Bottle Royale - A 3d Sketchup Modeling Lesson

This is how you draw a bottle in Sketchup.

Start with finding a head on view of a bottle, and save the image file.  Then open Sketchup.

 Click camera>parallel projection.  Perspective can distort your view and angles, parallel projection does not.

Click camera>standard views>front

You can drag your image into Sketchup or click file>import and navigate to the image.

 
You will draw onto the image, tracing the outline using lines and arcs. You can also use the shortcuts l and a. Don't worry about scale until you finish, just trace the outline of the bottle.

Since the bottle is round, you only need to draw half of it. We will sweep the profile to obtain the shape.

 Click the tape measure tool or t. Create a guide at the bottom most horizontal point and at the vertical axis of rotation.

To navigate in your drawing, you may need to orbit, do this by holding the middle mouse button or key in o and hold the left mouse button. You can pan by keying in h and holding the left mouse button. You can zoom by scrolling the middle mouse button or keying in z and holding the left mouse button.

Draw a circle clicking at the intersection of your guides and clicking again at the flat 'bottom' portion of your bottle.

Select the face of the circle, click the follow me tool, then click the bottle profile. (With curves Sketchup cannot draw smaller faces, but can scale from larger faces to smaller faces. If you are drawing or sweeping a curved object and Sketchup 'deletes' some of the faces when you complete teh sweep, try scaling it to 4x, drawing the sweep, and scaling it back down by .25x once the sweep is completed.)

This will generate our bottle.

Delete the face on the bottom of your bottle and your guides.

In your materials window (window>materials if it isn't open) click the drop down and select translucent.

You can select the blue glass material (the dual color diagonal pattern indicates a transparent material) by clicking on it.

Clicking on the bottle will apply that material to the face you clicked. Holding the shift key will apply the material to all adjacent faces with similar materials.

If you want a different colored bottle, click the create material button in the materials window.

You can change the color in the color wheel and the darkness on the slider to the right. Name the new material.

Click ok and shift click to apply the new material to the bottle. Clicking the edit tab in the materials window will allow you to edit the material on the fly.

Go to view>hidden geometry. If it is unchecked you will not see hidden geometry.

To hide the rest of the lines, you could shift  click them with the eraser, but clicking each one is time consuming. Click view>face style>wire frame.

Now you only see the lines we want to hide.

Select them by left click dragging, then right click and select hide. You could also go to edit>hide on the menu bar.

Go back to view>face styles>shaded with textures to see your bottle.

If you are going to create a model with multiple bottles, select the entire bottle and right click, selecting make component. This will keep the file size down as components are multiple instances of one object. Editing one component will edit all of them. Utilizing components where possible can significantly reduce file size. If you need the bottle scaled accurately, select it, click the scale tool or key in s.

A typical bottle is 8" tall.