sjrixon wrote: ↑Thu Dec 23, 2021 10:07 am
Been quietly watching with interest. How did you do the bricks on the chimney? They worked really well..
I measured an old brick - probably victorian - and made a "model" of a brick in sketchup. I then traced the drawing of the building to get the outline of the chimney, in 3 dimensions.
I copied the brick which I saved as a "component" and repeatedly pasted it on top of the chimney, moving the bricks around until I covered the outline. I worked out by trial and error that 2 bricks end to end were about the right size for the side of the chimney, and 2 bricks rotated 90 degrees with a brick between them were the same size.
So I literally placed the bricks in the right places with a slight gap between them - just as I would have if I were building a real chimney from bricks.
Finally I reduced the size of the base outline of the chimney by 10% in width and length - but left the height alone. This left the brick joints exposed as if the grouting was that type which leaves a slight gap between bricks. Exaggerated a bit of course but I wanted to define the edges of the bricks.
The stonework was done a bit differently. I photographed some stone walling and imported the photo into sketchup at the correct size. I then traced the stonework on top of the photo using that "Pen" which allows you to draw lines which follow where the mouse goes. Having a set of stones in outline I copied them and placed them on top of one side of the outline of the chimney. Then I pulled each stone 1mm to create the effect of stones joined by the same type of grouting - and deleted the stones which were outside the basic chimney outline.
I hope that makes it clear!
Trevor.
Perhaps I should add something about "nested objects". I often overlap components - as described above. If you use the Inspector software to identify faults in 3 D models it will identify a "nested objects" fault. If you look up that in the help section it says something about nested objects which ends with "sketchup will correctly export an stl file containing nested objects". So I ignore the warning, and the stl files have always printed correctly.