At home with SketchUp

Behind SketchUp's simple interface lies a powerful toolset waiting to be unleashed. You already know how to create complex models by extruding faces, using inferences, and adding slick entourage, but there is more to explore.

Using SketchUp Pro 5, you'll learn professional techniques for project collaboration, methods for building terrain models, and how to create your own signature rendering style.

This three-lesson course focuses on the tools you'll need to work professionally with SketchUp, starting with importing from other common programs, like AutoCAD. You'll clean up 2D CAD plans within SketchUp and transform them into accurate, attractive 3D models. SketchUp Pro's Sandbox toolset is introduced—you'll use it to sculpt terrain and building sites from scratch and using plans. Finally, you'll learn how SketchUp is used with other rendering software, and how to create a signature rendering style combining SketchUp and Photoshop techniques.

Jim Dodson, architect and Sessions 3D authority, has developed this course with the professional SketchUp user in mind. He'll guide you through the software with high-level techniques, and let you use your imagination with challenging hands-on projects.

LESSON 2 Enter the Sandbox You can create some pretty complex buildings at this stage of your SketchUp experience, but what about the environment around them? You'll work with terrain modeling in Lesson Two, using the SketchUp Pro Sandbox tools to sculpt smooth meshes from scratch and from contours. You'll use additional Sandbox tools to add details and create level building surfaces. Combining what you learned in the first two lessons, the exercise will challenge you to create detailed terrain based on CAD plans and add your cabin to this new environment.