rockwork

Does anyone have a good method for drawing rock forms, glaziers, and the like.We do rockwork drawings for the contractor. These rock forms can be anywhere between 3' to 15' high. They are normally used to suggest hilly and rock sites and are sometimes practical animal barriers to contain zoo animals. There is usually a contours drawing shown for estimating at bid time. There is a character reference guide that shows the rock work rendered or colored in elevation on a grid background. The rockwork drawing also shows a rendered plan version of the rockwork . I am trying to work sketchup into the workflow to achieve this. Any suggestions? I have some ideas. But I would like to here yours.

lap

Cut tiny low poly parts out of high poly scans of natural surfaces. There are lots of sample scans downloadable from the scanner manufacuteres sites, university sites and so on.

Another option is to create a 2d flatbed scan of wrinkled aluminium foil, convert raster image to vector outlines using one of the many available vectorizing utilities, import into sketchup and push, pull, cut, paste, erase to the right 3D structure. The randomizer ruby scripts can help a lot (or mess it up)

I'm working on a script called subdivide.rb. With this script, you could start with a cube, and then add lines with the script to impose a grid of lines of your choice (2X3, 4x4, 2000x5000, etc.) on each face of the cube. Then, the move tool could be used, or, another script written to randomly move vertices in or out to give the cube an organic shape. It's still a work in progress, but I expect to finish it in the next month or so.

Todd

Quoting maggy:

Cut tiny low poly parts out of high poly scans of natural surfaces. There are lots of sample scans downloadable from the scanner manufacuteres sites, university sites and so on.

Another option is to create a 2d flatbed scan of wrinkled aluminium foil, convert raster image to vector outlines using one of the many available vectorizing utilities, import into sketchup and push, pull, cut, paste, erase to the right 3D structure. The randomizer ruby scripts can help a lot (or mess it up)

Maggy,

Do you have any sketchup examples of what you are referring to?

Here's a Push/Pull method of growing rocks. The sandbox tools would be useful too. Smoove and Smoove+Shift (works normal to the face) work on stuff made outside of the sandbox and with hidden geometry turned on. Setting up the offset feature of Smoove helps to control smooving. Selecting bits and using the script nudge.rb from smustard.com is yet another way to move things around.

this attachment is a nice start, using more or less random push pull move cut and paste on this more or less random grid it allows to create all kinds of rocky surfaces.This is actually a part of a height map of Amsterdam, because that's what I'm working on right now, but scanned human skin and wrinkled tin foil look vey similar.

For the broken edge of a glacier it's better to get hold of a scan of long human hair, turn upside down for the glacier effect. I do have some but they are huge. Near lots of tourist attractions in Holland are shops where you can get your 3D picture burnt in a square block of crystal glass; don't know if they are in tourist centers around the globe. Their scans are relatively low poly. If you tell them what you need it for maybe you can have some scans for free?

wrinkles.skp