Desk thingy

Hey internet how was your day? I thought I might as well get some work done on my Google SketchUp project so I decided to make my desk thing that holds my T.V. The first problem that I faced was one of my most hated Google SketchUp problem, "Cannot Push/Pull curved or smooth surfaces". Now I am not very sure on how to un-smooth a surface but Google was no help. So to fix this error I just drew lines on the floor and wall and then used these as guides for a rectangle which I drew upon them. At this time I realised that building this desk would be very similar to the things I did with my book case. So like the sides of my book case all I needed to do was make one side, group it and then copy move it to the desired section.

See similar to my book case but just different sizes.

At about this point I was feeling pretty bored with Google SketchUp because I was only really doing the same thing again so I decided that I might try something new. With my desk thing there is a little box on the right hand side which holds some of my most played games. I wanted to see if I could import a image of, in this case, a video game cover art and then place it on a rectangle so it looks like a game case. This is what my desk looked like when it was finished being made.

With the desk being built it was now time to attempt to import a jpeg in Google SketchUp. The image I chose to first test out was this one.

One of my favourite PS3 games.

I needed to find an import option in Google SketchUp so I thought the best place to find this would be in the 'File' drop down menu. I clicked it and looked through the list and as I guessed the 'Import' button was there. Once I clicked it I got to this screen.

There were some things I needed to do before I could just click the 'Open' button. I first needed to get to the folder in which the jpeg was located, fairly basic I know. I then needed to click the 'Type of file:' drop down menu and select jpeg so I could see all the jpegs in the folder. The thing I did was click the 'Use as texture' button which is located below the preview box.  I did this so I could just use the paint bucket to apply the image to, in my case, a rectangle. However there was one problem with this. I needed to select the object I wished to paint straight after clicking 'Open'. So I needed to create my rectangle first then do all the necessary steps for importing the jpeg. However I faced yet another problem.

It would not let me paint my rectangles with the jpeg. After a few minutes I realised that the rectangles were grouped. This means that in order for me to have painted any of them I would need to double click them, do the whole import jpeg thing again and then it would work. Or I could just right click the objects and then click 'Explode' which un-groups them. After painting one of the rectangles I faced yet another problem.

The surface was painted however it was tiled and not facing the correct way. So my plan B was to try to import the jpeg but instead of clicking 'Use as texture' I clicked 'Use as image'. Once this was done a object was created which was the image I imported. This was what I needed because I could move, scale and rotate the image just like an object because it was one. With it in place I the continued to do this for the three other cases. I also downloaded a T.V, PS3 and a PS3 controller to add to my desk thingy. This is what it looked like.

I was very happy with what I had done. It looked really good and it did not take too long. This was most likely due to the fact that I downloaded many of the things I used, but hey sharing is caring. I was also very happy with how I learned how to import jpegs and I didn't even have to Google it.