Presentation 2: Google Sketch-up

Build a house with Google SketchUp. Upgrade your School building to be the tallest and the most colorful or weird looking in the world! Then place your buildings on Google Earth (either your school location or some spectacular places such as Grand Canyon, Liberty Island, next to Stature of Liberty, Manhattan or even on top of Mount Evenerest. Fly over them with Google Earth to see what they look like.

Requirement

Google Earth, Google SketchUp, Fast internet connection

Preparation

Learn to build with Google SketchUp, in particular, figuring out in which plane you create a shape – sometimes you may be tricked into thinking that your shape resides in one plane while you see a projection of a completely different shape. Make sure to turn the object every time you make changes to see that it is what you want.

Objects that are not at the right angle may be difficult to build. For example, the roof on a house, a chimney that is not perpendicular to the angled roof. You may want to figure out how to do that.

Being able to create twisted shapes is a plus. You may need to go through SketchUp tutorial to find out what you can do.

Once you create a building, fill it out with textures. For best results, push the windows in the walls by a few inches, or vice versa, pull them out, it will create an original shape. Use transculent materials (glass) on the windows – it will show the inside of the building and you can even see the windows on the other side.

Complete one window the way you want it, then select it and copy / paste. Once you have a few select them all and copy paste to another wall.

This is how you can create a house with an angular roof:

There is an easier way to do it: make the building taller than needed, then draw an angular roof on one of the sides.

Then push the extra triangle to the opposite end of the house so that it disappears:

The last step is to put the building in Google Earth. This link describes in detail how to do it

http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=36241

In short, use Google Earth to select a view where you want the building to be, then import the view into sketch up, update the position of the building with regards to terrain (make sure to click the "terrain" button in Sketch up toolbar). Last, upload your building to Google Earth. Now you can fly around your new building in Google Earth.

Presentation

Google Sketch up opens up with a man standing in the middle of nowhere. I suggested that the man needs a house. So initially we built a small house for him, selecting textures, putting windows on the wall, building a roof.

If you try to pull off chimney from the angular roof you'll get something like that:

The right way would be to create chimney outside of the building, select it and move onto the roof:

Once we were done with the house, we decided to change the way our school building looks. The school is called Windmill Montessori so we built something of the shape of a windmill

I didn't have much time so this was a quick sketch.

Before that I practiced to build windmill shape with my son, this is the one we got:

Here are a few more ideas for the new school:

1. Hanging garden or a garden on a roof

2. Pool

Here are the schools we built in other classes: