Te Wero Bridge Competition in Auckland, New Zealand - Google SketchUp Workshop: Modeling, Visualizing, and Illustrating - page 22

a touch of the real world to the otherwise typically super-crisp, digitally
generated images.
What I like about the SketchUp's tools is that they are so “simple”
and “essential.” I like the fact that simple tools will not interrupt your
thinking, rather their simplicity makes designing in 3D (as opposed
to modeling mindlessly) that much easier. Well-considered, essential
tools will let you create new tools by combining them so that most
of your modeling needs will be covered with a minimum number
of tools.
Step 1: Picking Up the Right Competition
Goal : Finding the right competition to enter.
Inputs : Web newspapers, Google News search, competition-listing
websites.
Tool : Internet.
Competitions are everywhere nowadays. I just looked through a few
competition-listing websites on the Internet and found more than sixty ongo-
ing international competitions. But good competitions are rare.
What makes a competition “good”? To me, as a practicing architect, the
feasibility of the project counts for a lot. A good jury is a must, and an interest-
ing program will motivate everybody.
You can be pretty sure about the jury and programs, but you cannot really be
sure about the project's feasibility; there are just too many unknown factors
involved.
Well, we can never be sure, but at least we can do a bit of research at least.
For a public project like a landmark bridge, it is not difficult to find related
articles on the area (in this case, New Zealand) in newspapers. I collected
them via the Internet and concluded that the project was a worthwhile one.
You should also check the status of your design copyright in case you win
the competition, and you should also cover yourself if they cancel the con-
struction altogether after the competition.
After much research and investigation, I decided to enter the Te Wero
Landmark Bridge Competition.
Step 2: Working as a Team
Goal : Simultaneous editing of a single SketchUp model by a team.
Tool : SketchUp.
Most of the following techniques I explain here were developed in the
course of taking part in this bridge competition. In the first stage, we
worked on the site model and the project part (the moving bridge)