Now grab the Rectangle Tool again and draw out a rectangle near one of the intersections of your roads. To begin, grab the Orbit Tool (O) and rotate until you’ve got a nice angled, overhead view of your map. We could easily populate this skyline with various structures from the community, but it’ll be much more fun and unique to create them ourselves. SketchUp gives you the ability to not only create some incredibly complex architecture, but to also import pre-built models from a large community. To do this, triple-click to select the entire connected street object, then bring up the Materials palette with Command+Shift+C and simply drag the color white onto your selection. Notice that I also went ahead and colored my street white. You can select each one of these individually with the Select Tool and delete them, but since we’re going for a sketched look, I was liking the extra superfluous lines. Notice all the little intersecting lines where our streets overlap. This is just a fun, freehand project as a proof of concept. The size doesn’t really matter as we won’t really be drawing anything to scale. Now grab the Rectangle Tool (R) and draw out a tall skinny rectangle like the one you see below. You should have a completely blank canvas to start from. Toy Box Metropolis Toy Box Metropolis is a 10-turn city builder with a difference: it's set on a child's bedroom floor. Here are the best online city-building games that run in your web browser. Once you’ve got the app all ready to go, create a new document and delete anything that it already contains. Online city-building games may not have the same depth as SimCity, but they're great fun nonetheless. Trust, me, I could teach your grandma to use SketchUp in an hour.

Don’t worry if you’ve never used this app before, it’s really simple to pick up and run with and has no where near the learning curve of your typical high-power 3D modeling application. The first thing you need to do is obviously go download and install the free version of SketchUp. There’s a nearly unlimited set of different angles and views that you could provide to your client within minutes of a request. However, if you build the entire project in SketchUp, you can simply rotate the viewing angle and export again. At this point, you’re back to square one! You’d have to start the entire process over from scratch and spend several more hours preparing the other versions. Now, imagine that you show the client and he says he wants a rotated view so he can see it from the other side and a top down view. If you had to generate something like the image above for a presentation, a website or any other design, how long would it take you? Despite the fact that the illustration is quite simple, many people could easily spend several hours making the initial sketch, scanning it and colorizing in in Photoshop.

Design your own virtual city