My First Sketchup – house in Pingdong, Taiwan

I am not kidding. This is my FIRST art work using Google SketchUp.
Before introducing my SketchUp work, I want to tell some of my background information, so that everything, like my work and me, is more understandable.

I was born in Taipei, raised, and had lived in almost every major city in Taiwan- Taichung, Kaohsiung, etc. Then, I moved to the United States on Aug. 15th, 2005 and continued my high school education in Cary, North Carolina. Pingdong, a rural area located in the southern tip, is actually where my mom was born. And the reason why I choose this rural place instead of Taipei, the big city, is that, Pingdong is the place where my childhood memories were filled – Happiness.

The program, SketchUp, was roughly brought out to the class on the very first day of the semester. On the 3rd class, Feb. 14th was formally introduced and demonstrated with some of the basic function, like drawing linear line, curve line, square, circle, and some other way to view SketchUp by using orbit, etc. It really caught my attention because I am interested in 3-D/ spatial design. From my perspective, spatial art gives strong and immediate impacts at the very moment for the people who are viewing the art work. Besides, it also gives clear, vivid ideas of what the artist wanted to express. Thus, I started my work on the following Saturday, Feb. 19th. Here’s my unfinished work (, and I am not going to finish on this one.):

I am pretty much just playing around with ‘whatever-sketchup-can-do’, to see what kind of visual impact I can get. This takes me about more than half hour. You know, I am a newbie to SketchUp. While I was playing around, I realized this is not what I want; since everything is not proportional, I decided to make a new one. And I am just going to put all pictures I rendered here at once so that you can see the progress.




Finally, the entire work was done few weeks ago (Mar. 16th-ish?). I use V-ray, a Sketchup Plug-in, to render my work so that the outcome looks more realistic. By using V-ray, I can put extra light and the light bulb will actually glow. Besides glowing, V-ray also offered couple more lighting option like: diffusion, emission, reflection, and refraction. You just simply have to make some adjustment, and you can see the master art piece you just did.