Comments on: Use a Photo to Make a SketchUp Model

By: John Hutchinson

John Hutchinson — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:47:04 +0000

Hey Bob,
Great approach to the problem! When I faced similar problems while developing illustrations for PopWood, I would always start with the vertical centerline of the image figuring that this was the only true elevation. I would then scale this centerline to the known dimension. My horizontals were created by projecting work lines over the distorted horizontals. I knew that these perspective lines would be true elevations where they passed through that line. I’d then use your average method to set the length of my horizontals. Seems like we’re doing the same thing. Just starting at a different place.
John

By: IronArmadillo

IronArmadillo — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:21:01 +0000

Bob, this exercise is great if you’re trying to do everything exclusively within SketchUp. I have found that squaring an image before before importing it into SketchUp greatly simplifies things. There are a lot of good photo editing software products out there but my favorite is GIMP – which is free use software (www.gimp.org) and it runs on Linux, Windows and Mac. It may not do a lot of the exotic things you can do to photo images but it will do virtually 100% of what most people will commonly use photo editing for. I import the image into GIMP and use the perspective tool to square it front and side. Using these squared images makes it much easier to build a SketchUp model.

By: wphred

wphred — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 23:36:05 +0000

Very clever use of the tool, Bob. Have you heard of the SketchUcation Community newsletter (it’s called Catchup now)? It comes out once a month and is loaded with things people have done using Sketchup. Yeah, there are people selling plugins (no different than buying a book, to me), but there are references to free plugins as well. The latest issue has an evaluation of a cabinet buiding tool, plus there are articles on making dynamic components, and info on materials. If nothing else it can kick start your noggin on how you might go further with Sketchup.