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Derek McFarland/5 min read

How to Draw Water and Lily Pads for Your Fountain in SketchUp

Water & Lily Pad Checklist

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This SketchUp tutorial walks through how to draw water and lily pads for your fountain in sketchup, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

So, in this video, we are going to draw water and lily pads for our fountain. So, to draw water, we need to copy the bottom of our fountain and bring it up.

Because this is all grouped together, we want to separate the two groups: the walls and the base. So, I'm going to right-click, Explode. This will undo the group.

So, I'll explode. And now, I want to double-click on the base, right-click, make group, and triple-click on all of this, the walls, right-click, make group. Now, these two pieces are separate.

Now, I want to make a copy of this base. So, I'm going to go to the Move tool. And then, hovering over this, I will select Control, which will add a plus sign, and then I can drag this up.

I'll drag it up, say, one foot, two inches. You can orbit to the bottom of your fountain to make sure you made a copy rather than move the original. But Control, then plus the Move tool, will create a copy.

Next, I'll go to the Paint Bucket tool right here. And once I click this, you will notice that the materials dialog box will automatically open. I want to find a nice water material for this face.

So, I'll click this toolbar and then find water. You will see that some of these materials have a diagonal line going through. The diagonal line refers to transparency.

If I click this, you will notice that I can see the bottom of the fountain because this material is transparent. If I click this water pool, there's no line. This will create a solid.

If I go back to the transparency one and then material that and I go to edit, you can see that the opacity level right here allows me to change it from solid to transparent. So, that's how you can edit the opacity of a material. So, let's go back to the original water pool light and click to make that the correct material.

I'll go ahead and save my file. The next thing we want to do is draw some lily pads. To do that, I will use the Pie tool, which is right here.

So, the Pie tool acts like the Arc tool. I'll draw one down here so you can see. First, you're going to draw your line, and then you're going to draw your angle.

Instead of it just being an arc, it will be a closed face and closed object. So, it looks like, you know, Pac-Man or a lily pad. So, I'm going to delete this, triple-click, and delete.

And I want to draw some lily pads just on the surface of this water using the Pie tool. So, I'm going to zoom in, and we can make these as big or as small as we want. So, you know, I'll draw the first line, and then we'll draw it around to kind of get to 90 percent.

I'll just, you know, then I'll click escape to end that one. I'll start over here, do a little bit, do a slightly smaller one. I kind of need to zoom in because it'll snap at certain points that may not give you the right distance that you want.

And again, you know, we can make these with the standard sides. If I go back here and click this, you will notice that it says 12 sides. I can change this to 20 sides, making it a more precise circle compared to the 12-sided one.

So, one thing to note is when you have a decent amount of sides to your geometry, your models can become larger and more challenging to work with if everything has hundreds of sides. Typically, between 10 and 25-30 sides, your computer can handle that fairly easily. Next, we'll use the Push/Pull tool to add some depth to each of these.

So, I'm going to pull this up one-half inch, or 1/2 inches. And then, like we did previously, we can just double-click, and it will copy the same move. It'll copy in both directions and distances.

Next, I'll go up to my Selection tool, draw a selection window, and drag to the right to select all that's within that. I will hold down Shift to deselect the pieces that I don't want to group: the pedestal, the fountain, the water base, just the lily pads. And I will right-click, make group.

Oh, I noticed I didn't extrude this last one. So, I can double-click this group and go into the Push/Pull tool and double-click to copy that same move. Now, all of our lily pads are within a group.

So, let's go ahead and add some materials and colors to these lily pads. I'll go back to my Paint Bucket tool. And I want to go to Vegetation, Landscaping, Fencing, and Vegetation right here.

And I'm going to look at some materials. See if there's any nice color and vegetation that would work well for a lily pad. This Vegetation Blur 2 seems nice.

I want to click that, and then click right there on those lily pads. You know what? I think that kind of looks a little off.

Maybe I'll try this Vegetation Blur 1. Oh, yeah, that looks much better. I like that as my material for the lily pads.

So, I will Zoom Extents, save the file, and there we go. There's our fountain with water feature and lily pads. So, in the next video, we will look at making unique materials and applying those materials to some koi fish that we'll place inside of our fountain.

I'll see you in the next video.