Sketchup Tip: Creating Curbs is Easy

I want to show an easy way to create curbs. In this example I will use a basic 4 way intersection and we will add textures and then make the curb stand out as 3d.

1. Start out by drawing out the line work for the curb and sidewalk and roadway. Make sure that everything is closed and is a surface. It will look something like this:


2. Next fill in the surfaces with textures. Sketchup comes pre-loaded with many textures. There are also some downloads to add more materials to your library. The link to download them is here: http://sketchup.google.com/bonuspacks.html. A tip to make things easier is to make the asphalt the same material as the curb. You'll see why in the next step.

3. Using the push/pull tool drop the asphalt surface 6 inches. You can see that sketchup assumed the surface of the face of the curb to be the same as the surface that was pushed. That was the reason for making the roadway surface to be the same as the curb surface. If you had made the roadway surface to be asphalt, then the face of the curb would have also been asphalt and you would have to change each face on the curb to be concrete, which would be time consuming.

4. Now change the roadway surface back into an asphalt material and you are finished. A 3d version of a roadway intersection.

In the next post I will show how to make ramps at the intersections.