Making Terrain in SketchUp

So, two Rhino operators, two VectorWorks gurus, and a Sketchup dude walk into an Art Department. The Art Director Says “We have a cliff/moonscape/mine shaft/cave/dungeon-carved-from-solid-rock, that has to go on stage fifteen, who can do that?”.

The two Rhino people say, “My workflow isn’t really set up for that,” as they go into the kitchen for a bag of junk food, “it’ll take a week.”

The two VectorWorks operators back away. “Oh, man,” they say, “VectorWorks may have the tools somewhere but I have no idea how they work.”

The designer who works in SketchUp is left standing in the middle of the department bullpen and the Art Director says, “I guess you drew the short straw, Dan.”

Dan, the SketchUp dude, answers. “Sure, I’ll have it in two days.”

Ok. So that isn’t a very funny joke, but that happens to me. All. The. Time.

Why? Or in my case, why ME?

I have been doing this a long time (as I keep saying), and My experience is that the SketchUp operator often gets this job. SketchUp is not Z-Brush or Modo, but it doesn’t have to be. When actors are strapped into a stunt harness and dangled from it for hours at a time, it's a set, not CG. Those sets need to be modeled and drawn, and SketchUp has a surprisingly useful toolset to do lumpy stuff as well as architecture.

If SketchUp does ruins, it’ll do cliffs and tunnels. Yes, so do other programs. But you can’t always use them to make reasonable working drawings, or you can but it isn’t quick. Not even a little bit. This tutorial covers all the ways you can build rocky, dirty terrain-y stuff in SketchUp. Then it shows you how to make working drawings from them. SketchUp has tools that make the process wicked fast and accurate. It actually isn’t that hard, but you have to know how…

The almost five hours of tutorials in this package will teach you to use SketchUp’s native terrain modeling and Solids Tools to create…well…terrain (you seem surprised?). It will cover SketchUp’s built-in Sandbox Tools and how to use them to model horizontal and vertical terrain. It will also cover a method using premade rocks and SketchUp’s native Solids Tools to make craggy cliffs. There is also a tutorial on how to turn those terrain modules into working drawings for the beardy guys with the tools. Because if they don’t know what you want, they can’t build it now, can they?

This tutorial requires Both a working knowledge of SketchUp Pro and a working knowledge of SketchUp’s companion CAD package 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.

The package Includes: 

Over 4 3/4 hours of video tutorials

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

Trimble Layout 2018 files of the finished drawings as well as drawing templates in both Imperial and Metric.