As I am sure you know, I use Sketchup daily for kitchen design. One of the things that comes up all the time when using Sketchup is undermounting a sink. It used to be a tedious process of cutting a hole in the countertop that was the right shape for the sink, and then dropping the sink into the hole. If you were able to get it right the first time, it still took you forever. If you have to move the sink, forget about it, you'd probably give up.
That is why a while back, I created these undermount sinks.
Those sinks have been working great for a long time. They've gotten tons of downloads, and have been used in just about every kitchen and bathroom I have designed for the last year or so.
I was recently inspired by these faucets that are now available on the 3D warehouse from Delta and Brizo. Not only are they extremely useful, but the folks who created the models over at Igloo Studios did a really neat trick with using a single photo texture to make the faucets appear to be real, without having to be rendered. I did a post on this a few months ago where I compared these faucets to Miami Vice. See how Don Johnson faired by clicking here.
I sell a line of stainless steel sinks by Artisan. They are quite popular, and end up in a lot of our kitchen designs. A few of the other designers I work with were asking me if I could build an offset double bowl sink in Sketchup, and a "D" bowl. Instead of creating a generic one, I decided to create one that we sell. In the next few pictures, you will see the process I used to build these sinks. If you are impatient, and just want the goods, get into Sketchup and search for "Artisan Sinks" on the 3D warehouse.
There are a few things I need to model a sink in Sketchup accurately. First, I need the dimensions. I headed over to Artisan's website and grabbed a technical drawing on one of their sinks.
I imported the drawing into Sketchup. There I was able to scale the image based on the dimensions that are on the drawing. From there, I started to trace right over the image to start getting the shape of the sink.
Next, I used Sketchup's famous Push Pull tool to start massing up the sink.
I removed some unnecessary geometry, now you can see that the sink is starting to take shape.
Now I have hidden edges that I don't want to be seen. Notice that I left the edges along the top, and bottom. In the next picture you will see that I can select those edges, and use a plugin to round them over.
Using
this plugin I was able to select the edges that I wanted to round over. Much easier then using Sketchup's built in "Follow Me" tool.
So there it is, a model that is all ready for some textures.
I grabbed a picture of the sink from the same website. I placed the picture directly over the model that I wanted to paint it onto. You can "project" textures onto models. Think of it like standing in front of a projector, the image is "projected" onto you. Using this method, you can paint flat textures onto 3D models.
Since my model was drawn accurately, and the picture I was using was distorted (as most images are, because camera lenses bend images) I had to use Sketchup's built in texture positioning tools to fine tune the texture. If you've got a texture that is really out of shape, you can fix it up with a little Photoshop trickery. These texture tools were designed for texturing buildings, but they can work rather well for this sort of modeling.
There is the final product. Its a accurately sized, textured kitchen sink. It doesn't end there though. Next I made a Dynamic Component out of this sink.
This will help you, the end user with a couple of things. First, the component will automatically cut a hole for you in your countertop. It also has an option to set how deep its undermounted. And lastly, in the component, there are links to the specs of the sink, and a video on how exactly to use it! To get to all of these, simply right click on the sink when you have it in Sketchup, go to Dynamic Components, and then to "Options" and you will see the settings and the link.
So, go into Sketchup and search for Artisan Sinks. I've got a collection of three different ones in there to help you model!
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=b31bc56becdd90e784283d54542a3ba0
