My House, in the Middle of my Street

    I believe my house would fit into the colonial style. I’d certainly peg the windows as having been made in the 18th century. Fortunately, the shape was fairly simple to capture. Other than the garage and two chimneys, the basic layout is just a rectangle. I did my best to make the windows look as authentic as possible, but in the end I decided I couldn’t really capture the molding very effectively and left them flat. I did, however, add some depth to the impressions under the first floor windows, the eve over the front door, and the door itself. By the end, I was pretty pleased with my work.

A a big part of what made this model really feel like an honest impression home was the ability that SketchUp gives you to edit the built-in textures. The colors on the roofing and the lattice-work by the garage both had to be tweaked. With a bit more time, I think I could have fixed the scale on the garage and made it look a bit more finished. Still, SketchUp is really great for throwing together a decent sketch (pun-intended) fairly quickly. Closer detailing were take quite a bit more training. Whether that is a criticism of SketchUp or just a reality of 3D modeling is hard to say. Nevertheless, the software is remarkably easy to pick up and get going on a small project with.