More Sketchup to AI renders

From Sketchup to Dzine.ai

7th grade design lesson:

Think about the available worldbuilding tools from a kid’s point of view:

A 7th-grader plays Minecraft for the first time, and right out of the gates, she finds she can assemble captivating buildings. She fabricates a cabin propped high up, with fireplaces and bookshelves, and with windows overlooking mountains and deserts. She achieves this virtually without practice or instruction. Henceforth, she’ll measure any worldbuilding software she uses against Minecraft (or you may substitute Roblox here).

If Minecraft makes worldbuilding effortless, Blender makes it tedious. Blender is a 3D modeling suite that grants the 7th-grader fine control over every polygon of an architectural space she wants to build. She will achieve extraordinarily complex interiors or exteriors far exceeding what she could make in Minecraft. At least she could, if she weren’t put off by having to invest 50 hours to learn the software.

[image: half Minecraft, half Blender]

Sketchup strikes a compromise. It requires less than 5 hours to learn, and it empowers her to build rapidly (faster than she could build with Minecraft). Yet, the problem remains: an emergency shelter she builds in Sketchup won’t excite or engage her half as much as the Minecraft shelter does—after all, her Sketchup model is just a wireframe floating in space!

(the kind of shelter refugees are given after a Sri Lankan tsunami)

As her teacher, I have good reason to ask that she build her shelters with Sketchup, not Minecraft. I want her to exercise fine control over what she’s building and to think through the steps of how she’ll do it. But I’ve been hunting for a tool to make her output exciting.

Dzine has a feature called IMAGE-TO-IMAGE, where a user pairs a prompt with a structure reference. (The reference could be a sketch of a castle on paper, but we used screenshots of their Sketchup models). We also loved Dzine’s library of STYLES, especially those from the Anime collection.

[image: Dzine interface, showing style references]

[caption: Students used structure match: 0.8]

Dzine has empowered our students to make more imaginative worlds, but it also exposed them to the way art will be made by professionals in 2025. Industrial designers, architects, and concept artists are dinosaurs if they haven’t woven Dzine into their workflow. How fortunate I am that my 12-year-olds have an opportunity to unleash their creativity with this tool.