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Derek McFarland/3 min read

Adding a Water Feature to Your Fountain: Drawing the Pedestal and Importing the Fountain Profile

SketchUp vs Other 3D

SketchUp

Fast conceptual modeling — built for architects.

Revit

BIM — embedded data and automatic documentation.

Rhino

Precision NURBS modeling — industrial design and complex geometry.

Cinema 4D

Animation and rendering focus — not architectural.

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This tutorial walks through adding a water feature to your fountain: drawing the pedestal and importing the fountain profile, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

So, in this video, we're going to add our water feature to the center of our fountain. The first thing we should do is draw a pedestal for the feature.

So, let's go to the Circle tool, click this, and then kind of orbit around to the center. We want to put it right about here. And then, dragging along the red axis, we'll type in 12.

We want this to be a two-foot-wide circle, so 12 will be the radius. That will be correct. We'll click Enter, and then we'll use the Push/Pull command.

Next, click the circle and extrude that face up 18 inches. 18, press ENTER. Using my Select tool, I will triple-click this geometry, right-click, and make a group.

Next, I would like to bring in the fountain profile for my water feature instead of having to draw it. We previously created this profile, and it's located in your SKP 101 file downloads folder. So, I will open that up.

I will show you where it's at in the folder. It is located here: fountain profile.skp.

In SketchUp, we can go to File > Import, navigate to your C drive, SKP file downloads, and find fountain profile.

If you do not see any SketchUp files, you may not have the correct supported file types open. If I go to 'All Supported Types, ' it will show everything, and I can go into the fountain profile and then select Import.

Now that I have the file, I can click and place it anywhere on the model. I will place it right here. Then, I'll click on a point and move it to the circle.

All right, now, if you were to go into your Components dialog box, which is right here, and go into In Model, you can see that we have two components. We have Neeraj, who was our man in the beginning of the video that we deleted, and we have the fountain profile. By clicking on this image, we can now place multiple copies throughout the model.

And because it's a component, we can edit it once, and it will update everywhere in the model. I will click Escape to end this task. Then, I will double-click the component. This will enter me into the actual component where I can modify it.

I could also right-click, Edit Component, and do the same thing. So, pre-select the circle, then go into the Follow Me tool, and click this shape. I can now create a profile of the fountain. Your water feature may end up looking blue or white.

This is because the Follow Me tool decided to go in one direction or another. If your profile and fountain shape are white, you do not need to do this step like mine. However, if it is blue, what you can do is you can exit out of this.

Actually, go inside your model and click this, Reverse Faces. It'll make it blue or white. Now that we have it as white, you can see in our components box that the profile is now an actual fountain.

If I click this, I can place multiple fountains into our model. I will undo that. So, components are different from groups because they update automatically since they are linked.

We will talk more about components later in the course. So, go ahead and save your file. This is all we'll do in this video. In the next video, we will draw water and add some lily pads to our fountain.

See you soon!