Using SketchUp Pro in Garden Design - How to Create Powerful Garden Presentations

1. Course Introduction: Hi, I'm Rob Little Page, and I'm a landscape architect and educator. And I'm the author of the Fundamentals of garden Design. And the chapter on design approach is included within the resources for this course. Now I've been using sketch up to do design presentation for clients for over 25 years. And I found that being able to do a three dimensional presentation to a client is a very powerful tool. Now I've broken this course into three sections or categories. The first seven lectures are going to be on how to import files into sketch up itself, whether you're working with PDF or Autocad files or drawing your design, your site survey directly into the sketch up program. The next five lectures are going to be on design development and actually creating your design. And we're going to start that on paper. And then finally, we're going to take this conceptual design and we're going to draw it into sketch up and refine the drawing as we go. This course is for beginning and intermediate users of Sketch Up. I'm not going to be discussing how to download or install the program onto your computer. You should already be familiar with that process and you should have some familiarity with the program itself. Also, I'm going to be using Sketch up Pro, so I'm going to have some file import options, meaning Autocad files that you won't have that option if you're using sketch up free. Now, I've created this course to help you become more creative in developing your own landscape designs. And we'll be concentrating on the conceptual design, whether it be for friends, family, or for an actual client. Now your project will be to develop two alternative design solutions for one single property. Whether you use the base plan that I'm going to provide to you in resources or a project of your own choosing. So we've got a lot to cover in this course and I'm excited to have you here. So let's get started and I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Importing Files: Hi, in this lecture we're just going to recap what I was talking about in the last lecture about the different file types that you can bring into sketch up. Now this is aside from your drawing your site survey directly in sketch up itself. Typically what I work with is I will have an architect or a developer, they will send me, e mail me a set of plans that are in a PDF format. And since Sketch Up will not accept PDF directly, I have to export that as an image. And I'll use Adobe Acrobat and just simply bring that PDF into Adobe. Then I will go over to File, Export, choose Image. I'll take Jpeg, and then I can export it as a Jpeg. Now I can bring it in to sketch up directly. And now I have to trace it. But I do have all of the dimensions, everything is there. It makes it pretty easy to work with. The other option is to have a DWG file, an Autocad file. This I can import directly into sketch up, but as I mentioned in the last lecture, it's going to come with a lot of extra information that I don't necessarily need to have. Maybe it's the interior of the house, how the rooms are laid out, all of the different setbacks and such that I may not need for doing my landscape design. I'm going to have to go in and turn those certain layers off so I can clean up the plan and have what I need to work with all the extra noise involved with that. And I'm going to be breaking all of this down over the next two or three lectures where I'm going to show how I do this process individually. Each one takes a little bit of time. I'm probably going to break this out as far as using PDF to Jpeg and bringing that into Sketch up. As well as DWG bringing that into Sketch up and then turning the layers off and cleaning that drawing up. I want to make these lectures concise and I want them to be enjoyable and I don't want them to drag on. I want you to get the information you want and the information that you need. And then we're going to move on. Let's just jump into it and we're going to be doing a lot of screen capture from here on. As I show you what I'm doing in sketch up directly. That's where we're going and I will see you in a bit in the next lecture. Thanks. 3. Converting a PDF to an Image File: All right, here we have a PDF that was e mailed to me. I cannot import a PDF directly into Sketch Up, it just won't support this format. I have done some redactions on this plan because this is an actual client. That's why you see all the black bars in here. But I'm working with Adobe Acrobat Pro. And because of that, I can do some exporting. If I come up to file and go to export to image, I say Jpeg, Then I can leave this over into a Jpeg. I've got it in my file for revised plans and I'm just going to go ahead and say save. It's saving it as a J peg at this point. The nice thing about this is now I've got it in a format that I'm going to be able to work with within sketch up. If I open up my sketch up and I have already gone to camera, I'm in top view and I'm in parallel projection. What I'm doing is I am treating this as if it were just a sheet of paper on my drawing board. And I'm going to go file and I'm going to go to import. Now I have this brought into sketchup, and this is a Jpeg, an image file. One thing you want to do when you're working with images and sketch up is make sure, go to Window, go to Preferences at open GL. You want to use maximum texture size, that's going to give you the cleanest picture that you're going to have to work with. I have done that. When I zoom in using the scroll wheel, you can see I've got a pretty image file, but there's a lot of stuff in here that I'm not going to need. Now, one thing about it being an image file is that I'm going to have to actually trace the footprint of this building. Before I do that, I want to keep my drawing organized and I'm going to come over here and I'm going to set up a series of tags. One of them is going to be my image file. I'm going to have one. I'm going to call my base plan. Get that right. Finally I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to have trees. These are my tags there used to be called layers, Basically the same thing. And I'm going to come in and I'm going to grab my line tool and I'm going to start drawing. And I'm going to draw on the face of the image. I always have my axis lines showing the red and green. It helps keep me oriented. I can come down, I trace this as closely as I can. I'm just going to run this up to the top, then back to there. Okay, I've just closed this out. I'm just going to clean that up. Now my image, I'm going to come up and I'm going to put this on the image layer. If I turn this image off now there's the property lines that I just drew. I'm going to turn the image back on and I'm going to come back on the interior. And I'm going to, just now, I'm going to walk my way around and do the entire footprint of my building. This is where it can get a little tedious, but if you're working with a PDF and you're importing a J peg, then this is literally what you're going to have to do. It's just working your way around. I'm going to come along and I've just closed my house, now I've got my footprint. If I turn the image off, that's what we're looking at. But now I have to size this because sketch up doesn't know what the real dimensions are yet. Well, my dimensions are 176.49 feet. But if I hit the tape measure tool and I measure it on that line, it's saying it's only seven feet, 4 ". I'm going to type in my value of 176 point. 49 feet and hit enter. Do I want to resize the model? Yes, I do, I'm going to resize that. I'm going to go to zoom extents. Now I have a property line that measures what it's supposed to be, 76 feet, 176 feet, 5.78 ". I'm going to do that now. I can come back into the interior of my house. I can hit the offset tool on my keyboard and I can pull this in. And I'm just going to hit six for six inch wall. Now that's going to give me a little bit of a wall and I can delete the interior. Now if I look at my image again, there's that and I know it's the right dimensions. And then I'm going to continue on and trace where the walkways are, where the pool and spa is. I'm going to show you the final drawing of this. I'll trace in where the rock walls are. I'm also going to be tracing in where all of the trees are. What I'm going to do real quick is I'm going to turn this. Whoa, and I didn't want to do that. I'm going to just capture all of this. I'm going to make it a group because I want to keep its geometry separate. I also want to put this on my base plan layer. Now I can turn my image back on if I want to. I could turn the base plan off, I don't have to. But now I'm going to just come in and put some bookmarks where all of the trees are. As I go through all of this, this is really just to give me an idea of where these existing trees that have to remain on the property are going to be. As I go along, I can turn the image off, I can turn the base plan off. Now I can come in, I can make these a group, and that keeps that geometry, and I will finish off the rest of the trees that need to be filled in. These guys all the way around and put them all on the same group. But now I'm going to put these on the tree layer and we'll see why I'm doing it this way in an upcoming lecture. That's how I'm going to proceed with this. I'm going to pause the recording for a few moments and finish this up, and then we'll take a look at what it looks like overall. Let's just do a quick pause. Here we are back, and now I have all of the trees earmarked in here. They are all on their own layer. There's the layer for the hard scape and the property lines going around. If I want to turn off the hardscape, then that's going to disappear. If I want to turn off the trees, they're going to disappear. If I need the image back, then I can bring that back as well. But right now, this is what I need to work with and my dimensions are there. That's pretty much it. On getting a PDF converted to a Jpeg and then working with it to create something you can actually start designing on inside of sketch up. Okay, we'll have a quick recap and then we're gonna go on to the next lecture. 4. SketchUp into Layout - Importing and Scaling Your Model: We're going to be talking about moving our sketch up model into layout. You may be asking, why are we doing it this way? I thought this was a class in learning how to design in sketch up it is. But to design properly, you're going to have to have scale drawing to work with. We're going to scale that drawing in layout. That's why I'm using sketch up 2022. What we're going to look at here is I've got all the trees, they are on their own group and they are on the trees tag. We have the hardscape and property lines. I've got that on the hardscape tag. Just for one final reference, I'm going to bring up the image. If you look around, you're going to see that we have a north arrow down here that I have not included on the hardscape. It's not there, but I want to know which direction north is. I want that on my plan. What I'm going to do as I'm going to click on the hardscape group tag and I'm going to double click that. And I get a bounding box going around and I want to get this in oriented. I'm going to zoom down and I'm going to get my line tool, and I'm going to bring that down and click. And you can see the bounding box has now expanded to include this new geometry that I'm putting in. I go like that. Now I can turn the image layer off. Now I know which direction my north orientation is. Now this north arrow is within the hardscape group. But if I highlight this, you'll see it says untagged. Even though it's within the group, it's not technically on that tag layer. Now I can do that now if I turn off the hard escape that Nor Theo disappears. I'm going to hit Save. I'm going to open up layout and I'm going to be importing my file into layout. We've already set the dimensions in the sketch up model, now we just need to get it scaled. I'm going to come in and I think I'm going to use architectural D, because I want a 24 by 36 sheet of paper and I want my title bar on the right hand side. I'm going to click on that. That's going to bring that up for me. Now I can come over and go Insert Trees and Hardscape only is what I had named this file. I'm going to open this. Here's my sketch up model. Now in layout with whatever information it came in with. I'm going to do a double click and pull this down. Now you can see it's highlighted. And I'm going to go to sketch up model. I'm going to go, I don't want it to be a raster, I want it to be a vector file. I also want to select the scale. I'm going to, I can choose from any number, but if I check 1 " equals ten feet, then I've still got it scaled. Now I've got some room all the way around to work with, and I can come into style. I'm going to get rid of the background because I want it to be white. I'm going to move it just a little bit to the left so I have a little more room for information here on this right hand side. If I click on this one more time, I can confirm my scale is still 1 " equals ten feet. Now I want to come in and do I want to keep the trees looking the way they are? For my purposes, that is a possibility. I certainly can do that. Or I can put in something that's a little more artistic to do that. I'm going to go ahead and collapse this, and I'm going to go to Scrapbooks. There's a whole assortment of different things in here. Your trees, simple branch, all of them. They're in plan view, they're in elevation view. I'm going to go with trees. Plan view and I'm just going to take the assortment and look at it. I'll grab this one for an example. I can put this in. If I just left click once and then move my mouse, I can populate all of these all the way around. It doesn't matter that it's the same symbol, because I'm just using this as a representation of existing trees on the lot. I'd put all of that there. I can hit the escape button, and that frees me up from repeating all of these. Now I can come in and use the scale, and I'll hold down the shift key and bring this out to where it looks like it's about the right size. And place it, that's pretty close. And I'm going to do the same thing with all of these. I'll pull this out and put it back. Now I've got this going all the way around. I'm not going to necessarily do all of this at this one time because I'm sure you get the idea of what I'm working on. I'm going to move this back down. Once I have done all of this, I don't need these circles anymore. I'm just going to go file save. But let's see, I'm just going to call this my example two. I'll save that now. I don't need to keep this. I could do better than that. I'm going to jump over here and I'm going to go to arrows, and I'm going to go to north arrows. And I'm going to just pick one that I think is going to work nicely. I'll just pick this one, for example. And I can take this and I'm going to, if I hit the escape key, then repeating itself now I can turn that. There's a little knob right there that if I left click now I can turn this and have it oriented similar to what this is doing here. I can go ahead holding the shift key down, I can make that a little bit bigger and set it where I need it, and it looks like it needs to be rotated just a little bit more. That looks pretty good. I'm going to go file save now. I want to get rid of all the stuff that I don't need. I'm going to come back to my sketch up. I am going to turn off the trees layer and I'm going to go into edit mode. So I double click on the hardscape group. I'm going to just simply highlight that. I'm going to delete it. Bounding box closes down. I'm going to go File Save. Now I can come back to my layout and I can go to File Document Set up references trees and Hardscape. I'll highlight that. I'll update it. Hit Purge. Now all of those extra trees are gone because I turned that layer off and I've got my north arrow oriented. Now I can come in and fill in all of my title block just by double clicking onto this. Then I can fill in whatever information that I need at that point. Once I have this completed, then I'm going to come and I'm going to go file. And I'm going to export this. And I'm going to export it as a PDF. And the reason I'm doing that is because I want to have it printed out at a local copy shop at the size that I'm working with. I don't need. I'll hit high. I'm going to export it now in Adobe Acrobat Pro. I've got this here, it's ready to be printed. I can go ahead. It's saved as example number two. I could just put this into an e mail to my local copy shop. They'll print it out. Now I've got something I can put a piece of trace paper over the top of and I can start actually doing my design. And we're going to be doing that within this course, but this is how I'm getting started with working with sketch in garden design. I need to have a scale drawing to work with and that's how we're going to get to that and how we can print it out. Anyway, that's pretty much it for this lecture. And we'll have a quick recap here in a moment and then I will see you in a bit. Thanks. 5. Importing AutoCad Files into SketchUp Part 1: All right, in this lecture we're going to start talking about how to bring an Autocad file into sketch up. And this is going to work with sketch up Pro. If you're using sketch up free, you're not going to be able to do this. It doesn't support Autocad imports. I'm going to break this lecture into two parts. The first, I just want to keep it tight. I don't want to have a whole lot of time going into one individual lecture. I'm going to bring an Autocad drawing into this. And I'm just going to get started by taking George, as I've named him and take him out of the picture. And I'm going to go to file and import. I've got my civil plan. Notice it says down here, Untitled. I want to make sure I click on the file. I want to import. And I'm going to look at some options that are available. Mostly it's these three boxes up here. And I'm going to keep all of them tick. So where I can bring this information in, this one box here, preserve drawing origin would be if I was bringing in more than one Autocad layer file. It just helps to keep everything oriented. I'm just bringing in the one file, so I'm not going to worry about it then. As far as my scale in units I work in feet and inches imperial. So I'm going to use feet. But if you're using metric, then you have the option of meters. I'll keep feet. I'll say, okay and I'm going to go import. It tells me it brought in 71 layers and it did ignore some of the Autocad entities. And that's fine, I don't need that. And I'm going to go close now, I've got our Autocad drawing in. You see there's two sets of geometry here. I've got this up on the top and the main site plan at the bottom. I click on that, and this whole unit is a group. If I take a look at this a little bit closer and zoom in, then I see this upper bit of geometry or the contour lines the civil engineer had put into their Autocad drawing. Well, I don't need that. But before I get rid of it, I want to come over here to my tags and I want to make sure that everything that's within the Autocad file is visible. Some of these layers are hidden. And I'm going to just going to come down and make sure they're all on because when I do this, it just keeps it a lot cleaner. I'll just jump through here and get all of this done. Okay, They're all visible now. All the layers are activated. Now I'm going to come up here and click on this. And I'm going to right click, and I'm going to explode this. I can highlight just the contours and I'm going to delete those. I don't need those right now. I'm going to come down here, I'm going to look at my drawing now, because I'm going to be manipulating this geometry, I'm going to come back in and I'm going to make it a group. Again, the axis of my blue, green, and red orientations is right here. So the origin, since I want to look at this from a design standpoint as a sheet of paper on my drawing board, I'm just going to come in and go into top and parallel projection. I'm going to come down and I want to square the house footprint to my drawing axis. I'm going to come in fairly tight. I'm going to get to tap the M key for the move tool and I'm going to grab it right at this corner. I'm going to pull this down to where my origin is, where my axis is, left Click to anchor it, then I'm going to come over and grab my rotate tool. And I'll click at that origin point. I'll click again right there. And I'll zoom in tight now. My house is square to the axis. Now, it's just like I'm looking at a sheet of paper. And I want to come in and start cleaning this up. I've got a lot of geometry in here that I don't need to have that I don't need to be looking at. What I'm going to do is rather than explode and erase this, just in case I do want to have access to this at a later time, I'm going to just turn the layers off. Now, I could come in and explode this from a group and literally erase everything. But if I erase the wrong thing, then I'm going to have to try to figure out how to recreate it. I would rather just step over and start looking at what I can get rid of. I'll zoom in a little tighter here. I've got some dark lines right up in here. Well, I'm going to turn off the temporary tree fencing. Notice if I turn off that line disappears. That gets rid of some of the geometry that I don't need to look at. I'm going to go ahead and turn off a bunch of this. Sometimes when you're doing this, you're not going to know what you're turning off until you've done it and you look at it and decide if you want to keep it or not. This is trees. If I turn this off, what I'm actually turning off, and I don't realize it at this point, is that I'm turning off the trees that are going to remain on the property. That's fine because since I'm not erasing them, I can always turn this layer back on whenever I need to. I'm going to turn that off because then as I eliminate other bits of geometry, I can see what they are a little bit better. I'm going to t that off, I'm going to turn this off. I just go back and forth and look at my Autocad as I'm doing this so I can get a better feel for what's being turned off and it just works my way through. This takes a few moments to do, but I'm going to do this and record the whole thing. You can just see what's happening. This Autocad file is in the resources. If you haven't already done it, then at the top of this section, I have section resources and everything that I'm working with in here will be available for you to download and work with. I'm just going to keep working my way down and think about what I want to keep and what I don't notice. Okay. Those are just points, setback lines. This setback is lines that are in close to the house for landscaping purposes. I don't need to that street right of way, I'm going to keep that. I want to know where my street is, where the curb is. The rest of my easements, those dashed lines, I'm going to get rid of those. The center line of the road, I don't need that. These are just calculations that the surveyor was using. Now, the boundary, that's my property line. I don't want to get rid of that water service. Notice that line. This line right here. When I hit water, service disappears. I don't want that invisible. I want to keep that. Now, this V ditch, this is drainage around the exterior of the property. If I click on that, I can take that out. I'm going to leave that out for now. Then here's the trees that are to be removed and I'm going to take those. That clears up a lot of geometry right there. Okay. That's the sanitary sewer line. I may or may not need that. I'm going to go ahead and leave it for now. I definitely want to keep the retaining walls. This grade is going to be for proposed grades when they're doing the building pad, and I don't need to see any of these for my purposes. I am going to the gas and electric lines, I'm going to keep the driveway, I don't want to lose that now. This is a revised version of this plan, has the old architecture in. If I take that out, it cleans that up a lot, miscellaneous points, I don't need those. I definitely want to keep the house. The rest of that can go now. We have a fairly clean drawing that we can work with. It's still in a group. And that's fine. That's where we're going to leave this lecture at this point, because we're starting to get into almost 11 minutes. And I'm going to go ahead and close this out. We're going to come back to this same drawing in the next lecture. And we're going to finish cleaning it up and working with this to be able to work with it in sketch up directly. Okay, that's it for now and I will see you in a bit. 6. Importing AutoCAD Files Part 2: In this one we're going to start cleaning up some of this geometry that we imported in for landscaping purposes. I don't need to see all of the interior walls and some of the different architecture and geometry that was brought in. With this, I'm going to go ahead and click and that activates the group. I'm going to double click. There's my bounding box. I know I'm in edit mode at this point. I'm going to go through and just start cleaning up some of the geometry that I don't need to see in my drawing. Then I can zoom in. Now you're going to want to pay attention to where the exterior of the property is and or the footprint of the house. Then also this is like the Eve line going over where there's a garage coming in, The Eve line, do I really need to see that? Probably not. But let's start by cleaning up the interior of the house. This is something that just takes some time and you just have to go slow, take a look at it, see what you want to keep and what you don't. Here's the exterior footprint of the home so I can come in and clean a lot of this geometry out. And it just helps save time. And when you start bringing in planned trees, elevations and such, the less geometry that you don't need, well, the better. I'm just going to keep going through and cleaning some of this up. Here's the exterior coming around so I can go ahead and clean a lot of this. Notice when I did that, I'm going to lose part of this wall right here. That's going to be inevitable when I'm doing this. And I'm just going to have to come back and draw this back in with when I get this cleaned up. I'll just go ahead and shoot through this and then we can take a look at it here once I get it completed. The exterior of the house is right here. This is a covered patio. I don't want to lose like the outdoor fireplace and this access to the patio area, but this I can get rid of. Then zooming in again so I can see what I'm looking at. I can clean that up. This just a little covered area, I can clean that. This is like a shower. I don't need to see that. For my purposes, again, this just takes a little bit of time to come through and clean it up the way you want to see it zooming in and out using the scroll wheel. If I do my left click and drag from right to left, then I'm getting all the geometry that that touches and I don't necessarily have to get a complete set. I can just clean that up there. This one I can clean up that way. I can clean this one up that way I don't need this interior door. I don't need that. I don't need that. Then the exterior of the home is coming around this way. Here we're seeing like a bathtub and the toilet. I don't need to see any of that. For my purposes, I'm just going to delete all of that. The exterior of the house is coming around and over in this direction, all of this geometry, I see I can take this. It's better to just zoom in and out and take your time with it, rather than trying to do absolutely everything all at once. You get the gist of what I'm doing here. I'm just trying to get all of this cleaned up and I can go through and clean this as much as I feel I need to. For my purposes, I know that the retaining wall actually connects this line here. I don't need it. I don't need some of this. And I can do the cross hatch and get a lot of this again, just keep cleaning it out. And. As necessary. Zoom in really tight so you can really hone in on what you're trying to work with and eliminate out of this. Now notice I still have a little bit of a line right there from that piece of wall that I just took out. I'm just going to hit for my Erase tool and take that out. Then the space bar gets me my selection tool back. I'm going to pull this down. Go ahead and take out as much of this as I possibly can notice, there's a little bit of discrepancy right here that's on a hidden layer. So what I'm going to have to do, once I go over that, see it's still there and it's going to be there until I figure out what layer that is, it says it's on the tree fence temporary layer. Okay. So if I went to tree fence temporary layer and turned that on, now I'm going to hit for erase and I'm going to take that out. And now I'm going to turn the tree fence off again and that line is gone. Now I can come over now. This is the swimming pool and spa area. I don't need to see all of the different architecture on the interior. I know this whole area is going to be water. I can just come through and start taking some of this out because again, it's just cleaning up the geometry that I don't need to necessarily be seeing. For my purposes, I can get rid of that. That's like a little spigot come in and get rid of that. Oops. And making sure I only grab what I want to grab eventually, I don't need to see the drain in the bottom of the pool. I'm going to have all of this cleaned up the way I want some of this architecture. I'm going to have to go back and forth and really look at it. Then I can hit L from my line tool and connect onto that connect on that. I don't need to see that that's some hidden geometry. I can go through and clean all of this up. Now I've drawing that's going to be a little more realistic to work with my boundaries just look like lines. It's like what exactly are these? But if I come over to the boundary layer and you see it shows it as a solid line. Well, if I want it to look more like a property line, then I can select and change my property line all the way along my street, right away, which is right here. Well, maybe I don't want that to look just like a solid line again. Maybe I want to go ahead and make that a dash line. I can just select that. Now I'm starting to get something that's looking a little more realistic to what I want. I know that from the engineer drawings, this is indicating a step coming into the front porch that does not exist. So I'm going to take that out. I also know from conversation that this gate right here, this wall does not exist or fence line, I should say does not exist. I'm just going to take that out. Then I would come back and start looking at the engineers drawing again, any changes that may have come through from the developer or the homeowner, wherever you acquired this and make those changes. This wall needs to be connected, this line needs to be connected. You see it's being hidden now, because I've got hidden layers in here, I'm going to stop this lecture here at 10 minutes because there's one other way that we can skin this cat. And we're going to take a look at that. And then we're going to be moving on into drawing directly into sketch up, Let's take a short break and then we're going to come back and look at one more way to clean up the geometry in this particular Autocad file. Okay, thanks for watching. I will see you in a bit. 7. Another Way to Edit AutoCAD Files: In this lecture, we're going to look at a different way to clean up our drawing. And not have any hidden geometry that could cause problems on down the road, depending on how you're going to work with your sketch up drawing later on. Right now, what I want to look at is, here is our house, our footprint of the house, the driveway and such. I have all of the layers that I want hidden. Of course, turned off. For example, if I click the temporary tree fencing, then this dark line right around here comes back in. And I don't need to see that for my purposes, that's just for protection purposes during the grading of the pad and protecting the existing or the trees that will be allowed to remain. Right now, all of this is turned off and what we are seeing is what I would like to have remain for my purposes in doing the landscaping landscape design. A different way of doing this rather than like in the last lecture. I simply went through and hid these different portions of the geometry, like the center line of the road and so on. But the thing is, even though they're hidden, the geometry is still under there. It's still an underlying factor that can cause problems on down the road, depending on how you want to tackle this. What I'm going to do in this instance is I'm going to reveal everything that is currently hidden, and I'm going to hide everything that I want to save. This will make sense in a little bit. What I'm going to do is I'm going to come in and I'm going to start bringing different elements back in. Now, the house, I want to save that, I'm going to turn that off. Then miscellaneous points. The old part of the house, I'm going to bring that of the geometry driveway goes away. The electric the gas, and then these proposed grades come back in. The retaining wall, sanitary sewer, the V ditch comes back in. The water service, I'm going to hide that, the boundary or the property lines, I'm going to hide those. Now I can speed this up. Instead of going to each individual eyeball, I can come in and click on one, hold my shift key down, go up, click on that. Now I've highlighted those, and I can bring all those up the street right of way. I want to save that. I'm going to take it out then I'll just bring this up. They are a setback. Now, these are the trees that are to remain. I'm going to again, hold the shift key down, click release the shift key, and then click again, bring all this geometry back in the trees I want to save or that are going to be saved. I'm going to turn those off. Then I'll finally do this last bit, right up to where the temporary tree fencing is. We've got that now. All of the geometry that I want to save is hidden. All the geometry that I don't need to have for my purposes, I have revealed and I'm going to explode this. I just did a right click on it and exploded it. Then if I out, I can come across all of this. Hit the delete key. Now all of this unnecessary geometry is gone. All except this right in here, this is all embedded in the gas and electric line. This is embedded in the water service. If you zoom in tight and then click on one of these, you can see the tag says water service. If I come over to say this one, it's going to tell me that's on the gas tag and this one is going to be on the electric. How do I get rid of those? I'm going to come down here. I'm going to go to gas and electric. I'm going to reveal these now I can come in, zoom in tight, hit for erase, and walk my way through and clean that up if I zoom out, because I know I've got some more. Here's some stuff over here again. Just get up there and get your cursor to it, click on it and then take a look over under your entity info. It's going to tell me this is on the sanitary sewer, and the sanitary sewer is right here. If I click on that, then that brings that in. Now, for my purposes, I kept this in originally. I don't necessarily need to do that. I think I'm just going to go ahead and delete all of that out. I do want to keep the gas and electric. I do definitely want to keep the water service on these. I would come in and continue cleaning up any of that extra geometry. That is just a distraction. Is it that big of a deal? Maybe not. But you're going to run into these instances. I just as soon show you what to do to take care of it and clean it up. I can turn the house back on driveway, the electric and the gas, my retaining walls can come back on. My boundaries can come back on. The existing trees to remain can come back on. Look at this, what's going on there. When the engineer developed this, the old portions of the proposed footprint of the house, we're embedded with the house tag layer. What I'm going to do is click on that. That's its own group or component. Says component one in model tag is old. If I hit delete, all that is gone. Now I've got a nice clean drawing. There's my street right of way. Now it comes down to simply remember that I had broken this apart, I had blown this up. But I can come in, I can start cleaning the interior of the house up because I don't need this geometry for my landscaping purposes. We've already been through this. You understand what I'm doing there? Then one more time, the boundary, I can come over and look for the boundary which is right here. I want it to look more like a property line that changes all of that. And the street right of way, I can come in and find that. Take a look. And I'm just going to use a long dash. Now, I've got a drawing that I can do a little more clean up to get it where I want it to be. I don't have anything hidden down underneath. I'm erasing. I'm deleting all of this extra geometry. That's what we're going to be doing with this. That's how I can clean this up and save some potential grief on down the road. Okay, We've gone a little bit longer than I wanted to, so I'm going to call this one. Good. I'll see you in the next lecture where we're going to start talking about actually drawing a site plan. You may have mapped yourself into sketch. All right, thanks for watching. I'll see you in a bit. 8. Drawing Your Survey Directly in SketchUp: All right, in this lecture we're going to start talking about drawing directly into sketch up. And I have a site survey that I did on a simple property a few years ago that I'm going to be using as an example. In this, I've got some points within the property where I'm going to have to use triangulation to locate the corner of a retaining wall and to locate a tree and even a property corner out within the property, the project boundaries. And so we're going to be using the Arc tool to develop a way to do triangulation to locate these odd points that may not be as easy to discern just by dragging a tape measure off the edge of a patio or the corner of the house. So anyway, let's take a quick look at what this sketch looks like. And I encourage you to go ahead and download it if you haven't already printed out so you can follow along with me when I'm doing this in sketch up. Here's the footprint of the house and we've got the entry, we have an existing driveway, but I've got a tree out here and I've got a couple of odd points, a retaining wall corner and the corner of the property. It's not a perfect square to locate the tree and the corner of the retaining wall and even this far corner of the property line, I'm going to use triangulation, meaning I'm going to use two known points, meaning two corners off of the house, to locate an unknown point. The corners of the retaining wall or the tree down here. We'll be going through all of this in sketch up in just a few moments again, go ahead and download and print this out and use this as a guide. As I am drawing in directly, that's where we're app and I'll see you over at the computer in just a moment. Okay, here we are looking at our sketch up. I've already opened the program. I'm just going to go ahead and start drawing our site survey directly into this. And I'm going to start at that lower right hand corner of the house. I'm going to hit the L for my line tool or I can come over and select it right over here. I'm just going to do a left click. There's my line getting started and I'm going to go up 63 feet, hitting the apostrophe key to show for 63 feet. If I look down in the value added box, it would tell me that I'm doing it the way I want to. Now I'm on the red axis for 15 feet. Green axis coming for six feet. Now I'm going over 45 feet. Now I'm coming down 23 feet on the site survey. This does not look at all proportional, but that doesn't matter. As long as you have your values correct, then it doesn't matter if it's proportional or not. The closer you can get it to being proportional, the nicer it is. But it doesn't have to be 26 feet. Then I'm going to come over nine feet, then I'm going to come four feet, then I'm going to come across for 18 feet 6 ". Then I'm going to come back up for two feet 6 ", and I'm going to come across for 20 feet. Come up on the green axis for five feet, then I come across seven feet 6 ", then I'm dropping down 11 feet 6 ". Then with any luck, I'm at 15 feet. And if I look in the value control box right down here says 15 feet. I know I've accomplished it, my property closed properly. Now I'm going to hit the Space bar for my select tool. I'm going to select the interior of the house. Tap the key for the offset. Because I like to give my houses about a six inch wall. I type six now. I can zoom in, I can get rid of the interior, and I've got my walls. Now I know my property lines are 7.5 feet on each side. Right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the tape measure tool and get my guides come over seven feet 6 ". And I'm going to do that over here on this side as well. I'm going to come over seven feet 6 ". Now I'm going to go back to my line tool, and I have a driveway that starts right up at this corner, coming down, it's coming straight down for 40, 1 ft, 6 ". Because I haven't actually close that line out, I'm going to hit the escape key. Now, my driveway doesn't come in square to this corner of the house, it's in a foot. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select my tape measure to get a guide. I'm going to go 12 ". Now I can get on that and I'm going to come down 37 feet, 6 " and get myself down to the bottom. I'm going to go ahead and take that guide out. This is pretty much all of my hardscaping right now. What I want to do because as I start to develop a plan and sketch up, I want to keep my geometry separate and clean. I know I'm not going to change the driveway, I know I'm not going to change the house. I'm actually not going to change the property line or the retaining wall either. Let's go ahead and just draw those elements in. I'll go ahead and hit the line tool again. Can over click there and then I'm going to come over on the red axis and click there. Clean that up. Now my property line goes up 132 feet 1.12 inch on this side, my property line goes up 123 feet 7 ". My site survey is telling me that from this point to this point, I should be at 85 feet 5 ". And if I look in the value control box down in the lower right, it says 85 feet five and an eighth. That works for me. It's close enough. Now I can hit the Erase tool and get rid of these guys. Now the next thing that isn't going to change is going to be that retaining wall. I'm going to go ahead and again, I'm going to hit my for the tape measure tool. I'm going to come over four feet and I'm going to do the same thing on this side. I'm going to come over four feet. I know the retaining wall starts nine feet, 10 " below this corner of the house. I'm just going to come over and come down nine feet, 10 " L for line tool. And I know my retaining wall is coming up on the green axis for 30 feet, 7.5 ". So 30 feet, 7.5 ". Now my retaining wall, if I look at my site survey, it's starting somewhere below the face of the garage, the face of the building right here. I don't know exactly how far down that is, but I do have triangulation points. Get rid of that up in this area that I have taken. And that would be points A and B to point, if I come over and choose the arc tool, go to point where I have point A and come out and I'm saying that it is 33 feet. I'm going to hit that and I'm going to draw an arc. Then I'm going to do the same thing again from point B. From point to point C is 63 feet 8, " three feet eight. I'm going to hit enter, I draw an arc. Now where that intersects is where my retaining wall is. Now I can hit L for line tool, come down on the green axis, keeping it on the green axis. And the length of my retaining wall from that corner is 85 feet, 10 ", 85 feet ten, Hit the escape key, take that guy out. I can take these out at this point. And now my distance from here to here on my site survey, I'm saying it's 79 feet, 4.5 ", Let's see, I'm at 78 feet 1 ", depending on how it was measured. That's what we came up with. And that's going to be accurate because you don't always quite remember exactly where your measurement was in the field. What we're looking at right now, our last triangulation I want to do is down here in the front because we have a tree in the front yard. I'm going to come over and choose my arc tool again. Point is right here at this corner. I'm going to come down and E to G was 29 feet 3 " hit the inter key, drag an arc. Then point was at this corner, if I come over it was 33 feet 1 " hit enter, were they cross? I'm going to make that a group. Actually. Yeah. Before I do that, I'm going to make a quick little change here. All of this is something that is not going to change what I'm going to do right now. Because I may or may not keep that tree. I don't know yet. But if I make this a group, I have now isolated my geometry. Now I'm going to come back, select my arc tool, come down and do my 29 feet 3 " and throw an arc. Come over here, do my 33 feet 1 ", throw an arc. Now I'm going to make that its own group and you'll see why in a moment. Okay, What just happened here? Okay, make that a group. Now I'm going to hit the tool or key. The tree had an eight inch diameter to it, so I'm going to do that. It also had a canopy of ten feet radius, a 20 foot diameter. Now I can click on that, get rid of that geometry, clean that up, and make the tree itself its own group. Now what I can do as I'm developing this, and I'm going to get this done here pretty quickly here. I want to come into entity information. I'm going to click on that group, I'm going to come to tags. I'm going to add a tag right here. I'm going to call this my Base Plan. Now when I click on this, I can come up to here, I can put that on the base plan tag. I'm also going to go ahead and have a tree tag layer. Now I can click on this guy, come up here, put him on the tree tag layer. Now as I'm working with different geometry, whether I'm in plan view or going into three D perspective, if I want to turn off the base plan, I can do that. If I want to turn off the tree, I can do that And any other elements that I may be adding in that will be taking into in another lecture right now, I'm going to go ahead and walk away from the sketch up screen and we'll close out this. We've gone a little longer than I'd wanted to. Okay, that's it. On how to get your site survey into sketch up and how to use the Arc tool to create triangulations. All right. 9. Wrap Up - What We've Covered so Far: In this section, we looked at how to bring in different files that may be provided to you into sketch up and let's have a quick overview or review of what we've covered. We took a look at having a PDF supplied to us and converting that to an image file. Whether you're using sketch or sketch up like what I'm using. So you can convert that to an image file. I'm using Adobe Acrobat to do my conversions and now I can bring that file in as a Jpeg and I can trace it and have a plan within sketch that I can work with. If you're using sketch up pro, then you're going to be able to bring in an Autocad file, either a DXF or a DWG. We talked about how to clean up the geometry that you're not necessarily going to need when you're doing a landscape plan. And how to clean all that out and either hide the layers or actually delete them out of your drawing altogether. Finally, we talked about taking your own site survey and drawing it directly in Sketch up how to use the Arc tool to do triangulation, to locate existing features out away from the house, and other elements that you need to have documented within your drawing. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in a bit. 10. Tips on Creating Your Design: In this section, we're going to start actually developing a design that we can move back into sketch up. Now, I've said this before. Sketch up is not going to design the garden for you. You're going to design the garden yourself and we're going to move it into sketch. Sketch is our presentation software to where we can create a three dimensional plan that we can show our clients, our friends, whoever we're presenting to, and get them excited about what our ideas are. But I honestly do not feel you can design directly on the computer screen. I feel that you need to put some paper down and actually start to doodle, sketch, play around with different ideas. So I've got a couple of examples here on my table that I want to show you now. Here is a garden plan that one of my students did a number of years ago. Here's the footprint of the house. The student put together a rectangular 45 degree design approach. You're coming out of the house and you're turning at a 45 degree angle. And it's pulling you down along the central avenue of arbors, an orchard out here. We've got different elements, water feature, but everything's turned on a 45 degree from the house, pulling them deeper into the property. Now here is the same property again, but with a radial design approach. The student created a central patio area with seating around it. You came out of the house, you would step up to leave the patio area, you would step down into it. All of the elements are built off of this central point right here. All of the beds, all of the pathways, all of the arbors, Everything radiates out from this central point. Even the straight lines on the edges of the path, if you were to project them straight back in, are going to come right back in to this central point. I really don't think you're going to be able to explore these ideas and unleash your creativity, unless you just have a chance to get on paper and draw and see how shapes are going to come together. And then pick a design approach that is going to work once we've developed the final plan on paper and got it close enough to where I feel that I can take it into sketch up, then that's what I'm going to do. We'll do a layout and get that squared away, and then we're going to turn it into a three dimensional model. Okay, that's where we're going and I'll see you in a bit. 11. Starting with Trace Paper: In this lecture, I'm going to start actually working with designing the garden that I want to build in Sketch up. In our next section, what I'm going to work with is I have it on bond paper. I have my plan on bond paper. If we take a look at it here on the board, this is on 24 by 36 inch sized paper. It is oversized, and it's at one eighth inch equals 1 ft. I also have this available in metric. In metric, you're going to want to use paper size one and I've got that scaled for you there because this is on bond. And this is something that I can eventually start to draw my actual plan on before I move it into sketch up. Then I don't want to mess this up. This thing cost about four or five bucks to get it reproduced. If I just lay a piece of translucent trace paper over the top, I can work with ideas. And if I like them, great. And if I don't, I just take this off and start a fresh one. I've got this now I tend to design. I use basically a grease stick for drawing. I don't need to be precise. I just want it to be able to get ideas down on the paper, get some shapes going. I'm going to start with a rectangular design, which means I'm going to be parallel and perpendicular to the walls of the house. That's just my style. That's how I get started. This first plan, all I want to do is get some ideas out on paper. I just want to get an idea of where I might go. And I'm not going to know what I like or don't like until I can actually see something down here on the paper. So I'm just going to start drawing on this and coming up with some ideas. And I'm going to base it on the design brief, the client brief that is in the resources for this section. And we'll see where this goes. So here's my plan. I know that the entry to the house is right about here. I know they want to have a new entry coming in that's a little more attractive. They want some lawn. They want some shade trees. They want a patio area. I'm just going to get started and I'm just going to draw a walkway coming up. I know they want to have some lawn area. So I'm just going to draw something in like that. And I might carry that lawn over to just carry it on over to this side of the walkway. And then I can come in and put maybe a small shade tree in here and maybe another one here. And maybe I'm going to throw a third one over here and then some ground cover or shrubs down in this area. Something along this little planter, maybe I want to have something up in here just to hide this walkway so you don't really see it from the driveway. And then I'm going to come into the backyard and just draw something out in the shape of a patio. I personally like to have seating walls, a wall that's about 18 " tall to set plates on or a potted plant or just sit on. I'm going to leave a passage in this area because they want to have vegetable gardens. Let's see, North is up here, going this way, South, east and west. So my hot sun is coming in from this side of the house. So I'm going to go ahead and just create some of an arbor over the top so they can have a table and chairs and have some protection from the hot sun. They want to have a barbecue area. I'm going to keep a pass through or over on this side and do maybe a step up into the barbecue area, just to give it a little definition, a little difference from this area in here now. They can come across I'm going to give a pass through in here because the walkway or the door from the house is coming out at this. Now they can go straight through. We've got a subspace over here, people could go to. I've got a subspace over here they can go to. And then on up into the barbecue area. I'm going to do some vegetable gardens over this way. It might be raised beds, it might be in the ground, I don't know yet. And I'm going to do screening because they wanted to have screening from neighbors at the back end. And I'm going to do a little bit of screening over and here, not a whole lot. This is a dead zone on the property. I may or may not want to keep that there. We have it that I could I think I might even just go ahead and throw a little more lawn over in this area just in case they have a dog or some kind of a pet, or grandchildren or whatever visiting. Okay. That's it. That is a conceptual plan that I took what, three or four or 5 minutes to put together and it goes about that fast. It's just getting some ideas down on paper. Is it a good plan? Not really, but it's a start. And that's what I want to do with this, is just have a start to where I have ideas and a springboard to where I can come in and refine it from there. And that's what I want you to try in this first assignment. Jump into it, Draw about as fast as I did. I barely took this off the paper, I just kept it going and worked my way around. Then in the next lecture, I'm going to take the same blank plan, put a fresh piece of Chase paper over it, and I'm going to be able to come up with another design approach. I might try a rectangular 45, might try an arc in tangent. I don't know, I'm really just flying by the seat of my pants on this. But that's what it takes to get started. Okay, go ahead, take a look at the assignment, the client brief, and whichever plan you want to work with, whether imperial measurement or metric. And good luck in this. And feel free, I'd like you to send them to me. I'm more than happy to critique them if you want to wait till the final design solution, that's fine too. But anyway, that's where we're at. So I will see you in the next lecture. Thanks for watching. 12. Alternative Solutions: Okay, welcome back. In this lecture, alternative solutions, I want to explore a different design approach for this property. I did basically a rectangular design for the first go round with it. Now I'm going to try something a little bit different. The property isn't very big. I can't really do much in the way of curves, because curves are not an efficient use of space. If you're in a small area, what I am going to try is a rectangular 45 degree and see if I can do anything with that. So let's go back over here to the drawing table and let's take a look at what we might be able to come up with. Here's our property again. Another fresh piece of trace paper over the top so that the drawing itself stays clean. What I want to do here in the front yard is rather than coming straight down as I did before, I'm going to see if I can do something with a 45 degree to do that. I'm going to eliminate, as far as my design is concerned, this existing sidewalk coming from the driveway over to the entry. What I think I'm going to do is I'm going to come down just a little ways and go to about a 45 degree, rather than having something coming straight on down. I'm going to see about doing a walk that comes down. Now you can come off of the driveway, or you can come up off of the sidewalk and bring people into the entry. This way, this opens up some space to do that shade tree that they were thinking about, a tree there. I've got some shrubbery. Shrubbery. This now can become the lawn area that they were thinking of. Then I'm going to come to the backyard. If I was to come over and come up, I think I'm going to go ahead and keep my barbecue area over on this side. I am going to keep my seating wall coming around. I'm going to bring that in that connect with that, put a shade tree over and here, keep my seating walls intact. Go ahead. I'm going to do the arbor effect that I can have vines growing on. I can still put my table over here. My exit is here. I'm going to keep this open now. You can come this way into the barbecue. You can come this way to get to the veg garden and all of this paving. I'm still going to have some kind of screening up here at the top. There's another conceptual plan. Again, I'm just walking my way through it. I'm talking my way through it. I'm trying to decide if this is going to be something that I like. There are elements I like about it, There are elements that I don't like about it. But again, I don't know unless I try and give it a good shot. That was my second attempt at a design solution, a design approach on this particular property. Between the first one and this one, I should be able to come up with a final design solution that we'll be looking at in the next election. Okay, that's it, and I will see you in the next lecture, and we're going to come up with a final design solution. All right, thanks for watching. 13. My final Design Solution: Okay, here we are. And I have finished my final design solution. And we're going to take a look at that now and see what it looked like on trace paper when it was still rough. And then how I polished it and evolved it to where I have a design that I feel comfortable enough with that I can take it into sketch up and build this three D model as my presentation tool for a client. Let's take a look at the trace paper. So here's my trace paper layout. They wanted a more attractive entry coming in. And I liked the idea of working with a 45 degree angle. So I wanted to do something a little different here in the front. And rather than just having a walkway coming straight in, I opted on doing some kind of a courtyard. So I put in an octagon with low seating walls about 18 " high to help define the space. And I brought them into the garden in this manner, rather than just a walkway. And the front yard being a total pass through Now, it's going to be something that's going to be more enjoyable for visitors and for the owners themselves. So I brought them in, and again, just using my grease stick just worked up ideas. I wanted to have this courtyard area. I wanted to get rid of the walkway that was up here, right next to the house. I don't like that. So I radiated off the center of this courtyard with a new walkway coming over. And the same idea in the backyard. I wanted to do something with a 45 degree angle to it that's going to pull them to one side of the yard, but it was starting to feel like all of the weight was on this side of the house or this side of the back yard, and I didn't want that, so I had to find a way to help balance that out. This is my design solution here. And I've gone ahead and actually colored this in using pastels and colored pencils. But here's my entry coming in, here's my seating walls coming around to help define the space. A central small lawn area or maybe ground cover. I put a gate at each of the entrances, exits of the courtyards just to help to define the space. Here's the walkway coming over to the driveway. Instead of having to walk right up next to the house, they've got to come in either off the driveway or if they're coming across this way into the courtyard where it's a more enjoyable entry walkway. Some kind of paving material. I'm fond of brick. I'd probably push for that, a focal point in the center of this. And then it pulls you on into the house. Shade trees, large plantings, mass plantings of such around. Remember, you're doing a conceptual plan at this stage and I don't need to know precisely what the species and plants I may propose on down the road at this stage. As far as I'm concerned, I want them to buy into the layout that I've put together, the different elements that I think are going to make this garden more interesting. Once they buy into that, then I'll put my time in to selecting the actual plants and then reviewing that with them. But I don't want to do a layout and a full planting plan and take this to a client and then have them say, well, the plants are okay. But I don't really care for the layout at all, so I've just wasted a bunch of time. Let's take a look at the backyard. The backyard again, I wanted to come out and push them into the larger area of the back. I came out, I did a 45 degree, now they're into this area. I still wanted to have some shade from that west sun coming in. I did the arbor effect over the patio. At this point, I put in a bridge over a water feature that flows under the bridge onto a gravel or decomposed granite path that leads back under a large shade tree to where I've got a bench and some seeding of some kind. Now they've got another destination out in this part of the yard. A couple of four by eight raised garden beds over here on this west side. That's by design solution. This is the design that I'm going to be building in the next section in sketch up as a three dimensional model and this is what we're going to be working with through the rest of the course. This plan, while I want you to do your own design solution, this plan will be available for you. If nothing else, it might give you some ideas to give a springboard for moving on with your own creativity. Okay, that's it for this section, or I should say for this lecture. And I will see you back in just a moment and we'll do a section wrap up. All right, thanks for watching and I'll see you in a bit. 14. Wrap Up - A Review so Far: So that brings us to the end of this section. And in this section, I really emphasize the idea of taking trace paper and working up different design solutions, different approaches to test your creativity and see what is actually going to work most effectively for you as the designer and for the potential client that you're going to be presenting to. This is what I like to do to get started on a set of plans. Throw that trace paper down and work it up from there. Once I've got something that I'm happy with, and I went through four different iterations of this particular trace paper drawing before I came up with the one that was close enough that I could take my scale rule. Which is okay. I took my scale rule and started really putting this down to where it was ergonomic to the site. Now the plan I'm working on that I showed you in the last lecture was the imperial one eighth inch equals eight feet. And that's what's going to be available for you in resources. Anyway, that's it for this section. And I will see you in the next section where we're actually going to take this plan and we're going to start putting it together as a three dimensional model in sketch up. All right, thanks for watching and I'll see you in a It. 15. Drawing in SketchUp - Stay Organized!: Hi and welcome to this lecture where we're going to start talking about keeping our model organized. We're getting into the real meat of this course in that we're going to start laying out and building our landscape design, our three D model for presentation. Now in the resources I've supplied you with a base plan for this entire property. I've already modeled the house for you. I've done the fencing around the perimeter. All of that is provided so you don't have to build it in this particular lesson in the future. Yes, that's something that you'll be working on, but for now, I wanted to scc this portion so we can concentrate on the actual landscape design that we're going to be working with. So, go ahead. If you haven't already done that, you can pull that. It's a sketch up model, so you should be able to take it straight into your program, and it's already three ded, even though I've got it in plan view for you when you first import it. So you can go ahead and toggle it up to get to perspective and ISO view, and that will show you what this property is actually looking like and give you an idea of where we're going with it. So in this one we have to keep in mind that geometry and sketch up is really sticky. So we want to make sure we put all of our different elements into groups or into components. And the advantages of putting them all on their own tags and tag folders. And that's part of the whole gist of keeping our model organized. So I'm going to head over to the computer and we're going to open this model up. And we're going to get started and just kind of go through the basics of organization. And then in the next lecture we'll actually start drawing. Okay, I'll see you over at the computer in a few moments. Okay, here we are at our sketch up model. And this model is in imperial scale, because I work in feet and inches. And I do have this provided for you in the resources in metric as well. So if you're working in metric, you've got that option. If you're working in feet and inches, then you've got this one. So I'm working in this one here and what I want to show you in this is how I've organized this model and this base plan that I've provided for you. First off, when you bring it into sketch up on your own, this is what you're going to be seeing. What I'm going to do is I'm going to come up here to camera and I'm just going to go to standard views and ISO, And camera again, and perspective. Now this is going to give you a view of what this residence looks like. I've already built this model for you and we're also working on this assumption that we are on flat ground. I want to keep this pretty simple for this course, we will be dealing with slopes in subsequent courses using sketch up in garden design. So here's our house, our driveway. It's got a wooden fence all the way around the back and then a raised planter that comes around with the fence built up on top of the block wall. This is where we're going to start working what I've done because in sketch up geometry is sticky. Just as a quick refresher, if I said I wanted to have some pedestal here, a couple of feet high, whatever that might be. Say I put another one over here and I wanted it to be here, whatever. This may be the, that's all well and good, but what if I thought, oh gosh, maybe I'll see what these look like if they're up next to each other. So I'm going to do a triple left click. Hit M for my move tool, and I bring it over and I attach it to my other pedestal. So I've got a stairway or whatever this might be. Well, what if I don't like this and I think I'm going to move this out of the way, then see what happens. It auto folds, it's stuck to each other. That's just the default of sketch up and we don't want that. What I would do is I would make this a group and make this its own group. And what I mean by that is I've organized this drawing, so I've got the house bound blue lines. If I go to entity info, it says group one in model house. It's on the tag layer. If I come down here to the tag layer and I see, oh, here's my house, great. Well what if I don't want to look at that, maybe I need to get that out of the way so I can see a few more things. Okay, now what happened? We've got a door sitting back here. This was a component that I brought into my model, and here it is, it's a door. And I can close that out as well. If I click on that, it says component one in model. Actually, I want that on the doors tag. Now, I can click that on and off. There's my house again. I've done the same thing with the driveway driveway. It's on the driveway tag one in model. My fence boards all the way around. Group one in model. Now, all of these geometries are separate from each other, they're not going to get stuck together. And the same with the property line, base plane that we're working with. Jump back up here, property line, it's on the property. If I come here, then I can eliminate that base plane. But that's where we're going to be modeling on. When we start all of this. Then we're going to be designing the front yard and I'll be doing it based on the design that I put together. One other thing in here. I've got a series of fence posts, and it tells me I've got a solid component, I've got 25 fence posts in my model, if I come down here to fence posts, I can turn all of those off or on. The beauty of that is that if I need to be modeling and doing something, sometimes this geometry gets in the way and you can't see what you're looking at literally. If I can come in here and turn the house and that door off, now I've got a much clearer view of how I'm going to be designing and working with this garden. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and back out of this lecture. In the next lecture, we're going to be taking the Imperial Design. That's the one I'm going to be working with, and I've got it dimensioned, so you can download that and have the actual dimensions to work with in both imperial and metric. And I'm going to start designing the front yard. Keeping in mind that I'm going to be putting all of these into their own groups or if necessary a component and working with that. There we are. And I will see you in the next lecture. And we're going to actually start drawing this model at long last. Okay, thanks and I'll see you in a bit. 16. Building the Front Yard Part 1: Okay, here we are, and we are going to be putting our landscape design into our sketch up model. I want you to make note that the threshold, the doorway, is 6 " above the ground plane. In the last lecture, I had called this the property line and put it on a property line. And I have renamed that to be the ground plane. And the reason I did that is I just feel that it is a bit more descriptive of what we're working with. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and build the courtyard. We have our dimensioned plan and I'm going to use the tape measure tool and I'm going to use guides to help me create this and keep myself on track. Coming in from the property line, I'm going to come in 23 feet, 9 ", then come across five feet because that's the width of my walkway. Then it comes in six feet off of the front entry. Now I'm going to go ahead and my front of my courtyard retaining wall is ten feet across. I'm going to come up here and I'm going to come over 2.5 feet. Then I'm going to come over this way ten feet and there's the beginnings of my courtyard. I'm going to go ahead and grab my protractor tool and start building out my walls. And I know they're on a 45 degree angle. And now I can start doing a little bit of drawing so that I can clean up some of these guidelines as I go along 11 feet in there. Because the ground plane is still in its own group. I'm all of my courtyard to close on itself. Now I'm going to come back with my protractor tool. Just go ahead and finish building this out. 45 degrees, 45 degrees, Come up another 11 feet, 11 feet. And then I can close that off right there. Now I know that my walkway, the front stoop comes down three feet from this front corner. I'm just going to get there at the corner point in house group. I'm going to come three feet, then I'm going to come on the red axis, over to this line and then down to here. Now I want to make sure I get this squared in where I want it to be. I use my guides again, there and there. Now I can take that guy out. For now, now I know I have a walkway coming over to the driveway. So what I'll do is, again, using my guides, I'm going to come down, find my midpoint. My walkway is four feet wide, so I'm going to go two feet that way, then four feet this way. Again, bring this over. The driveway is its own group. I'm going to close this off all the way around. Then I can get rid of this line and I know what didn't close, it's because the house is its own group. This portion of the courtyard did not close. What I'm going to do is come back in and hit my line tool. Go there, go there, and go there. Now my courtyard closes. Now the threshold is 6 " above the ground plane. I'm going to hit the push pole tool and I'm going to pull this up, but I don't want to go the full 6 ". I'm going to go 5 " just to leave that little bit of leeway. And I'm going to do that now. I'm separate from the ground plane. I can go up to edit for right now. Delete guides and now I want to build my wall for my courtyard. I'm going to isolate my courtyard from the walkways that lead into it. Now I've got my courtyard isolated. I hit the key for the offset tool. A cinder block wall is typically going to be 8 " wide. I'm going to have 8 " wide for the wall, and I'll put a 12 inch cap on top of that. Now I can come in with my line tool because we do have an entry coming in through the wall with gates, and that starts to clean that up. I'll do the same here. Now I can erase this out. We've got our walls. The walls, I want them to be 18 " high and we're up 5 " here, but this is still flush with this. I'm going to go ahead and bring this up 18 " and infer and infer over now I've got my 18 inch high wall and I'm going to go ahead and find my center point so I can develop that center courtyard planting area. So I'm just going to come along and find the center of that walkway, in the center of that walkway, activate my circle tool. The diameter is 14 feet. That's going to be a radius of seven feet. Again, my offset, I'm going to bring this in 2 " to have a little two inch curve. Now I don't like how this is segmented out. How rough, that's not a smooth circle. My entity info tells me that it's 24 segments. And I'm going to go ahead and make that 50 segments, the same with the outer line. I'm going to make that 50 segments. That just smooths that out a little bit. Then we have some, a bird bath or sundial sitting here in the middle. And I'm going to say it's 12 " in diameter. That's six inch radius. Now the last thing I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and delete the guides. I want to have a cap, this, I'm going to do an offset. And if this is 8 " wide and I want the cap to be 12 ", then I'm going to do an offset of 2 ". I'm just going to go to Enter. I'll do the same over here to enter to, and enter. Now I've got that and I want to pull this up, so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to activate the push pole tool and I'm going to hit the control key and I get a little plus next to it. And that's going to give me a second face. And I'm going to, let's just make that 1 " thick. Okay. Then I'm going to come over, do the same thing again over here. And I can just infer that to that. Okay. Now I can come in and I can clean up some of these lines. I just go through and start cleaning up my drawing. What we're going to do is we're going to close out this lecture. What we'll do is we'll come back in the next lecture. Pick our materials and put on plantings, and we'll have our front yard pretty well squared away. I'm just going to bring this up like an inch to give a little border to it, and we'll call that good. Okay. That's the beginnings of building our front landscape and our courtyard. And we'll call that good. All right, that's it and I will see you in the next lecture. 17. Building the Front Yard Part 2: Remember, this is a conceptual plan. This is something that I would take to my client and say, here's the ideas that I've got, here's what I would like to do, and what do you think of it? How do we modify this before I go into a whole lot of detail of trying to come up with construction drawings or even necessarily specifics on plant selection. I use sketch up as a conceptual tool to get my ideas across to a client and show them what my vision is because the walkways are higher than the ground level around. What I want to do is I want to put in a border that would retain or hold in any additional soil or bark mulch and such like that. We're going to start with putting that in so we can finish off the structure of the garden again using the tape measure tool. I'm going to come in and I'm going to come over 1.5 " because I'm going to assume like a two by four board for retaining, which is 1.5 " wide by 3.5 " in height, so I'm going to come up 3 " so I've got a little bit of it in the ground for anchoring. I'm going to hit the R key for the rectangle tool right there at the intersection. I'll bring that down. Now you can see I have a new face on the edge of my walkway. I come up, I'm going to delete the guides. This is where the follow me tool can really come into play really nicely. First off, I'm going to take a line. I'm going to draw a line up and a line over. Now if I choose to follow me tool, I can come in and grab this face and pull this out. It's following that line that I just drew. Now my face in here. I can hit the push pull tool and I can bring this up. I'll just watch my value up at 3 ". I'm going to bring it to 2.75 ". I'm going to keep it just a little bit below the edge. My edging. Now I want to do the same thing back here. I've sped this up a little bit in that I've already set a line like what, I just did, a guide to follow. And I've already put my face over here, so I'm going to grab the follow me tool again. And if this works properly, then I can just bring this around up, over and up and end it there. Push pull tool 2.75 ". Okay, that brings that face up there. Then I want to do the same thing over here. And then I'm going to bring this up, 2.75 ". Now I've got that. Now there's one other thing. I've got these walls at 18 " high. Well, on my hand drawn design concept, I've got a gate across here. But 18 " high isn't really tall enough to have a gate. So I'm going to go ahead and skip that and just let this be an open walkway into a courtyard. But I do want to have some, a water feature, something that acts as a focal point as you come in. What I'm going to do is I'm going to come to this pedestal that I made. And I'm just going to, for concepts sake, say I want to have a water basin in here. I'm going to click on this, I'm going to hit my push pole tool, and I'm going to tap the control key on my PC. That creates a second phase. Now I can bring this up 1 ". Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to highlight this. I'm going to click the for my offset tool. And I'm going to bring this and I'm going to create a rim that's half an inch thick, 0.5 Now what I can do is I can use my push pole tool. And I'm going to bring this up. I'll bring it, let's bring it up. 6 ". Now I want to create a basin. I'm going to come in, I'm going to click on that, just select the face, and I'm going to select my scale tool. If I grab this grip and hold the control key down, do one left click. And I'm going to bring this out to whatever looks decent to me. I'll just call that good. And I've created a basin now I can take my line tool, I can come across and create a face. Now I'll use my push, pull tool, and I'm going to push it down. Oh, let's say 1 ". Oh, that was too much. Let's push it down half an inch. Now, I have created a basin. I've created an area for plantings. Now I'm going to start rendering this. I want these areas, the planting areas, to have some mulch in them. I'm just going to come over ground cover wood mix. If I click click now you can see the tiling. You can almost see that in there. If I go to edit and I go ahead and I'm just going to say I'm going to go four feet. It softens all of this out to a great degree. There's my mulch area now I want to do something with the flooring. I'm going to come back in, I'm going to go to brick cladding. I like the idea of antique brick. I can put that in. I can adjust my color a little bit to it. There's my entry coming in. This was going to be a lawn or ground cover area. So I'm just going to come to landscaping and I'm going to scroll down and let's see, grass they had mentioned they might like to have lawn. And I'm going to make this five feet. I want to soften that tiling out a little bit. I've got that effect now. I've got a water basin. I'm just going to go to water. I'll pick sparkling water. I can put that in there, and you can see I'm starting to get a decent feel for what this could look like in here. And I should probably go ahead and have my brick cladding on the face of this as well just come in. It really starts to bring my concept to life. Something that I can show my client. And one last little bit right there. Okay, Now I still have my retaining wall and I can just go around, it's subtle but it does change this and it gives it a little bit of texture to it. I would continue that. I'd probably do that with this guy here. I could do it with that. Then my cap, I may not want it to be something like that. Let's take a look at tile. I could say I want to put some tile cap to it. Let's try that field stone again, coming back in and just hitting around the edges. I would do that on all of these. I don't need to do it 100% right now because you get the gist of what I'm doing here. We've started really developing our landscape to look like something. I'm going to just save this and we're going to have one more lecture. And I'll bring plants in and we'll take a look at setting plants in. And we're going to finish this front yard off. Okay, that's it for this one, and I will see you in a bit. 18. Building the Front Yard Part 3: Okay, In this one we're going to come in and we're going to finish our front yard landscaping. I have gone ahead and I have made my courtyard its own group and I have put that on the courtyard landscape tag layer that I created. If I want to, I can turn, turn it back. When I go to do some rendering in the back yard, I can turn and it's going to save my computer processing time. As far as recreating this, that will save me a little bit of time and speed things up. I have also come in, I have added a couple of components just to have some little bit of ergonomics to the courtyard. I went into view, I turned my shadows on, and I also went to tool bars and turned on the shadows. I ticked this box. What that gave me is a slider up here. Now, depending on the time of the year or the time of day, I can show what the shadows are looking like. This can be a selling point for a client. Now what I want to do is I want to go ahead and start bringing in some different plant material. I've already typed in shrubs in the three D warehouse. So we'll just start with that. We'll take a look at what this has to offer. Spira. I like SpyriaI'm. I'm going to download that. Yes, we can take it directly into my sketch up model. And that looks a little bit small to me. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to get this and I'm holding down the control key, and then that scales it around the center of the shrub. I feel that that just doesn't distort it. Now, I'm going to hit my plus key to do go into copy mode. I'm going to pull this across and make sure that I'm staying on my red axis. Then I'm going to hit, and I'll hit four copies. Now I've populated the front of this with a few shrubs in here. Now let's go ahead and take a look at shade trees. Now, I can just scroll down, take a look and see there's one I like, I like that it's light and airy. Yes, I want to bring that directly in. I'm going to move that stay where you are. I'll just set him then I'm going to tap the control key for copy mode. Left click and drag on face in group. Perfect. I'm going to go back up to view. Make sure my shadows are turned on. And now I'm starting to get a better feel for what this front yard landscape can look like. I can come back into grasses and I'm going to go ahead and grab this. Yeah, that train is pretty noisy. Sorry. And we'll bring this directly in now on face in group M. And then control to go into copy mode. Copy mode. Copy mode. And I can just continue to populate my landscape in this manner. I could bring some more of these Spyria to this side, but I think you understand, you get the gist of what I'm doing. I'm using the three D warehouse and I'm pulling this in. If I didn't want to see this bar mulch then I would just go ahead and highlight that. I could highlight all three of these. Now I would go to materials and I would go to select, there's landscaping and vegetation Juniper, I can put that in. Now you see this tiling, you can see the individual squares. If I go back to edit, I'm going to say I want this to be six feet. Maybe I can lighten the color just to hair. Now that's a little bit softer looking, I may keep this, I may not, it just depends. This is where I'm coming up with my conceptual ideas to show to my client and to say, here's what I'm thinking of. The last thing I want to do is I want to have all of my plants on their own group. I'm going to make that a group. Then I'm going to come over to my tags. I've already set up a front yard plants tag layer. I'm going to go to entity info, and I'm going to put that on front yard plants and now zoom out. And if I go and turn off front yard plants and I can come back and go into edit mode, how we can start bringing different components, materials, shadows and such into our sketch up model. And having created this on paper, a conceptual plan, now I've got something I can show my clients. And so I'm going to go ahead and finish off this lecture here. We're going to do a section wrap up, and then we're going to move into the backyard and start working with some arrays and some other components. Okay? That's it. Thanks for watching and I will see you in a bit. 19. Front Yard Design Wrap Up: Hi, welcome to the section wrap up, where we brought our landscape conceptual landscape plan in to sketch up. We took the hand drawn design that I did and refined it. And as I started to draw, I realized that there were some measurements, some ergonomics that I could adjust. Originally, I had gates leading in off of the sidewalk, off of the driveway from the entry to the house into that courtyard area. And as I worked with this and designed it and brought it into three dimensional view, and I wanted it to be 18 " high, so it would be a comfortable seating wall. I realized that that's too low to have any kind of a gate. That would make sense. I eliminated those. That's the beauty of a conceptual plan and that's the beauty of drawing it out on paper first to get your basic ideas and then you can refine that in Sketch Up on paper, you're going to be a lot freer. You're going to be able to work with this. And then in Sketch Up we refine it. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in a bit. 20. Building Out The Back Yard: Hi and welcome back. With this lecture, we're going to go ahead and start building out the backyard. Let's just jump into it, just like we did in the front. I'm going to go ahead and use my tape measure tool and create guidelines and work off of the scaled drawing that I've got. I'll just I know that I've got my back patio over about six feet, 7.5 ", six feet, 7.5 I'm going to hit enter. My patio is 16 feet wide. I'm going to do that. Then my patio comes out two feet. I'm going to do that because the house is its own group. I want to go ahead and be able to box this patio in, and then it comes out two feet. At this point, I need to start using my protractor tool, because I've got some 45 degree angles happening. I'll come in, come up, and I'll turn in 45 degrees. Come up on the green axis, I'll turn in 45 degrees. Now I can draw this line which is six feet. The one on the other side is also six feet. I'm coming out six feet. Now I'm squaring off again, that's back on the green axis. So I don't have to use my protractor tool at this point. This is coming up for seven feet. This side is coming up on the green axis for four feet. I'm going to keep working my way through this. What I'm going to do is because this is just the routine of putting this together, I'm going to go ahead and speed it up from this point on, let's go ahead and just keep moving with our design. Okay, at this point I have closed in my patio and I'm going to go ahead and for right now I'm going to delete the guides and this threshold is 6 ", so I'm going to hit the push pole, and I'm going to bring this up 5 " like we did in the front yard. That gives us our raised patio area. I know that we have a seating wall starting here and working its way around until we get to wherever the pond is. Let's go ahead and establish the footprint of this pond. What I'm going to do with that is zoom up and get a, a different angle to take a look at. I've got to make sure that I'm connecting on this lower bit right here. Not on the top of the patio, but on the lower bit of the patio. So I want to draw my footprint. I'm going to go ahead and I'll grab that. I'll stay on the green axis and I'll turn 45 degrees. I know that my distance across is 74.4 ". I'm just going to go ahead and go. 74.25 There's the other side of my pond. My pond is coming out. You know what, I think? Before I do that, I'm going to make my patio its own group. Now I can work with the pond and the patio separate from each other. My pond comes out for eight feet. Then it's going to go across perpendicular to this. It's going across the seven foot, four and a quarter, which should take meat right over to where that line is, that guideline. It does. Then at that point I'm actually going at a 45 degree, which is also my red axis in this case. And I'm just going to take that all the way down again. I want to make sure I'm hitting. My distance from here to here should be about 15 feet, and I'm showing 15 feet, 4.4 ". I'm a little bit off from what my measurements are showing and I'm not going to let that get too fuss with me since this has been made a group. I'm going to bring this across now. I've got a face right there, there's my pond. This is where sometimes it's nice to get the house and the door out of the way so I can see what I'm looking at to a greater degree. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and click. And I'm going to do an offset because I'm going to have just a narrow little offset. And I'll say it's let's say 3 ", that's like a three inch curb. Then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and bring it in there, bring that in there, Erase that portion out. Then I'm going to bring this up since my patio is up. 5 " I'm going to bring this up 4 ", Then I'll bring this up. Let's bring it up 3.5 ". This would be my water level and here is the edging holding the pond in place. That's the beginnings of what this is going to look like. Now, I'd like to go ahead and get my retaining wall built in. What I'm going to do, I'm just going to do another offset and I'm going to have it come in 8 ". Then if I look at my diagram and bring this to here and then I can start to clean this up a little bit because these are not part of my retaining wall. And I'm going to bring this up, I want this to be an 18 inch high wall, but it'll have a two inch cap, so I'm going to bring it up 16 ". I'm going to go ahead and use my offset tool. I'm going to bring this out to, it has let's say let's 82 inch overhang. I'll bring this up 2. " this up 2 ", I can start to clean up some of these extra lines that I don't need in here just to make it clean. And I'm going to go ahead Edit, Delete guides. I will bring my, my house back on. And now we're starting to get a feel for what the backyard can look like. I'm going to stop this lecture here. We'll come back in the next one. And we're going to finish off the pathway going over for the sitting area in this area here. And we're going to go ahead and see about building our arbor and then a bridge coming across the water feature. Let's take a break. I will see you in a bit. I'll be right back. 21. Building Out the Arbor Part 1: In this lecture, we're going to go ahead and build out our arbor. And we're going to be using components to accomplish this, because I have so much geometry happening right now, since I have built out the front yard, and I've got the house, I've got all these picket fences and such around to be able to speed my computer in this process, I'm going to go ahead and turn off a bunch of these layers that I really don't need to have on. So now what I'm dealing with really is just this patio area, and that's going to speed this up a whole lot. I have called this the back patio. I've got that now. See, I haven't done anything with the pond yet. And I'm going to wait until I've built this path coming out. And then I'll put the pond and the path all on the same group, and I will give them their own tag. I'm going to go ahead and start building this arbor. Again, referring to my diagram, I want to establish where the face of the arbor is in my diagram, saying that it's about 13 feet, 9 " or so in from where this corner is right here. What I'm going to do, there's multiple ways to do this, but this is how I do it. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to be using my tape measure tool and guides a lot in this. Now I'm going to pull this back. Now my plan is saying that it is about 13 feet, 11.34 basically 14 feet. But when I measure that, I'm just going to call 14 feet. But when I measure from where the face of the arbor is to the back of the patio, then it's only a little over ten feet. About 11 feet. And I don't think that is going to be enough. Again, conceptual plan, seeing how things look in three D. I'm going to just say that I would like to pull this back. Instead of 13, 14 feet, I'm going to go back ten feet. That's where I'm going to put the face of my arbor where the rafters are going to be up above. Now, I don't want posts down here on the patio ground layer. I'm going to put my posts up on top of the cap. But this cap is cantilevered 2 " over from the edges of the main wall. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to grab that vertical, come to the intersection. That gives me a vertical right there. And I'm going to do the same thing again. Now I know where that phase is appear. This is a 12 inch wide cap. I'm going to use six by six posts, I want them to be in 3 " from each side. If I go ahead and tap on this and come in three and hit Enter, then there's that there. Okay. And I'm going to come over and I'm going to do the same thing. Again, I'm really using my guides to help establish where I am going to get this happening. Now I'm going to grab this vertical because it's on the same elevation as the rest of the top of my wall. If I come down and come right to that intersection with my vertical, now there I've got it there. Now I can come in and actually start to build this. At this point, I'm going to get rid of my two verticals because I don't need them. Now I'm going to tap R for the rectangle tool, I'm just going to use a six by six post. And I'm just going to call it 66. I know that's a little wide as far as actual dimensions, but for a conceptual plan, this will work. Now I'm going to pull this up, remember I'm 24 " or 18 " above the patio surface, and I'm going to use an eight foot post. It's going to come up 78 ". What I'm doing is I want to have eight feet from the surface of the patio to the bottom of where my rafter would come across. I'm going to do that. I've already established this over here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to triple click. I'm going to make this a component, I'm going to call it Arbor Post and say Create. Yes, I do. Now I'm going to hit M and copy. And I'm going to pull this across and put it right at that intersection. I've my two posts. Now what I'm going to do is that's a pretty big span going across there. If I measure this, my open span is 23 feet across, and that's too far. Structurally, that won't work. What I want to do is I'm going to have to put a post out here in the middle. Since I want it smack dab in the middle. I'm going to go ahead and do another guide. I'm going to grab the floor plane, the edge of the wall right here. I'm just going to go right down along this back because I want it centered on this back wall. There's my center point Now I know I'm using a six pi, so I'm going to go 3 " that way, and I'm going to go 6 " that way. Now I've got my post lined up in here. Now what I can do, I'm going to grab a vertical and bring it over here. And I'm going to put it right at that intersection. Now I've got a vertical coming up right there. Now I can come over, hit move control for copy. I'm going to grab the midpoint and I'm going to pull this post over and put that midpoint right there. Now I'm going to make this unique. I'm making this unique because these guys are on top of the wall and he isn't. And I want him to go all the way down to the floor. I'm going to come in tight. I'm going to triple click to go into select mode. I'm going to hit my push pull, and I'm going to pull this down to where it's right there on the face. And now I've got my posts established right there. And I can see that this lecture is going to go into a second one. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a short break and we're going to come back and we're going to establish the posts at the back end and put those together, and then we'll build our rafters. We'll take this in smaller steps so it doesn't get a little too overburdening anyway, let's take a short break and I will be back and we'll do the back posts on the arbor, and then we're going to figure out our spans and how we're going to make all this happen. Okay? I'll see you in a few moments. 22. Building Out the Arbor Part 2: Okay, welcome back and we are going to go ahead and put in our back arbor posts. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to just turn our view a little bit. Now remember, these guidelines are 5 " above our ground plane and we want our posts to be centered on the ground plan itself. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and activate the tape measure tool. I'm going to grab this vertical line to act as a guideline. And I'm going to come over and I'm going to put it right at the intersection of that. And then I'm going to do it again. I'm going to put it at the intersection of that. Now I've got the red axis, and I want these posts to be a foot off of the face of this wall here. What I could do is I can come down to the intersection on the red axis, I'm going to come out 12 ". On the red axis, I'm going to come out 12 ". Now I know my posts are going to be six by six, I'm going to come over 6 ". At this point I should be able to take these out of the way. Now I can pull this post over is I'm going to just set that so I've got a good intersection right there. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to grab this post. I'm going to go move and control, and I'm just going to pull it over. And then I'm going to take it and I'm going to put it right there at that guide point. Now I've got my center post. I'm going to make this post unique. And I'm going to do that because this post now is sitting 5 " lower than this one here. And I want all of my posts to be the same heights. I've made that unique. My distance from center or midpoint in arbor to arbor post to the midpoint is 11 feet, 9.4 ". What I can do is I can come down here. I can go move and copy. I'm going to grab it at the midpoint and I'm going to move it on the green axis, 11 feet, 9.25 ". That puts it right where I want it to be. I'm going to do the same thing, again, going in the opposite direction, 11 feet, 9.25 ". Now that's lined up. Now my posts are lined up, but again these are 5 " lower. What I want to do, I'm going to go into edit mode. I'm going to click on the top. I'm going to use my push pull tool and I'm going to zoom out just a here. And you see these are moving, the other posts are not. So I can bring this up 5 ". Now if I drew a line from here to here on the red axis, that's good. And that's 16 feet, 15, 16 " of 17 feet, as far as this is concerned. Right now a six by 12 will make that span. These spans are 11 feet and 11 foot span. We can do that with a four by 12 or a 612. We actually, we could even do it with a six by eight, but I want all of these to be the same height. I'm going to come up here, I'm going to go edit. I'm going to delete all the guides. I don't need them right now. And there's the beginnings of my arbor post or my arbor. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to need to use a six by 12 to make this 17 foot span here. This span from here to here is just a little over 11 feet. I can use a six by eight across here. Before I do that, I'm going to make sure I've got all of my Harbor Posts, their own group. I want to group them. I'm going to add a tag that says Posts. Then I'm going to come up here and I'm going to put them on that tag layer. Now I can keep this geometry separate. I'm going to go ahead and now draw in the beginnings of my rafters. I'm going to pull that up, it's a six by eight. I'm going to bring it up 8 ". Then I'm going to make this a component, and I'm going to call it rafter and create. Now I can go ahead and I catch the move and copy. I'm going to put it right there. Now I want this to come out, let's say a foot this way. See what that looks like? Because it's a component. You can see my back rafter is moving with me. I'm just going to bring this out 12 " and I'll come around to this side and I'm going to bring it out 12 ". Okay. There's the beginnings of that now. I need to six by 12 coming this way, but I don't want it to be coming above my rafter. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to come in and I'm going to grab a line and I'm going to come over to here. I'm going to come down 12 ". And I'll come over on my red axis and create that now since this is okay. Thank you. Okay. Now I'm just going to take this, and this is a six by, so I'm going to pull it over 6 ". And then I'm going to make it a component, I'm going to call this rafter number two. I'll create that. Now I need to have this over where this post is. So I'm going to take it and I'm going to move, I'm just going to move it back to where it's there. And then if I come over, put my guideline on the right post, Move copy. Now I've got my posts established. Now what I can do is I can put in my rafters up above. I'm going to go ahead and edit and delete these guides. And I'm going to, again, stop this short lecture here. We're going to come back one last time to do the rafters above. And then we'll move on to the pond and start putting some rendering to this. But we've gone quite enough for this lecture. Okay, that'll do it. I will be back in a few moments and we'll finish this off. 23. Adding On The Rafters: Okay, we're back and we are going to try to figure out how to finish this arbor off. What I want to do is I want to use two by six rafters going parallel with this beam all the way across to be able to do that. That's too big of a span, certainly for a two by six. But because of the way the shadows are coming, that's going to offer the most shade down into my patio area. That means I'm going to have to add a 612 beam here between these two posts, but also in between as well, so that my spans are more realistic. What I want to do is I don't want to see a bit of my beam dropping down 4 " below this rafter, because this is a six by eight, this is a six by 12. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into edit mode and I'm going to select the top of this. I'm going to pull this up 4 ". Now this is a six by 12. Now I can come here. I'm going to give a guideline so I know where I'm at. And I'm going to come in, I'm going to select all of these triple click to make sure I've selected all of my geometry. And this is a component, I'm just going to grab this at this corner and I'm going to pull it right up to that intersection. I've got a nice flush look to it. Go ahead and delete that guide. Now what I want to do is I'm going to want to bring that beam, copy it over, to put it between these two posts. But right now, Sketch up sees this beam as one solid piece. If I was trying to find the middle out here between these two posts and between these two posts, sketch up is going to think the middle is right here because it's just one solid beam. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into copy or edit mode. I'm going to do some lines to split this beam down the middle and I'm going to have to do the same at the end. So that sketch up doesn't think that it's going all the way out to the very end of the beam over here. I'll do the same thing over here. And red axis. Okay? And because it was a component, it was doing that to the whole thing. That's fine. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to move and copy this beam down to this point here. Now what I want to do is I want to find the middle point so I can put a beam here. And put a beam over here. At the midway, I'm going to tap my tape measure tool. And I'm just going to get on this line, there's my middle point. Okay? And then if I want to, I can do the same thing in this direction. Now I've got one in both spots, and I'm going to do the same thing again over here. There's my middle point. I'll just do it like this because, okay, that is the center. When I move this, I'm going to want to move and copy from the midpoint to put it to that, because that's the center of where I'm working. If I go ahead and select this and, and, and grab it at the midpoint and lock it in, I can go and copy again. I'd pull this over midpoint. Now, go ahead and delete these guides. Now I've got my framework for the arbor put together. I don't need to have these lines in here, but I'm not going to worry about those right now. What I want to do now is see about getting my actual rafters put up. The distance from the middle to the middle is 16 feet, 6216 feet, 7 ". I'm going to just go ahead and I'm going to establish a line there. Before I get too far with this, I am going to make sure I've selected all of this and I'm going to make that a group. I'm going to create a rafters tag, and I'm going to put this on that rafters tag. Now, the arbor posts are on the arbor post tag. That's good. Everything's in its own group at this point. And that's what I wanted to see. Now I'm going to go ahead and that's the midpoint. I'm going to use my take measure tool again and I'm going to come 34 of an inch one way, because a two by six is 1.5 ". If I go 1.5 then now I can use my line tool and I'm just going to go from there to there. And then on the blue axis, I'm just going to say 6 " to make this simple 1.5 and back down. Now I can use my push pole tool. I'm just going to bring this two by six rafter all the way down to there. I think maybe it might be nice to have it candle levered, but let's wait on that. I'm going to make this a component, and I'm going to call this, I'll just call it the top rafter and create. Now I'm going to come over here, I need to find the middle point. And then I want to come back 0.75 ". I can erase this one at that point. Now I'm going to come over here, I'm going to grab this. I'm going to go move, copy, grab it right there. Where I want to do is put it right there. Since it's about 17 feet, I'm going to say divide and I want to have let's say eight of them in between and enter. Now I've got my rafters up on top. Now my spacing between these, whoa boy, that scroll wheel can move quick spacing is two feet apart. What if I'm going to take that out and I'm going to hit the control for copy? I had done a division with eight. I'm going to make it to where these are a little bit tighter together. I'm going to go divide and I'm going to go 12 and enter. Now my rafters are a little bit closer, a little more shade out of them, I think that's going to work just fine. Now what I want to do is I'm going to just select these. I'm going to make them their own group. I'm going to call this rafters. Now I can come up here and here's top rafters so I can put them in their own group on their own tag. Now if I want to, I can turn those. I can turn the rafters themselves. I can turn the posts of now we've got our harbor built and we are ready to move on and finish off our pond and pathway. And then we're going to render this. So I'm going to go ahead and stop this one here and we will be back in the next lecture. And we're going to finish off our pond. And we're going to start pulling the backyard landscape together. Okay? Thanks for watching. I'll see you in a bit. 24. Finishing the Pond and the Pathway: Okay, here we are. And we're going to go ahead and finish off our path and our pond feature. And then we're going to figure out where our raised garden beds are going to go. Let's go ahead and just see about finishing up this landscape. What I've done is just for references, I've put the retainer wall back in. I highlighted the retaining wall tag so that we can see that because I just feel ergonomically that helps me out. This is still the back patio. It's in its own group. The pond is not yet and I'm going to wait and put that into a group with the pathway. What I'm going to do is come in and if I take a look at my diagram, my path starts out face of the pond or the edge of the pond and it's one 5 " in. I want to make sure I'm coming in one 5 " on the ground plane. I'm going to go ahead tap the tape measure tool. I'm going to come in and I'm going to tap this and I'm going to come across 1 ft 5 ". Then my pathway is four feet wide, actually. At this particular juncture, my pathway is 44 and a quarter, because I'm on an angle, I'm going to go 44.25 and hit enter because then once I turn my 45 degrees, I'll be back to a four foot. Now my pathway comes out 12 " on this side, over on the other side is coming out 23.34 ". I'll go ahead and click and making sure that I'm at the intersection. That's where I want to be two foot, 3.75 That gets me started on my path coming out. Now I'm just going to come around, grab my protractor tool. Come up turn 45 degrees to grab my protractor tool. Come up turn 45 degrees. Now I can start drawing in my path. The upper piece of my path measures 17 feet, 5.5 ", 17 feet, 5.5 The lower path is measuring or 15 feet, 5.5 ", 15 feet, 5.5 Then my little seating area is five feet wide. Well, my path is four feet. I'm going to come over on the green axis 6 ". I'm going to go on the red axis five feet. I'm going to go on the green axis five feet, the red axis five feet. And then just close that in. Now I've got my path closed in, but I'm 5 " or 4 " lower than this. And I don't want to come off of some a ramp or bridge over this and have to step down 4 ". I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to click that and I'm going to hit my offset tool. And I'm going to push this and create some edging. And I'm going to have that edge be 1 " thick. It could be like some, a plastic bender board or something along those lines. Now what I want to do is create this edging using my push pole tool. I'm going to bring this up 3 " and then I'm going to bring my interior up 2.5 ". Now I've created some seating area and some walkway within that I can pick whatever material I want to. At this point, I can go ahead and delete my guides. Now we've got a way out and across, but I have to be able to cross this right here. What I want to do is I want to create some guidelines that will help me to do this. I want to be, even with my edging, this is where I use my guides a lot. My edging and then I'm going to go ahead and I want to make sure that anything that I create is going to be on top of my curbing. So I'm going to click here. I can click here again. Intersection. There's that. Now I want to make sure I'm even with the top again. I'm going to click intersection. And click come over here, Intersection. That is looking good. Now I'm going to do one more thing. I'm going to click, and I'm going to make sure I'm right on top of my patio so I can create what I want to see. I can now get rid of this lower line. I want my pads. Now I show a bridge in the diagram. I've thought about that. And I think instead of a bridge, I'm going to do some concrete stepping pads that are going to be more durable. I'm going to go ahead and hit my tape measure. I'm going to come 2 " off of my patio. Then I've already measured this. And if I go 46 " and 2 ", then I'm going to have from this intersection to this intersection, three feet, 10 ", which is 46 ". I've got two equal pads. And I can just come in and close these in. Before I do that, I'm going to triple click and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to make my path and my pond area their own group. If I want to change anything on these pads I can without affecting this geometry, then I can come in and I can click on this and it's untagged. I'm going to put it on the pond and path tag layer. Now if I need to, I can turn that off or on. Now what I want to do is grab this and I'm just going to draw my pads in following my guidelines. There's a then I'm going to draw this one. I'm going to bring it all the way over because I want this pad to actually go over the edge of my curbing. I can close that in. Now I'm going to go ahead again, delete my guides. And I'm going to turn off my pond and path. I can turn this up to see. I'm going to hit my push pull and I'm going to bring this down. And remember this is conceptual, I'm just looking at bringing it down. Even with that, I'm going to make this its own group. I'm going to create a new tag layer called stepping stones. Now if I tick on this, I can come over here and there's my stepping stones again, keeping all of this geometry open. And now I can turn pond and path layer back on. Now my pond area is its own, my path area is its own. When I come in to render, I'll be able to make this look the way I want it to. There is that essence there. And then finally, I'm going to turn my house layer, I'm going to turn myself around and turn my house layer back on. They wanted to have raised beds. I'm just going to go ahead and click the rectangle tool. I'm on my face and I'm going to go four feet. Oh, let's make it four by eight feet. I've got a four by eight foot and I'm going to offset it and have a 1 " thickness to it. Now I can pull in, I can bring this up, let's say 24 ". And I'm going to, I'm just going to make this a group because I'm not going to be really changing it. But I am going to go copy and move. And I'm just going to copy a piece over on face in the group. I'll put it right there now I can come down onto the interior and push, pull, and bring this up to, let's say 22. ". This is like filling my box 22 ". Now I've got some raised beds on the west side of the house. I've got my pathway. I am going to click on this and I'm going to reverse faces so that it's white. There's the beginnings of my backyard. We've got this, we've got my pads. What's next is to come in and actually start rendering this out and getting some plant material in. We'll be back in a little bit and we're going to actually see what this looks like when it's got some rendering to it. Okay, thanks for watching. I'll see you in a bit. 25. Rendering and Bringing in the Plants: All right. Welcome back. And we're going to go ahead and render out our backyard landscape so it looks like a landscape. And we're going to use a lot of the same materials that we used in the front yard. We've already put some color to the house itself, but we're going to go ahead and start filling in our patio and retaining walls or raised beds over here in this side. And then we'll start bringing in some plant material because these are all in their own groups. We've got to go ahead and select them. And then double click to go into edit mode. And then I'm going to select this face. I used antique brick in the front. I'm going to use it again here in the back. Just work my way around. Bring all of this look in to where once we do a presentation to a client, they're going to get a much better feel for what their garden could look like. Now I'm going to come in and I want to do the walls, And it seems to me that I used a synthetic surface and I used this. I'm just going to throw a little bit of color onto this. And it's subtle, but it's there. That's what I want to see. Again, being a conceptual plan, you can come in and change the colors based on your client's preferences. Field square tile, we'll see. We'll just go ahead and work with this. We just work our way around, just like we did in the front yard, getting some rendering done to this to really make it look like something that renders out our patio area. Now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to grab some sparkling water. Well, first I'm going to go in, because this is its own group, I'm going to grab sparkling water. I'll put that there. I'm going to go back to my materials. I'll go to landscape and fencing, just to pick something to give a look to this. I think what I'll do is because I've been using brick on the patio area, I'm going to go ahead and continue that so that it contains the same all the way around. I could even do that with this, just give it a brick edging, Maybe that's not realistic. But it's giving you the idea of how to work with these different elements. Being able to orbit and use your scroll wheel to move around and get the visibility you need. And if necessary then you go in and turn off some of the tag layers. You get the idea there's that now this is my sand layer that was in here. This I can go into edit. I could take this and maybe a little bit finer instead of 1 ft 6. ", what if I say it was three feet? I can adjust my color a little bit to make it lighter or a little bit darker. Okay. That's starting to look a little more like something. The last thing I want to do is my stepping stones were their own group. I'm going to come in and is there anything in here I'd want to see. Pavers, stone walk. Let's see what that looks like. That's a nice transition from the brick to the sand that I selected. I can do that and back out of that. Now we're getting a nice feel for what this could look like. Now I'm going to come back and let's finish off the arbor going to orbit. And I don't really care a whole lot for most of these, Okay, So what I'm going to do is I'm going to back that up again and go into full edit mode. Now when I click this, you'll see both of the beams get rendered. And then I'm going to do the same again for these. Okay, that that out. Now we've got our rafters and I'm going to just make them the same color. Now, that last thing to render as far as the arbor is concerned is our post. Remember, we made some of these posts unique. I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to take just a slightly different color and do that. And then finally, I had made these back ones unique as well. So I can come in click, there's the beginnings of my landscape and I'm pretty happy with this. I think this is going to turn out looking good. Now I'm going to go and leave the materials. I, I'm going to close my tags down. I'm going to go to components. Here's a bench now I'm going to have to swing around. And what I am going to do here is I'm going to turn my tags back on because I want to turn my retaining wall. I want to turn that visibility off so I can see this to a better degree. And I'm going to grab my rotate tool and I'm going to go red, axis, move, move. Then I'm going to hit the scale tool and there's my grip and I'm going to hold the control key down. So we'll take it right from the center. Then I can pull this in and pull it on the red axis a little bit. And I've got a bench seating in here. I can turn my retaining wall back on, I can turn fence posts back on, my fence boards back on, and start to get a better feel. Now what I want to do is I do want to bring in some plants. So I'm just going to go ahead and type in shade trees again. And let's do a search for that. There's one we used in the front yard. We'll grab a shade tree. It's an oak tree. I'll download it. Yes, we can take it directly into the model on face in group that looks a little big in that sense. I'm going to go ahead and get the scale tool. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to hold my control key down so I can bring it down and on face in group. And I'm going to put it to where it's right there. I can just keep populating all of this out as necessary. Then I've got my shade factors, now I've got my raised beds. I can go back to materials, and I'll just grab some wood. Now, I'm going to go into landscaping and I'm just going to find some, let's just say wood mulch. And I would do that for both of my raised beds. And I can come back, close this down. I'm going to go ahead and turn on the front yard courtyard and the front yard plants. We'll look at the completed landscape here in a couple of lectures. But this is where I've come with this and how I've put it together. So I'm going to go ahead and end this lecture right now. I'm going to finish fleshing this out and we'll look at the completed landscape in a lecture coming up. Okay, thanks for watching. And this is how we can render and do a presentation for a client using sketch up. Okay, thanks. I'll see you in a bit. 26. The Completed Garden: Here's my final garden design, and I've put in a few more conceptual plants. I've just worked this around. And it has changed from that original hand drawing that I put together. This is the beauty and the power of sketch up to explore ideas and how form and function follow together. The bird bath, the little water feature is the center and the hub of this entire front yard design. Everything radiates off of this. So this would be almost a radial design garden. Having the low walls gives a sense of separation from the public passageway if there was a sidewalk out here or the street. And having the walkway coming over, radiating directly off of the water feature and out to the driveway is much more enjoyable than having a walk snugged right up next to the house. So changing this out and making this into a much more relaxed and interesting and enjoyable entry from the public space to the private garden itself. And the same in the backyard. You see, I've done just again, conceptual plantings. They wanted screening from neighbors on this side. We've accomplished that. They wanted a small water feature. They were certainly open to it. We've accomplished that. We've done it in an interesting way to where now again, low seating walls bringing this around and our water feature coming in, working its way across bench seating at the far end. This could be expanded, perhaps it could just be, but it gives a whole nother perspective to sitting and enjoying the yard. That's one thing that I really enjoy is being able to give people different destinations within the garden to go and enjoy the new landscape of probably thicker plantings along here. But this would be a conceptual design I would gladly take to a client, say, here's the idea, here's what I'm coming up with, what do you think of it? And then how do you move forward based on the client's input? I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time actually picking out individual species or varieties of plants. I may not even pick out specific materials all at once. Just enough to give them a feel for what this garden could look like and then refine it as we move forward. That was my final design solution, but there are some other ideas as well floating around and that's going to be in alternative solutions. We've got a lecture coming up where I actually have an alternative design solution. And it's something that you might want to take a look at as well in your designs is gosh, I've got this but I think that might work as well. So how do you present alternative solutions within sketch up and yet not have to redraw everything to get started again. So anyway, that's my finished design. I'm quite happy with it. I think it could work really well. It could be fleshed out easily and come up with a few more details to where this could be a working drawing and a construction drawing, to where it could be built. Okay, that's it for my completed garden design. And I will see you in a bit. 27. Creating Animations and Scenes: So we've completed the garden design. And I know that this isn't really fleshed out 100% but it's the gist of what we're doing here. The garden is such that you want to be able to walk your client through it, and there's a number of ways you can do this. One is you can just simply use the scroll wheel and move around and explain what's going on. Another option is to create an animation some scenes. And this would be something that you could actually, if you had some kind of screen capture, you could film and e mail to a client if it was more convenient. But to create scenes, then you want to open the scenes tab. I have already created six different scenes in this. It's very simple to do. You just rotate your view to wherever you want it to be. Then you just go ahead and I'll just create a seventh scene here. I just hit the plus sign, It adds a scene. We've got that in there. Now I can come up and I've got all of these scene tabs shown along the top one. For some reason seven popped in there. But now I can go to scene one and I can physically just click through the individual scenes to show my client what I feel that the garden could look like and explain what my design solution is at that particular time. Another option is to go to View and come down to animation. And it'll say Play. Now, before I go to that, I'm going to go to settings. I've set the scene transitions for 5 seconds and scene delay for 5 seconds because I wanted to give time for the shadowing to be rendered and give me time to talk about what my design solution is to a client. I'm going to go ahead and you can just set that to whatever. I'm going to turn that off and I'm going to go back to view animation. Now I can go to play and this will just automatically work its way through your entire scene. Display, whatever it is that you want to display to your client. And it will just walk its way through it. And like I say, I've got it on a little bit of a delay because I was trying to get some shadowing to come into effect by going on the slow side. It gives me the opportunity to talk to the client and explain what I think it might be and see the power of being able to do an animation. And then explain and show different views of what this would look like, even to the point of coming up to a bird's eye view, where they get a better feel for what the layout of the garden is. How the shapes interrelate, how the courtyard would look and feel with the water feature in the middle and the low walls, how it helps to define space. Now it's going to go back to scene one. And I can come up and just go ahead and stop. You can create multiple scenes out of this. Don't underestimate the power of using animation and creating scenes within your garden design. Again, you can always come up to the slider bar and the shadows change the time of day to give different times of the year, different times of day into your scenes. And then create new scenes or update a scene or add scenes. It all just goes to help present this design solution to a client to where they have a better feel for what your solution is and how it would work in their particular situation. So that's it for animation and scenes, they're really easy to create. And then if you don't want one like scene seven, if I don't want that, I can just remove that scene. And yes, I want to remove that scene. And it's deleted from the scene tabs up above, so there we have it, animation and scenes. And it's a great way to be able to walk your client through and even to visualize the garden to a greater degree for your own purposes. Remember it's all visualization. And as designers, the more we can walk our way through the garden, the more we're going to get an ergonomic feel and an aesthetic feel for what this garden can end up looking like. Okay, that's it for this lecture and I will see you in the next. Okay, thanks for watching. 28. Alternative Solutions: All right, here we are. And we're going to take a look at some alternative solutions and how you can build these into your sketch up model. To where if you have a client and you have different ideas, different directions, you may think they'd like to go and you'd like to offer alternatives to them. Then you have this opportunity and you can do it without having to redraw the footprint of the property, any of the other hardscape materials that you know are going to remain. And yet you still want to be able to give them these different alternatives. What we can do, these are called iterations, which is just a fancy word for alternatives where you can find this and how you could create it is. I'm going to go to the tags tab and open this up. What I have done is I have actually created tag folders. I have my original design solution, and if I hit the drop down arrow, I have my front yard and my backyard, My visibility is on. I've got my house on its own folder. So the beauty of putting these in a folder is before, and I'm just kind of bust this open. The backyard, I had all these different tags. Front yard, plant, driveway, courtyard, landscape, the arbor with its three different rafters, posts, top rafters. All of this stuff that just starts to get a little cumbersome to look at, but if I can put them in a folder, then it consolidates it down. And I know I'm going to find my original design solution in this folder, my house, I kept it separate in its own folder. Fence and retaining wall. I kept it in its own folder because it has different components and such in it. The retaining wall itself, the fence posts, the fence boards. So it's just a way of organizing and it makes it a lot simpler. Now if I want to say, hey, here's my design solution and show it to my clients and they say, wow, that looks nice. But have you got any other ideas? Just as an example. And I can say, well, I sure do. And I can come up here and I'm going to open my original design and I put the driveway under the original design solution. Now, I probably should have put the driveway in the house folder because I'm not going to change the driveway. And I can do that really easily. And I can do that right now. I can highlight this and I can bring it down and put it right there. Now it's in the house folder. That's going to actually make this a little bit easier because I can come in and say, oh, here's my original design solution. You want to see something different? Okay, I can turn off my original design solution. I'm going to turn off my ground plane because I have an alternative ground plane. And I can start bringing, here's my alternative ground plane. Now all of a sudden, just out of the blue, I've got a brand new design solution that I can show a client. Instead of a courtyard, I've got a walkway with a couple of entry pillars with post lights, a couple of bird baths on each side. A very symmetrical design. I've got four trees, two on each side, Hedging, balancing this out. Now, I would definitely have more plants in here. This is just to show you the beauty of how you could have a different design solution. It's the same in the backyard and instead of a arbor and water feature, I went ahead and I just did a very simple patio. Maybe some lawn area. Just a different patio coming out a step up for the barbecue area just to separate the space a little bit. Some bench seating. And very simple, in some ways a client may look at this and say, you know what, we really like the front yard, that courtyard look to it, but the backyard is starting to get a little too fancy for what we want. What we'd really like is just to have a simple patio, a barbecue area, sublime. And then again, some screening from our neighbors. That's it. This is the beauty of this, and you don't have to redraw everything. It's all right here. And I can turn this back off, turn my alternative solution off, and turn my original design solution back on. Now I can look at this and say, okay, yeah, this could be a little pricey. Let's go back to what we were looking at in the alternative. And maybe put that into the backyard and go ahead and stick with this. Look here in the front yard, that's where you can take different ideas. This could be the front yard, the alternative could be the backyard. And it just all flows really nicely together. And it's a way for you to get different ideas out and show them to your client and get their feedback on it. And then make modifications to where you can come in and do a final master plan that can be dimensioned and really get into the construction details. Okay, that is it for alternative solutions, easy to do, Just pay attention to your tags. Keep organized as you can with like your original solution. Alternative solution may be alternative solution number one. Maybe alternative solution number two. But it'll take a little bit of practice, but it's a great way and a really powerful way to be able to get different ideas across to your client. Okay, that's it. Thanks for watching and I will see you in a bit. 29. Course Wrap Up and Thank You: Well, we've come to the end of my course on the power of sketch up in garden design. And this is the first of a series of courses in sketch up that I'm going to be doing in garden design. But in this one we've covered a lot of ground now. We worked on flat ground in this, but we talked about how to bring in a PDF. What you have to do to get that into sketch up, how to work with Autocad files, how to go ahead and take your own site survey and draw it into sketch up. And then take that, especially with sketch up Pro, you can take it into layout, get a scale drawing whether you're using imperial feet and inches or metric, and then you have a base map to lay your trace paper over and start working up ideas. I still really believe that you're not going to be able to get as creative as you possibly can unless you throw that trace paper down and just draw and just work ideas out. Look at different design approaches. Read that chapter on design approach that I put into the section resources and explore and let your creativity flow your imagination. Run then. And then you can bring it into Sketch up and start working up this conceptual plan that you can take and show to your client. Put it into a three D perspective. Show them alternative solutions if you choose to do that and get a better feel of where to go with that plan. Then at that stage you can come back and make this into a working drawing between sketch up and layout where you can dimension things. But this course has been all about using sketch up as a presentation tool. And I really appreciate your watching it and being through this whole section. And I will see you in the next course on down the road. All right, thanks a lot.