SketchUp RUINATION!!

KaBOOOOOM!!!

How many times have you seen that in a script/movie/streaming series/TV show? (Enough already with the slashes…) Oodles is my guess.

I have been doing this for well over thirty years and I can tell you two things: It sucks to be middle-aged, and stuff gets blown up in movies. But how do you design ruined stuff? Well, you start with a digital model (everything starts with a model these days) which gets turned into illustrations, VR presentations, and sometimes even little tiny physical models made of foam core. Then all that gets changed a dozen times by people who make more money than you do. Then you make working drawings of it to hand over to beardy guys with tools; with the tiny foam core model, provided anything remains of it from getting changed a dozen times. (And folks call me cynical).  The beardy guys carve slabs of foam the size of small dinosaurs into stuff that looks like your model so actors can complain about how uncomfortable it is to hang in your set from a stunt harness for six hours (Whiners).

Forget about everything past the Digital model. For now. SketchUp excels at ruined stuff. Well, so do other programs. But you can’t always use them to make reasonable working drawings, it isn’t quick, and I don’t use ‘em. So there. This tutorial covers all the ways you can break, bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate things in SketchUp. Then I show you how to make working drawings from them. If you do your job right, you can 3D print them and even run a 7-axis router from them. It isn’t that hard, actually. SketchUp has tools that make the process speedy and painless (certainly it’s less painful than sitting through this blurb).

Over 7-hours of tutorials in this package will teach you to use SketchUp’s native terrain modeling and Boolean tools to create ruined buildings and objects. It will cover Ruined stone buildings, broken concrete, and rebar and the use of premade debris ramps. It will also cover how to bend and dent components like tin roofing and “I”-Beams. There is also a brief lecture on the ways to describe ruined things to the beardy guys so they don’t come after you with a skill-saw. That alone is worth the price of admission.

This tutorial requires SketchUp Pro. You can use any version of SketchUp Pro, back to SUPro 2018, but Trimble only supports versions 2021, 2022, and 2023, so the more current you are the better.

The package Includes: 

Over 7 hours of video tutorials

Sketchup and Layout 2018 files of all the study models and components used in the tutorial videos.