Step 1:S - Creating Custom Shipping Container Layouts. Sketchup | Tiny House Design - Page 2. The following is a guest post and house design from one of my regular readers, Craig Moorhouse. As you can see the design isn’t exactly tiny but contains so many great ideas and detail I asked Craig if for permission to share it with you. Thanks again Craig! I sent a handful of Google SketchUp drawings of a modular container home concept that I’ve had for a few months now to Michael at his Tiny Home Design website. The home has a floor plan of just under 1000 sq. ft and isn’t tiny (or small for that matter) but Michael found worth in these drawings because of the work I put into the home’s detail and because it showcases the possibilities of what can be done with this 3 dimensional drawing tool.
The concept behind the house – in a large nut shell – is this. I call this concept a “Sawtooth Saltbox” It consists of four ISO shipping containers – two 40 and two 20 ft. which I arranged in a zigzag pattern (sawtooth). Sketchup | Tiny House Design - Page 2. Michael Janzen. Sketchup. I’ve been spending a lot of time waiting for my computer to render SketchUp images lately – but happy with the results. These illustrations are made with SketchUp and then exported/rendered with a plugin called Podium. There are many photorealistic plugins on the market, but I chose to buy Podium because it seemed (and is proving) to be very capable and has a reasonable price. In an nutshell, you draw normally with SketchUp and then add a few key items from the plugin’s library of components and materials to really make the drawings shine.
Let me call out a few of those items in the illustration above. Lighting – Normally you have just one light source in SketchUp – the sun. It makes shadows. Materials – Lighting is made more realistic looking when materials take on real world qualities. Components – All the objects in the room are available from the makers of Podium. Rendering is where the magic happens.