Level of Detail Case Study

Whenever you start a new Sketchup model, you make decisions about the level of detail (whether consciously or sub-consciously). What drives those decisions is usually a combination of the size of your model, the amount of time you have to create the model, and the overall purpose of your model. In this article, we’ll look at a Rubik’s Cube and a couple of different approaches to modeling one.

Rubik’s Cube Level of Detail

A Rubik’s Cube is a clever puzzle, popularized in the 80′s, that consist’s of 26 colored cubes that are interlocked with each other. You can rotate each of the 6 faces of the cube to rearrange the individual colors. Once scrambled, the point is to arrange the cubes so that each face of the cube has a unique color on it.

I thought it would be cool to model a Rubik’s Cube in Sketchup, and it struck me that there were a number of different ways I could approach the project. They would all technically be a Rubik’s Cube, but the amount of detail put into each model would vary greatly.

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