#BUcityplanning and Architectural Studies Host Two-Part SketchUp Workshop
On Wednesday 27th September and Wednesday October 4th, two workshops on the 3D Modeling software SketchUp were held. The Workshop was hosted by The City Planning and Urban Affairs Program and sponsored by the Architectural Studies Program. Michael Born, president and owner of Born Illustration Inc. presented and demonstrated the use of SketchUp for a variety of projects. With a Bachelors of Architecture degree from the University of Detroit Mercy, Mr. Born is also the founder of the monthly Boston Society of Architects SketchUp Bootcamp series, which aims to boost proficiency and is open to beginner and intermediate users of the software.
In his presentation before the demonstration, Mr. Born mentioned the importance of modeling things, citing famous architects such as Gehry and Gaudi and the methods they employed to model their projects. Models should be refined before digitizing, which is where SketchUp comes into play.
The advantages of using SketchUp are manifold. Mr. Born emphasized that “storytelling is the idea” and that the software was not
only useful to the user, but also to the client who wanted to view and understand the end product. With SketchUp, users can manipulate a lot of information all at once and use animation, different perspectives, and different angles to accurately visualize the finished product. For example, Mr. Born described how a remodeling project was presented to clients through the use of SketchUp’s animation feature, to help them understand how the current building would look once renovated. By taking the clients through the different steps of the renovation, the user would be able to convey his ideas by telling them a story.
In his demonstration, Mr. Born explained that using SketchUp was as easy as creating a face, and then pushing and pulling to manipulate the width or height. With these directions, the Workshop attendees were encouraged to play around with the software and try out different features. Mr. Born also showed the group how to select certain objects, and advised periodically grouping different objects to prevent stickiness and later complications. In the second session, Mr. Born also expanded on layering and organizing objects, for example, snapshots of google maps and bing maps layered over each other to create a guideline on SketchUp, as well as ghosting images of maps over the snapshots. Mr. Born also linked these ideas to real-life uses, drawing from a video about social life in small urban faces to bridge the gap between learning in class and real world locations and problems.
Article by Meaghan T’ao, CAS ’18
Posters by Jiayu Zhou, CAS ’19
