Google® SketchUp® and SketchUp® Pro 7 Bible

Chapter 14. Working with TIN Surfaces

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating TIN surfaces

• Using the Smoove tool

• Stamping and draping edges onto surfaces

• Increasing surface resolution

• Flipping edges

Almost all models created with the conventional SketchUp tools consist of straight-lined objects. This is great for buildings, machines, and mechanical-type objects, but if you want to create objects that are more organic, you can use the Sandbox tools. The Sandbox tools are used to create organic shapes like terrains, plants, and animals.

The organic surfaces are called Triangulated Irregular Network surfaces or TIN surfaces. These surfaces break down into triangular faces and are most often used to create terrain objects. These terrains are irregular in that they have a randomness to them.

Creating TIN Surfaces

Before you can use the Sandbox tools, you need to enable them using the Extensions panel in the System Preferences dialog box, as shown in Figure 14.1. After the extensions are enabled, the Sandbox submenu appears in the Draw menu. SketchUp does not need to be restarted once the extensions are enabled.

Enabling the Sandbox tools also adds a toolbar to the interface. The Sandbox toolbar, shown in Figure 14.2, includes buttons for each of the available Sandbox tools.

The Sandbox Toolbar includes two tools for creating TIN surfaces. These tools are the From Contours tool, which creates surfaces using a set of selected contour lines, and the From Scratch tool, which creates a rectangular surface that can ...