Location, Location, Location!

Location, location, location! How many times have you heard that one? Well, my friends, if you have come within sniffing distance of a motion picture art department (it smells of triple espressos and despair, BTW), you know that half your time will be spent fighting traffic across town to a location shoot. And don’t think that just because everyone thinks this particular coffee shop is the perfect coffee shop, it ends there; no siree-Bob! These puppies have to be surveyed, measured, photographed, and made into drawings that everyone throws in the trash bin! Actually, a bunch of folks don’t circular file your location drawings, and for those saintly souls we keep on doing what it is we do best-making location drawings.

This three-hour tutorial teaches you (yes, you) how to use SketchUp and Trimble Layout to make exterior location plans using SketchUp’s built-in Geolocation feature. Yes, SketchUp has a little, nerdy, Google Earth built right into it! And this is the place to come if you want to learn how to use it to make location drawings. We will also cover new toolbars for sculpting terrain, and how to use the real Google Earth to goose a lackluster satellite image (that happens sometimes, but we don’t talk about it too much to spare SketchUp’s feelings).

This supplement requires that you have SketchUp Pro as well as Trimble Layout. 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. We will be accessing the Extension Warehouse so, more current versions of SU are better, even though there are legacy versions of some of the plugins we need.

The package Includes:

2+ hours of video tutorials

Sketchup 2018 files of our terrain block and topo lines for making terrain.

A high-res terrain image for desktop as used in the tutorial.

Templates for directors and location plans (both in metric and Imperial) with drawing symbols.

Finished Layout file of the main project.