Using Google Sketchup to Design Paper House Kits

This article was originally supposed to be about how a simple change in a roofline can drastically alter the look of a paper house kit, and we may get there yet. In deciding which illustrations to use for the article, however, someone hit on the idea of drawing the houses in Google Sketchup rather than using photographs.

Downloading your free Google Sketchup software is a breeze. Simply open Google in your favorite browser and key in the word “sketchup”. Agree to a simple licensing agreement and the software is yours.  Installation was just as fast.

If you haven’t used 3D software before, it takes a little fiddling around to get used to it. Sketchup opens with a nifty-looking 3D lady standing at the intersection of three lines. The green and red lines are perpendicular to each other and form the traditional X-Y axis of width and height. It’s that blue line that is perpendicular to the other two that makes Google Sketchup so powerful. That’s the depth line. That’s the line that shifts your drawing from being a flat 2D into a powerful 3D.

To draw our first house, we dragged the pencil down the red line until we found a wall length that we liked. From the end of the wall line we drew a shorter line along the green axis. We then went back to the nexus at which the lady was standing and drew another line along the green axis, perpendicular to the end of the first wall. Sketchup automatically gave us a dotted reference line to show us when the two green axis lines were the same length. We simply connected the ends of the green axis lines to make our fourth wall.

Sketchup has a push-pull tool that’s really neat. You can use it on any flat surface, such as the one we created with our rectangle, to convert it to a box. Simply click the tool on the flat plane and “lift” your plane with the mouse. What was a simple flat 2D rectangle is now a four-walled 3D house!

You can find the midpoint of the top line of each wall simply by moving the Pencil tool along the edge – the midpoint will label itself and show you a light blue icon. Placing the Pencil tool at that point and drawing up the blue axis perhaps ¼ the height of the wall below gives you the pitch of a roof. Repeating that process at the other end of the house lets you draw the entire roof.

Okay, now, back to the original point of the article. The house on the left has only the end walls gabled, creating a simple pitched roof. The result is a house that you might find in colonial New England and perhaps the Midwest.  This would be a relatively easy house to build, both in the real world and in the world of paper kits.

Placing a gable in each wall, however, creates a much more complex roofline that looks both western and far-eastern at the same time.  A narrow overhang, as shown in the illustration, makes it look like a California tract house. A wider overhang results in a distinctly Japanese looking structure.

In the world of paper house kits, there is virtually no difference between the two roofs as far as complexity of design is concerned. The simple roof is drawn with a single fold-line down the center. The second roof is slightly larger than the first and is drawn with four fold lines: centerlines in both directions and then connecting the two sets of corners. 

You can download Sketchup for free from Google and visualize your own houses. You can also visit Papertecture and download paper house kits for free.