SketchUp Pro For Garden Design

Welcome to SketchUp for Garden Design!  This course is intended to give you the knowledge and skills to use SketchUp for preparing your designs for presentation to friends, family or clients.  This course will show you how to create 3-dimentional perspective models of your designs that you can use in exploring design solutions and studies, making your ideas even more effective and convincing.  I'm excited you're here, we've got a lot to cover, let's get started!

I'll be showing how to work with PDF's, DWG files and drawing directly in SketchUp.  The different files I'll be using are available for you to download within the Resources for this lecture.  These files are what I'll be using throughout Section One, I've bundled them all in one place for  your convenience.

The first Site Plan is a PDF that you will need to convert to an image file to import into SketchUp (I use Adobe Acrobat to do the conversion).  The next file is an AutoCAD file - you'll need to be using SketchUp Pro to import this file - SketchUp FREE will not support this.  Finally is the Site Plan (with corrected measurements) I use for drawing directly into SketchUp.  This is a field sketch of a property.  Use this file to practice drawing directly in SketchUp or use a project of your own.  This final site plan is what I'll be using for the rest of the course to develop a design and a 3-D model for presentation.

Welcome to using SketchUp in Garden Design!  This course has been a long time in the making and I'm really excited to finally bring it to you.

To make this Course valuable, please have a project of your own to work on.  It may be your own garden or that of a friend, maybe it's mapping and drawing your house, but make it something interesting.  You'll get so much more out of this course if you work on a design that means something to you! 

I'll be showing how to work with PDF's, DWG files and drawing directly in SketchUp.  The different files I'll be using are available for you to download within the Resources for this lecture.  These files are what I'll be using throughout Section One, I've bundled them all in one place for convenience.

I'll be using SketchUp Pro 2022 for this Course.  If you are working with an older version - that's ok.  The commands are the same.  Also, I'm working on a PC but I'll have any shortcut commands presented on screen for those of you who use a Mac.

A reminder - SketchUp will not design any garden!  It's simply a drawing tool.  You still need to create a design that you can draw in SketchUp.  The more you work your ideas out on trace paper, the more efficient you'll be when you open SketchUp and start refining your ideas.

Just a short overview of the different files you can import into SketchUp.  I'm going to concentrate on the most common files you'll be working with - namely image files (JPEG, TIFF and PNG) along with AutoCAD (DWG) files.  Once you understand these extensions then any other file that SketchUp accepts should be easy for you to work with.

There's a good chance you'll be provided with a PDF of a property at some time.  Since a PDF is not a supported file format within SketchUp, you'll have to convert it to one that is.  The easiest is to export it to an image file.  In this lecture I'll demonstrate the way to do this export and then import it into SketchUp.  I'll be using Adobe Acrobat Pro as my PDF editing software.

SketchUp Pro will support AutoCAD files - you can import them directly into the program.  But, you'll be getting a lot of information you probably won't need for your garden design project.  In this lecture I'll import a DWG of a file I've been working with and start demonstrating how to clean it up so you have something to work with within your design. 

In Lecture 7 I'll continue demonstrating cleaning up unnecessary geometry that was imported with the AutoCAD file.  Eliminating unneeded geometry will help to keep your computer from getting bogged down.

In Lecture 7 I showed how to hide or delete unwanted geometry, but a hidden layer is still there!  In this video I'll show a way to really get rid of any geometry you don't need to have - hidden or not.

Often you'll be doing your own site survey and need to draw it directly into SketchUp, including doing triangulation to locate trees and other elements within the property.  This lecture will demonstrate how to do all of this efficiently.

Once you've drawn your Base Plan into SketchUp you can import it into Layout where you can choose the size paper you want your plan printed on, you can choose the scale of the drawing and you can fill in the necessary title block information.  In this lecture I'll take the drawing I created in Lecture 4 and import it into Layout.

This lecture is a brief review of the topics covered throughout this Section and a quick look at where we're headed in Section 3.

Starting your design on trace paper, rather than on the computer screen, will open your imagination to more creative solutions.  To explore ideas you need to move quickly and intuitively, allowing lines and shapes to flow across the paper and interconnect.  Once you have a solid, rough sketch of what you want to create you can then refine it within SketchUp, adding detail as needed.  Remember that good design begins on the Ground Plane - this is where we organize our thoughts, paying attention to Design Approach concepts and how they will work in 3-dimensional space.  I strongly recommend that your always start your designs on paper first!

Here I have assembled the Resources for this Section including the chapter on Design Approach from my book on garden design.  All of these resources are available to download.  The design assignments are on oversized paper since they are to scale.  For the imperial scale (1/8" = 1'0") use 24" x 36" paper, for the metric scale (1:100) use paper size A1. You'll probably need to send these pdf's over to a copy shop to print, only print the plan you'll be working on - you don't need to print both scaled drawings.

In the last Section we learned how to bring different file types into SketchUp, including drawing our site survey directly into the program.  So now the question is “Do we design in SketchUp? Or, are we bringing our designs into SketchUp for better visualization and presentation?”  Personally, I vote for the second option.  In this lecture I'll show how I get started on creating design solutions for any project that you'll be able to use for your own clients.

Spock said "there are always possibilities"  and your first design solution may not be the best one you can develop.  In this lecture I'll try a different design approach and how to use this idea to create alternative layout of the design.  At the end of this lecture you should have a greater understanding of the power of starting your design on trace paper rather than on a computer screen.

In the last two lectures we explored how to create different designs using two design approach techniques.  In this lecture I've settled on a final design I'm happy with.  Now it's time to take this plan and draw it into SketchUp where we'll be able (in the next Section) to create a 3-D model for presentation! 

We've explored the power of starting your design on paper rather than on the computer screen.  In this lecture I'll have a brief review of what I beleive is the strangest way to get started on your design and how to finalize your solution.

Here is where you can download my design in both Imperial and Metric scale for use in the Section.  Feel free to use your own design as well!  Also, you may want to print out the blank plan and create your own design for this garden and not use mine at all!  I have included a SketchUp model of the house and property (without my design) for you to download into your version of SketchUp. It will be in plan view, but toggle into perspective to see what the house and property look like.  I'll be creating my design on this model.  I've also included both plans with dimension values shown so you can check your work.  You'll be using all of this information to create the garden plan on the SketchUp model I've provided for you.  Remember - if you want to do your own, original design, great, go for it!!

In Section Two we created our design.  Now it's time to build a 3 dimensional model of the plan.  Doing this goes beyond just having something to present to a client - it also gives us, as the designers, the opportunity to visualize and modify the design as necessary to create a garden that can be built and enjoyed.  This lecture will give a brief overview of what will be presented in further lectures. Be sure to download the plans I've provided you in Lecture 18 - Section Resources.

Tags, components and groups are the underlying keys to staying organized and being able to navigate our model.  This Lecture will cover how these 3 items ply a vital role when modeling.  Without being organized your model will become cumbersome, geometry will stick to each other and you'll find it very frustrating as you move along.

Before we can build a model we need to draw our design in SketchUp.  This means using the scale rule and being prepared to make adjustments to that our design fits the site and satisfies our goals as the creators of the garden.

In addition to my original hand-drawn design I've provided two versions of the final design I created - one in imperial (feet and inches) scale and one in metric (1:100) scale. 

Also, you have the two scaled plans with dimensions in case you need them. 

Look closely and you'll see that there are differences between the hand-drawn and the final design.  This is because, as I draw in SketchUp and set my dimensions more accurately, I'm seeing ways I feel I can improve and refine my ideas.

Enough of talking about what to do - now it's time to actually start pulling our design into 3 dimensional space.  In the last lecture we drew our front yard design in Plan View.  Now we'll pull the courtyard and garden into a 3-dimensional model and see how it looks.    Refer to Lecture 20 if you need to, the key is to stay organized!

With this lecture we'll finish the front yard landscape.  You'll see how to import trees and shrubs and set up shadows specific to the month and hour to give your client (and you) a better understanding of how the garden will work throughout the seasons...

A short recap of what's been covered throughout this Section.