use follow-me, draw the profile of the bathtub, draw the outline / contour of the tub, and use it to follow. I’m eating icecream right now, but I’ll do a quick demo :wink:

ok, first 2 ideas. on the left, simply sandbox. it’s a native toolbar.
on the right, curviloft. similar result, but more things to change and tweak.


this is using follow me. I select the path, then click on follow me, and click on the profile of my tub.
and in the end, I just fill in the missing bottom

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You can often find actual make and model of fixtures on the 3d warehouse. Saves modeling everything.

where is the fun in that !? :smiley:

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@ateliernab Thank you so much. You went above and beyond with all that you shared with me here. I myself am a very visual learner so showing me via the videos you uploaded has helped me tremendously. I really appreciate all the effort you put in. I wish I knew this before I started trying to make the bath haha :laughing: but at the same time I did have fun trying to do this with very little experience using sketchup and just doing trial and error and basically winging it haha :laughing:

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Hi @ivanjones. Thank you for your help. Yes I did try looking for some on there but couldn’t find anything close enough to the dimensions of my bath. Normally I would just go with something that was close enough but as the space is so tight I needed the exact dimensions to see if my bathroom layout would even work. But thank you again for the advice

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That could be solved with the scale tool..

would you be able to explain that a bit more please

Scale tool works off of percentages. So if you import something that is to large, and it needs to be shrunk down, you can use math to quickly find the percentage you need to drop it down.

For example if an object is 20 units and you want to scale it to 18 units. 18\20 is 90% or a 10% scale down.

Now, forgive me for a moment but im on my phone and not at sketchup, so when you select your object, hit S then grab one of the top red square “handles” and drag it down and either type 0.9 or drag until you have 0.9.

There is another way to scale with the tape measure tool but its hard to explain in words.

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well yes and no. it’s not JUST percentage :slight_smile:

instead of typing a percentage, you can also type in the actual dimension (with the unit) that you need.

here, I fist resized the goat on the blue axis to a factor 2. then I typed in 2mand now the bounding box is 2m tall. same in length, same in width (in cm this time)

so if you find the almost perfect model but you need to resize it, you don’t have to go all mathematic-y and find the ratio. you can simply use the final dimensions you need :wink:


edit : oh well, I only checked the first video, didn’t see there was a second, it’s basically what I said. :upside_down_face:

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Haha, yeah. I actually had forgotten about typing in the dimension and when i saw the second video, i hurried and added it.

My favorite part of scale tool… Typing -1 and having it flip and mirror the part haha

It also works off of dimensions. Just type the unit after the number.
Edit: @ateliernab beat me to it…

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