SketchUp - 3d for the rest of us

[Ross Macintosh]

I just thought I'd do a little evangelism. The thought was that some might not be familiar with SketchUp and that this thread might introduce you.

SketchUp is a unique, user-friendly 3d modeling program that is easy to learn. View some of these introductory/training videos and you'll quickly get a good sense of how it works. The first section is a great overview. I think you'll see that SketchUp really is a unique and fun program.

Here's a gallery of images to show what others do with it. Although there are lots of buildings in the gallery, SketchUp really is a general purpose modeller. It can be used for quick visualizations or for ambitious modelling programs. The gallery shows mostly the ambitious sort.

Also checkout FormFonts.Com which is an inexpensive subscription-based service that provides SketchUp components for download. I thought I'd include it here to give you a good idea of what you can do besides buildings. It also illustrates the quality that you can achieved.

For me, my two primary graphics programs are SketchUp and Xara X1. I find the two work well together. My hope is more people will discover for themselves how great these software programs are. At both sites you can download demos -- view those videos linked above before trying SketchUp and you'll find the demo a blast!

Regards, Ross