#drawing systems

[usefulstuffmouzon]

SketchUp component colors

Just learned something really useful. Several years ago, I figured out that it's useful to have components with various weights: block, fast, and slow, then add-on speeds of slower and slowest. Block is what it sounds like: the resolution of a monopoly house. Select the block tag and you can zoom out to see an entire neighborhood of buildings and anything you do will be at blazing speeds: panning, zooming, whatever. The fast tag is still pretty fast, and so on.

Essentially, I'm building 3 models within a model which are turned on according to their tag. Each model is a group, not a component to prevent conflicts with other similar models; only the enclosing model is a component. The last two tags (slower and slowest) piggyback on the slow group and contain the most detailed items.

The "groups within a component" model is really useful if I'm looking to have several items within an overall model that I want to have different colors. I've rarely used the "apply this color to this component" feature, almost always coloring surfaces within a component instead. It turns out that if a surface already has a color, hitting its enclosing component doesn't change that surface, but if it doesn't, it gets the paint bucket color. More on this later as I learn more about this.

[usefulstuffmouzon]

SketchUp's Problem With Black Text

This bug has been around since at least 2020. When I create 3D Text and place it on a surface, explode it, and try to fill it black it doesn't work. But if I pick any other color from the Colors palette (say, a green) then pick black it replaces the green with black. It's not tragic; just annoying. Any ideas?

[solkarasart]

For our final Intro to Drawing Systems project, we had to take a building (which we had to do a quick perspective rendering on of itself) and then change it in someway and do that in perspective, as well as surrounding area and all that. Some people got super creative and made things like a giant mech, past projects had submarines and other fun stuff like that. I opted to turn my building into a weird, sort of church-like mediaeval structure hidden deep underground... but what's that staring out of the house? Entirely made with black ink pen and grey markers Really poor quality image for now, a bunch of my older assignments I accidentally deleted instead of saving (I had a separate folder for my portfolio work, and I thought I had merely copied everything, but no turns out I had moved the files over entirely). I might throw up a better looking image later but it requires me scanning the image in four times with the scanner (it's quite large) and then stitching it together in photoshop and I really don't want to do that right now... lol

[solkarasart]

For our final project in Drawing Systems, we had to design a product, making an orthographic rendering (the one with all the measurements), a magazine ad, a glamour shot, and then a final presentation of the product. Originally we were going to make an isometric rendering as well, however because of the school shutting down and switching to online only (and we also lost a week) our professor opted to not have to do that portion. This one was a lot of fun! I'm tempted to use the orthographic rendering to get one actually made!

[ellieroseillustration]

Drawing Systems //

Metamorphosis.      Week Seven

‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’

The second part to the Metamorphosis work led us to a choice of carrying on from the previous project or starting a fresh creating something based on a quote. The piece I created is simple and yet I feel like I should’ve tried to incorporate more insect elements to the piece rather than looking like a transformative image. It doesn't incorporate a lot of metamorphosis which I could’ve achieved through overlapping the female figure and an ever-growing amount of insect qualities growing onto her body.

[ellieroseillustration]

Drawing Systems //

 JG Ballad Quote work.     Week Four

‘Like an immense submarine temple, the white bulk of the planetarium stood before him, illuminated by the vivid surface water. The steel barricades around the entrance had been dismantled b the previous divers, and the semicircular are of doors which led into the foyer was open. Kerans switched on his helmet lamp and walked through the entrance. He peered carefully among the pillars and alcoves, following the steps which led up into the mezzanine.’

The basis of this work followed on from the previous workshop titled elements of chance and randomness. After being giving a piece of text from JG Ballad’s book we were too use methods we had previously explored to express what we were reading. A lot of the colour described in the text was white, so I tried to use a small amount of black acrylic. He talks about their being disruptions from divers so I used masking tape to stop the paint going everywhere and peeled it off to display disruptions in the piece itself.

[ellieroseillustration]

Drawing Systems //

 Tate Modern Visit.      Week Two

Context // Someone who is lost.

The first portion of our visit involved us taking on a context and taking photos of the new wing in regards to what we chose. Most of the photos ended up being of the building rather than the work that was on display. I took on an erratic state and took photos from all different angles, hoping to replicate the sense of being lost and not knowing where you are. 

[usefulstuffmouzon]

PowerCADD's Advanced Text Tool

I can't believe I didn't know about PowerCADD's Advanced Text tool! Apparently, it's been around since Version 8. When you create a text box with this tool, it brings up a window where you can do pretty much every kind of typography adjustment that can be done in other illustration and page layout apps!

One caveat... because it retains all formatting of anything copied from another app (even including hyperlinks) you have to take one extra step of pasting into a plain-text TextEdit document, then copying and pasting into PowerCADD.