by Sarah Peterson

 

Putuco Roof Attempt:
In an early attempt at the Putuco roof, I did a
wireframe and was hoping to find a way to flesh out or
drape over these guidlines. I was attempting to use
the “Follow me” tool, originally with the lines that
cut through the plane. However, the “follow me” tool
only works on planes. After many attempts at creating
a plane from the lines, another capability SketchUp
lacks, I simply added in this square plane and
attempted to trim off the area outside the shaping
lines. SketchUp would not do this either. Eventually
I had to abandon this attempt and start again.

 

Putuco Complete (Figures 2 and 3)
Here you can see the completed Putuco form, as it was
raised from the archaeological sight blueprints. To
finally achieve the roof, I drew a circle for the base
and a straight line at the apex. I eventually realized
that the only way to make faces from lines was to make
triangles with the draw tool. I made a very small
triangle connecting the apex to the base and used the
“Follow me” tool to draw it around the circle. This
technique was able to form the shape, but left
unsightly lines all over the surface where the planes
connected. So, the last step in generating this model
was to select all of the lines on the roof’s surface
and hide them.

 

Reed house

Figure 4 shows the variety of reed textures
available and the difference tile-size and direction
made. Importing pictures and adjusting color, shade
and size are easy in the Paint- Edit window. Changing
the direction of the reeds for the roof had to be done
in Microsoft Paint.