What is a room made of?

RoomBox helps you instill life into your models by making it quick & easy to create rooms to populate buildings.

But what is a room in RoomBox, really?

Walls

The main component of a room is its walls. They are referred in RoomBox as Left, Right, Back, Floor and Ceiling.

With RoomBox, individual walls can be enabled or disabled to accomodate different settings, such as a room at a building's corner, or a patio without a ceiling.

Sprites

A room also contains sprites. They usually represent people, furnitures or light appliances. A room can have up to 4 layers of sprites.

In practice, each sprite is a flat image. Stacked together, they give a feeling of depth that will make your buildings all the more believable.

Individual sprites can be enabled or disabled. They can also be moved inside of the room. This helps in achieving more variety when reusing the same rooms multiple times in a model.

Rooms in a SketchUp model

Once created, a room lives in of your SketchUp model as a group filled with the geometry of its walls and sprites.

You can manipulate a RoomBox room like any other SketchUp entity. Move it around. Resize it. Duplicate it if you like it a lot. Delete it if you don't like it anymore!

One limitation though: what's inside the room's group should not be edited manually.

RoomBox is responsible for generating the geometry of this group. In consequence, external changes will get overwritten.

Under the hood: interior maps

RoomBox lets us quickly create rooms without burdening ourselves with the nitty-gritty details. If you are interested in creating your own rooms though, you will need to manipulate interior maps, which are the image files that RoomBox uses internally.

An interior map for a kid's bedroom.

An interior map is a single image made of 9 cells. The 5 cells at the center contain the room's walls. The 4 cells at the corners contain the sprites. When loaded into RoomBox, there different cells are cut and folded to create the actual geometry in the SketchUp model.

For importing your own interior maps, see the documentation about custom maps.