Another Soul Lost to SketchUp
Published 17 years, 3 months past
Hitting a link shared by Unstoppabot, who really needs to get around to fixing his feed linking policy (“View this site”? Lame!), I was seized with another spasm of appreciation for the deliciousness that is SketchUp.
I did a moderate amount of 3D modeling back in the day. The specific day in question would be the one where we all thought that images of rendered 3D models and, whenever possible, blobs of text were the absolute last word in Great Web Design. Remember that? Wasn’t it fantastic? When every page title could be a bunch of extruded and beveled sans-serif letters viewed slightly from above, with the whole mess of text angled away from the observer?
Good times.
So anyway, while I was cranking out renderings of page title text and university logos, I also spent some time creating scenes of other stuff. You can find some of the results if you dig deeply enough here on meyerweb, but that’s not my point. What I’m trying to say is that I enjoy a bit o’ three dee more than most, and have some knowledge of how difficult it can be to construct models.
When I first heard about SketchUp, I was intrigued but didn’t really buy into all the hype. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? And then I watched someone using it—at An Event Apart, as it happens; and no, it wasn’t one of the attendees—and was captivated. I downloaded the installer while I was sitting there, watching him create and modify shapes as easily as sketching them on paper. And then I left it uninstalled, because I was afraid of what it would do to my free time.
A few days ago, I finally broke down. I actually did have a legitimate reason to install and use it, a really good one, but of course I’d been waiting for any reasonable pretense to launch the .dmg and make with the modeling. So I did.
Color me deeply impressed. While you’re at it, add some heavy tints of addicted. I started by modeling our kitchen, and now I want to do the whole frickin’ house. I’m starting to eye local landmarks for recreation and contribution to the Warehouse and Google Earth.
I don’t have time for this. I need help. Stop me before I model again!
Comments (11)
Hehe… Its ok Eric. Embrace it =)
My wife has been using it for the past year and she loves it. She is an interior Designer and it works with her ideas very smoothly. I have yet to touch it. I think I am afraid of addiction too.
I’m no designer, and I needed a quick way to do 3D-modeling for an article, and found SketchUp easy to use, especially the alignment of the objects.
Lo, I am chastened.
Also, I love it that you call me Unstoppabot. Too awesome.
You rock, Ethan. Thank you!
Looks like this is my week to be in
del.This nifty program has helped so much when it came to remodeling the house. I’ve used it to visualize awnings and railings on the exterior of my house. And the latest and greatest I was able to design a 16′ square pergola that I put in my backyard patio. If you’d like to see a before and after let me know. Sketchup is the poor man’s CAD.:-)
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It appears to me you have a ping pong table in your kitchen.
I’ve mucked about with SketchUp, but I always manage to get myself in an awkward position where I want to model a building or something from both the inside and out; the tools didn’t seem to be in place to (easily) make walls of a consistent thickness, for example. Or at least, you can get it all set up by delicately copying and rotating a “measuring stick” line segment, but that doesn’t help much later on when you want to shift a wall set between two adjacent rooms.
Anyone got a suggestion for this case?
…I just completed my entire apartment– I need to sleep.
I too stumbled onto sketch up on Google Earth. I’m not that great at doing things on computers though this year has been a huge learning curve for me computer wise, coming to this site via Eric’s CSS through Lynda .com tutorials ….. anyway..
Yes I found it very easy to use and yes it consumed me for weeks. I have done a 44 story building I was involved in construction back in 85, a lighthouse in my home town, and the skate park, with our new proposed extensions.. The skate park is loaded into Google earth… search for a little coastal town south of Sydney in New South Wales Australia called Ulladulla. You can see the skate park model there, as well as where the lighthouse is supposed to be and there is also the skate park in Sydney CBD, thanks Google, still don’t know how to fix the problem of it placing the one modle is all three spots….
So… great easy to use program, the easy thing with Sketch up also was all three of my models were based on curves and I managed to pull them off with my limited knowledge.
PS Can anyone help me with the model postioning ? each time I go to up load a model, the same one goes to all three of the locations at once?
Thanks, regards
Cary
Man, I’m now into 5th straight week playing with it.
I need help, too.
I am even searching the whole Internet with the “sketchup” keyword, everyday.