Planning a concrete skatepark with the help of Sketchfab

Hey guys!

So the last two weeks I was very busy with…building a concrete skatepark! We were offered the opportuity to build our own Do-It-Yourself (DIY) skatespot right under a big, abandoned silo which is mainly used as canvas for street artists nowadays. While we were busy working under it, some amazing artists painted the walls of it high above our heads!

Two weeks for something this big, built out of concrete was a tight timeframe for sure. But the guys allowing us to use their property for our skatepark were hosting a big streetart festival on the 18. of July and they wanted a skate-contest to take place at this event too! Of course we tried our best to meet that deadline, which wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Sketchfab at our planning phase:

I created this Blender-model of the surroundings featuring the ramps we intended to build after we drew a simple top-down plan of the location. After I finished the model I uploaded it to Sketchfab. Then I made use of the awesome new “Annotations“-feature to better describe the intentions behind each of the obstacles we were going to build. Then I distributed the link to the Sketchfab model among our team, which was already pretty big at that point. This 3D visualization proved to be of great help to coordinate our efforts among this big team of helpers and everyone knew from the beginning what we intended to create, which maybe wouldn’t have been the case had we stuck to our (poorly drawn) first sketches on paper…

I even went that far as to take photos of the graffitis on the walls and incorporate them in my 3D model as textures! People even noticed this, which surprised me to be honest, but the loved it. :)

Thanks to this planning effort and lots of motivation to work long hours we managed to finish our skatespot in time:

Panorama view by David Knes (Click for bigger view) 

Thanks to Sketchfab, Blender, RED BULL DIY for the concrete and to our local skateshops for the support. For pictures of the opening day and skatecontest check this photo album of a good friend of mine on facebook: Click here

Bye guys, skate and create!