Stone cladding for Sketchup

[nberrington]

Greetings all

 

I've recently started trying my hand at 3D printing, and in particular drawing various structures I think are well suited to the technology.

 

I'm new to Sketchup, which I find less intuitive than Corel (the program I've used for laser files in the past.) The challenge I face is replicating stone. In Corel I have previously drawn individual stones in (laborious). Yesterday I downloaded an extension from Vali Architects for Sketchup.

 

The extension works well - drawing decent looking dressed stone, while negotiating corners, windows and doors (slow though). The problem is the pattern of the stonework repeats itself every 4 stones or so - spoiling an otherwise quite convincing wall structure. (It's fine if you don't look too closely, but it is apparent quite quickly if you look for it. This is a problem of most plastic and card stone sheets, and a pet peeve of mine.)

 

Does anyone have a recommendation for me? Are there better extensions out there? Am I better off drawing individual stones and pulling them to establish depth?

 

Regards

 

Neil

 

[monkeysarefun]

Unfortunately, unless you can somehow adapt one  of the "Random scatter" add-ons intended for adding trees etc in random positions I think you are stuck with drawing them individually. It may be  possible to group enough stones that you could then use as an array in order to cut down some of the work, especially if you mirrored  and inverted the group in order to disguise the repetition.  

I've done  many brick buildings in Sketchup, no stone ones though.

 

It is possible to create realistic  stone and brick  wall "sheets"  in Blender using bump and displacement maps created from photographic texture files , then export the file as an stl or obj  which you import it  into SketchUp to complete the model, which is probably the easiest way, though it can create massive files that Sketchup struggles with.  @EDDY100 did have a tutorial on it around here at one point.

 

Personally, I have swapped entirely from using  Sketchup to using Blender in order to do things like this, but if you think Sketchup is un-intuitive.........!

 

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

Edited November 8, 2023 by monkeysarefun

[EDDY100]

If you fancy a challenge, you can have a look at some of my videos on realistic walls. 

The videos are a bit dated but still usable.

As monkeysarefun said, Blender is another level from SketchUp but if you can master a few techniques it is so satisfying to get a result.

 

Realistic Walls in blender 

[stevel]

8 hours ago, EDDY100 said:

If you fancy a challenge, you can have a look at some of my videos on realistic walls. 

The videos are a bit dated but still usable.

As monkeysarefun said, Blender is another level from SketchUp but if you can master a few techniques it is so satisfying to get a result.

 

Realistic Walls in blender 

I tried your link, as I have been wanting to do something similar, with Fusion 360 designs, but it is not working.

[EDDY100]

Sorry about that, it was supposed to link to a playlist. Try this one.

Realistic walls

[TangoOscarMike]

From time to time I stick my nose into these threads to mention OpenSCAD. If you don't mind a little programming (or a gentle opportunity to learn!) then you might be able to use it to generate pseudo-random surfaces procedurally.

 

This is a coal load for a 3D printed tender. Let me know if you'd like a description of how it was made. I expect that similar techniques could be used for irregular stone surfaces.

 

[GWR57xx]

56 minutes ago, TangoOscarMike said:

From time to time I stick my nose into these threads to mention OpenSCAD. If you don't mind a little programming (or a gentle opportunity to learn!) then you might be able to use it to generate pseudo-random surfaces procedurally.

 

This is a coal load for a 3D printed tender. Let me know if you'd like a description of how it was made. I expect that similar techniques could be used for irregular stone surfaces.

 

Yes please! 
This is very timely for me as I’m just trying to print removable coal loads for some loco coal wagons.

Hopefully the information will be useful to the OP and others too.

[F2Andy]

You can do similar in Blender using geometry nodes.

[TangoOscarMike]

8 hours ago, F2Andy said:

You can do similar in Blender using geometry nodes.

 

That is indeed very similar, and almost certainly better (less laborious!) than my technique.

 

[TangoOscarMike]

10 hours ago, GWR57xx said:

Yes please! 
This is very timely for me as I’m just trying to print removable coal loads for some loco coal wagons.

Hopefully the information will be useful to the OP and others too.

 

I haven't done this for a while, so I will review what I did and reconstruct it here in installments (@nberrington - let me know if you'd like me to take this into a separate thread, or indeed if you'd like me to explore stone textures along similar lines).

 

I will start with excuses: my workflow is a little convoluted. I tend to make components with OpenSCAD and assembly them with Blender. And I quite often write Python scripts to modify STL files or, in some cases, to create STL files for a particular exotic object.

 

When I write OpenSCAD objects, I try to keep dimensions in a separate file, but I often slip into the bad habit of hard-coding dimensions deep inside my script. In this case, for example, the starting point for a piece of coal is a "sphere" of radius 2 (i.e. 2mm for a 00 model).

 

This will only make sense if you install OpenSCAD and try the examples. The starting point for a piece of coal is a low-resolution sphere - the resolution ($fn = 5) is so low that it is actually rendered as two truncated pyramidal cones.

 

sphere(2, $fn = 5);

 

If you enter this into OpenSCAD and render it (F5 or F6) you will get this.

 

 

This is a little bit like a piece of coal, but it needs a bit more randomness in its shape, and of course we need many different pieces. This is achieved by making two such spheres, each of which is stretched/squashed by a random amount in the X, Y and Z directions. Each sphere is then rotated randomly about all three directions. The final result is the intersection of these two spheres.

 

If you enter the following into OpenSCAD...

 

module piece_of_coal(){
    scale_first = rands(0.6, 1.4, 3);  // produces an array of 3 random numbers in the range 0.6 to 1.4, for stretching
    scale_second = rands(0.6, 1.4, 3);
    rotate_first = rands(-90,90,3);  // produces an array of 3 random numbers in the range -90 to 90, for rotating
    rotate_second = rands(-90,90,3);

    intersection(){
    rotate(rotate_first)scale(scale_first)sphere(2, $fn = 5);
    rotate(rotate_second)scale(scale_second)sphere(2, $fn = 5);
    }
}
piece_of_coal();

 

... then every time you render it you will get a different piece of coal.

 

  

 

The coal load is made of a collection of these. These have to be pseudo-randomly placed, but it's necessary to exercise some control over where they go. Obviously they need to be inside the bunker or tender, but one might also wish to impose some sort of contour over the top surface.

 

It's not my intention to leave on a cliff-hanger, but I know that I tried a few different techniques for this, and I can't remember which I preferred in the end. I will go delving in my files tomorrow.

 

[F2Andy]

On 23/12/2023 at 21:54, TangoOscarMike said:

 

That is indeed very similar, and almost certainly better (less laborious!) than my technique.

 

The downside is every lump of coal is rectangles and right angles - no variety in the shape. How that will look when printed, I do not know. There is likely a way to resolve that, but I have not used geomtry nodes much at all.

 

Here is how it was set up.

 

ETA: Updated image. This uses a dodecahedron as the basic lump of coal (you need to activate an add-on "Add Mesh: Extra Object") . Also has a "Realize Instances" node just before the end - if not there, the coal does not show up in the STL file!

Edited January 8 by F2Andy

[GWR57xx]

On 23/12/2023 at 09:56, TangoOscarMike said:

From time to time I stick my nose into these threads to mention OpenSCAD. If you don't mind a little programming (or a gentle opportunity to learn!) then you might be able to use it to generate pseudo-random surfaces procedurally.

 

This is a coal load for a 3D printed tender. Let me know if you'd like a description of how it was made. I expect that similar techniques could be used for irregular stone surfaces.

 

 

Thanks for mentioning OpenSCAD, which I hadn't heard of previously.

I've been reading through the tutorials and rummaging around on the web, during which I came across two very useful free downloadable OpenSCAD files, one for coal and the other for stone walls (so hopefully @nberrington will forgive our off-topic discussion about coal!).

 

Here's the coal (uploaded by af12689): https://www.printables.com/model/170915-g-scale-coal-pile/files

 

 

 

 

Here's the stone walls (uploaded by Vendicar Decarian): https://www.printables.com/model/400716-stone-arch/files

 

 

 

 

 

The corresponding scad files will give a very good idea of how these effects are achieved (obviously please credit the original author if you decide to use them).

 

I think the coal looks ok from a distance, but up close it becomes obvious that there are repeated geometric shapes (triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons etc). I'd prefer my coal to look more natural and random shapes, which may be a lot more difficult to achieve.

 

[TangoOscarMike]

13 hours ago, GWR57xx said:

I think the coal looks ok from a distance, but up close it becomes obvious that there are repeated geometric shapes (triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons etc). I'd prefer my coal to look more natural and random shapes, which may be a lot more difficult to achieve.

 

Soon I'm going to post another OpenSCAD script with multiple pieces of irregular coal, which I hope you will find more natural-looking. I think I'm going to start a new thread, since although @nberrington hasn't objected, it might be good to have a thread title that matches the content.

 

[TangoOscarMike]

On 25/12/2023 at 09:27, F2Andy said:

The downside is every lump of coal is rectangles and right angles - no variety in the shape. How that will look when printed, I do not know. There is likely a way to resolve that, but I have not used geomtry nodes much at all.

 

Indeed - I would expect that a technique similar to mine (intersections of randomly distorted low-resolution "spheres") would also be possible in Blender.