3D Christmas 2016 - The Model

This year's Christmas ornament is a 3D model of our house. My 3D-printing friend at church suggested the idea and offered to print and plate it. That's cool. In this post I describe creating this 3D model in SketchUp. I put up an OBJ file over at Thingiverse.

I've used SketchUp occasionally for several years and decided to start there because it's easy to enter accurate dimensions. I stumbled upon the match photo feature, which is exactly what I needed but didn't know it. This feature allowed me to import photos of my house and match the coordinate system to the picture by determining the origin, rotation, scale, and perspective. I followed the directions here. Then I traced the outline with the line tool starting with major lines on the principal axes. I drew some construction lines to allow me to locate the apex and trace the A-frame of the roof. I simplified the overhang because the print will be quite small. I'm not going for accurate construction drawings here, just something that looks nice and representative. This picture shows my starting photo with the nearly finished model:

I used the long gutter and siding seams to align the vanishing point lines, which set the coordinate system perspective and rotation. The origin is moved to the far corner of the garage because it seemed easy to put there. Once the model is started, more photos of the other corners are brought in. For each photo, I set the vanishing lines, origin, and then the scale to visually match up the existing model with the photo as best I can. Here's the other front corner:

I drew the chimney after completing all four sides of the house. The windows and doors are last. Since it's not possible to print detailed lattices in the windows because they are too small, I was advised to put in what I could with about an 0.8mm thickness. The windows are recessed and the shutters are extruded out. I did end up putting the panel details on the garage doors. I don't include any of the utility features, for example the power meter or chimney cover used for keeping the critters out. 

Finally, I usually use Solid Inspector in SketchUp to fix it, but always have to run my models through this cloud repair tool. I stumbled upon Windows 10's new 3D Builder - it did a great job of making the model manifold.