on how to draw a vase

This is gonna feature the arc tool, the follow me tool and the offset tool.

So, if you're a beginner and are looking for some tips on how to use

those tools this is kind of a good,easy tutorial for you.

um... and this is what we're gonna end up with, with this

vase right here

you can see it's hollow so we'll be building the wall and using the

follow me tool to 0:00:38.900,0:00:42.540 turn it into a vase. So the first thing your gonna wanna do and

i like to do this with a lot of different things

in sketchup,

is to create something to reference off of

So, for instance, if we start with the rectangle and we try to draw like an

upright

rectangle

sketchup is inferencing the wall behind

this table that I'm on.

I'm just trying to create

you know a rectangle that comes up like this and goes across but it goes a little crazy

like that.

So what i'll do is I'll just create a box here

and then use the push pull tool

to drag up

and this will give me a nice surface to reference

to when I'm drawing the outline of my

my vase.

So once you create your reference box,you just select everything by triple

clicking it. Right-click

and make sure it's in a group.

Because we don't want the profile to be sticking to this box we're going to be

deleting this box

later on.

So now that you have this nice reference face

to work on,

what we're going to do is create

the profile of the vase.

Now we don't need to make

the entire profile. We actually going to like split this in half

and just do half of the profile

and then the idea is we take that profile and spin it around in a circle.

So to do that, i'm just going to do it free hand. You can be more precise if you want.

You can use the tape measure tool

to create guides,

you know I specify dimensions

but we're just going to use the line tool and start drawing. So I'll just going to click

here

and drag over

to make the bottom

and I'll zoom in a little bit better

and make a little angle there

and then now we want to switch the arc tool so

since Sketchup thinks we're continuing to do a line you can either

press escape,

or you can just

click on your keyboard "a"

to bring up the arc tool or you can just select the

the arc tool. So,

another good idea is to have

a picture of whatever it is you're trying to model. This is a picture I just grabbed off

of

an image search.

This is kind of what I based the

shape of my vase

off of so it's nice to have something like this where you can

judge the proportions

so will come back in here

and we have the arc tool selected,

so we'll just start here

and will kinda come up to a spot here.

You click again,

to the specified second end point

of the arc,

and then the third click is gonna define the bulge.

Now it'll snap to different

types of arcs but we're just gonna come out to a

you know, slight bulge here, click a third time.

And there's the arc.

And we're gonna do another arc here,

coming out and you can see

that it has the tangent

kind of predefined there.

It will come out here,and

zoom in a little bit more to

give us,

give ourselves some more control

and then,

will do another arc

coming up here.

And then we'll switch back to the line tool.

See, you can see this profile kinda starting to

take shape

what we wanna to do is just

finish this off. We'll reference this point down here,

come up, click

and then come down

and click.

And you can see

the vase.

And now that we have that face we can go ahead

and delete the

box behind it.

So, I selected that, and hit delete

and you can see what it left with this

profile.

So now what we want to do is create the thickness,

so will go and grab the offset tool

and you can see that whenever you hover over

a face,

you'll see a little dot

and that's where

the

offset will start from.

So go ahead and click the start

and then as we move the mouse,

you'll notice how

it creates an offset profile

of the outline of that face.

Now we want to be careful 'cause see how

if you go too far

the line start overlapping so

we just wanna do a slight

like almost quarter-inch

line

and this is kind of the tricky part up here you don't want these lines to

overlap so,

so that's great! so now we have a nice

uh... wall thickness here

and then we'll go back to the line tool

and

we'll just create little cut-off points here

and then

we'll erase

all of these points

that we don't need any more.

So now that we have our profile

all we need to do is

create a path

for the follow me tool to follow. So we wanna go on a circular path

so we grabbed the circle tool

and you can see how right now

its showing a blue circle and when I come on this face

it shows a green circle.

So, you wanna make sure that it's locked into the blue

circle reference so whenever it pops up in blue you just hold down the shift key

and that'll keep it in that

reference point.

So holding down the shift key once you're in the blue circle you come to

this end point, you click once to start

and then you're gonna drag it out to this point

and click again to finish.

And then the final step

is

to do a follow me tool action.

Before you use the follow me tool, you wanna select the path

that the tool is going to follow.

So using the select tool,

you select the circle,

then you click the follow me tool,

and then click on the vase.

And there you go...

Now if your vase comes inside out like this and it's kinda gray,

sometimes that'll happen with different things you model in sketchup you just

select everything by triple clicking it, right-click

and click reverse faces

and you're all set!

And if you'd like to learn some more tricks and tips on how to use sketch up,

you can visit my website @ mastersketchup.com