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Derek McFarland/5 min read

Exploring Topography in SketchUp Using Sandbox Tools: Building a Community Park

Build Topography

1

Enable Sandbox Tools

Window → Extension Manager → enable Sandbox Tools (built-in).

2

From Contours

Import or draw contour lines, then Sandbox → From Contours generates terrain.

3

Smoove for Manual Edits

Push and pull terrain freeform — create hills, valleys, drainage.

4

Drape Site Elements

Sandbox → Drape projects 2D site lines (paths, beds) onto terrain.

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This SketchUp tutorial walks through exploring topography in sketchup using sandbox tools: building a community park, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

For the next few videos, we will be exploring topography in SketchUp using the Sandbox Tools. We will use a small community park as an example for building our topography. So first let's go to File, Open, and let's click the topography folder in our SKP101 file downloads.

Let's go to Topography from Image.skp. This is the first file that we will use. Click Open. I will select No to save changes, and first I am going to draw a rectangle starting from the origin point here and dragging out in the right direction.

I want my dimensions to be 180 feet comma 150 feet. Enter. Your rectangle should fill your screen.

If it's not, let's zoom out a bit so you can kind of can see it all at the same. I would like to build a texture to apply to this face so we can see what our community park looks like. Let's go to our Materials dialog box in our Default Tray and let's click this plus (Create Material) icon.

I will go and click this Use Texture Image checkbox and go to my C drive, SKP101 file downloads, and then the Site Plan.jpg. We will use this as our material and click Open. As you can see, the default dimensions for this material is one foot by 10 inches. We want our material to fit exactly the shape that we drew, so let's make this 180 feet wide, and then you can see that it automatically generated this to be slightly less than 150.

We want this to be 150 exactly, so we will uncheck the lock aspect ratio button and click this, and then we will highlight all of this text and type 150 feet and click Enter. Let's rename this material as Site Plan and then click OK. Now you should see this Site Plan material now populate in our In Model.

If you do not see this yet, you may be under colors or some other material, so click this home button, and this will show you all the materials that are currently in your model. Now let's select this material and paint it on this face, and it should look something similar to this. If your face is backwards—I will undo—that is probably because your material is reversed. Like, for example, if your material looks blue like this and you paint the material, it'll look inverse and backwards.

If you have a blue material, you want to right-click, Reverse Faces and then paint your site plan. All right, I will deselect my material and I will save my file. The next thing we will do is bring in all the architectural components as a whole instead of bringing in each individual component one by one.

I have provided a complete file so we can bring it all in one step. Let's go to File, Import and find the Community Park-Architecture.skp file and let's import this. I have the origin at the same location, so we can drag and snap right at the end point at this origin.

There we have our basic components. We have, you know, our carousel we built, our fountain, the welcome sign, and then the clubhouse which I am providing to you. If we go to our Components dialog box, you can see that all of this is grouped together in one component. However, if I right-click, Explode, now we have four separate files in groups, but this hasn't updated yet.

So what we can do is we have to go out into another folder and then go back in, and now we can see that all of this has updated to show the individual files. I will go ahead and save my file. The last thing I would like to do is open up our Sandbox toolbar.

We will be using the Sandbox Tools to create topography in SketchUp. Sandbox is an extension, but it is pre-loaded in SketchUp and is free to use. So let's right-click on the toolbar in this space right here and find Sandbox and click.

You should see the Sandbox toolbar appear. If your toolbar appears like this, let's drag this into our toolbar. So to make sure that our Sandbox Tools are active, let's go to the Extension Manager right here.

You can see the various extensions that we have pre-loaded in SketchUp. Sandbox Tools is located here. Whether or not the extensions are enabled or disabled is through this button clicker right here.

We want to make sure Sandbox Tools is enabled. We'll click Apply Changes and we can close this out. We will not be downloading any extra extensions for this course.

This is the only one we will use. In the next video we will begin to build three-dimensional topography in our community park. I will see you in the next video.