Sara Davids, junior in landscape architecture, has won the 2013 Student 3-D Design Contest sponsored by Land F/X for designing a realistic looking tree in Google Sketch-Up. 

According to the Land F/X contest website, the focuses of the contest were whether one could orbit freely around the tree model, whether it looked good from a bird’s eye view, if it used less than three or four materials and if it looked good when placed in more complex design models.

The tree that Davids designed was based on her favorite species of trees, the ginkgo tree.

“[It’s] an ancient tree. There aren’t many others in the same family. It has unique fan leaves also,” Davids said. “There wasn’t really anything specific about that tree. I knew I really wanted to do a ginkgo tree … and I was just kind of walking along Lincoln Way, and I thought, ‘Oh my, this is the perfect example!’”

It wasn’t the allure of winning that drew Davids to this competition. She had learned Sketch-Up last semester in one of her design classes and simply wanted a chance to practice.

“It was kind of fun to experiment,” Davids said. “I didn’t do it with the intention of winning. … The win was kind of a bonus.”

The process was lengthy, taking 15 hours of work time to complete. She began by importing a photo of the tree and tracing the branching structure, and then copying and pasting branches. Once copied, the branches were tilted to make the design more three-dimensional.

For the leaves, Davids found a texture in the free Sketch-Up warehouse and then edited it on a computer for a more realistic feel. She copied and pasted the same leaf over and over and also changed the angles and moved them to cover the branches in order to make the tree less uniform.

“Trees are not perfect. They have kind of an asymmetrical form,” Davids said. “You have to find that perfect balance because if it’s too perfect, it looks odd.”

Davids’s design will go into the free Sketch-Up warehouse to be used in electronic landscape models.

“It makes it a lot more realistic,” Davids stated. “If you’re presenting [a model] to a client, a client would be a lot more excited about seeing a 3-D tree and one that’s good quality. It may not have to do with the actual project. 3-D trees look better than 2-D tree and it’s easier to represent from different angles.”

For the contest, Davids won a 3-D printer, which she is donating to her high school in Knoxville, Iowa.

As for Davids, she said she is enjoying her studies with landscape architecture.

“It is a mixture of art, design, and environmental studies,” Davids said. “It helps create interesting living spaces not only for people, but also plants and animals. I love the Iowa State landscape program because it gives you many chances to travel, and you are able to become closer to your fellow classmates.”

Right now, Davids is working on more complicated programs like Autocad and learning to integrate it with Sketch-Up. In the future, she hopes to get into high-end residence design.

“You have a lot of free creativity,” Davids said. “I’m hoping for an internship this summer … to get a job later.”