Sketch Up....???

[tMac85]

How many of you all use Sketch Up? What do you think of it? How come there are not more companies out there trying to create some competition?

personally i think it has A LOT of kinks. Very frustrating and could use some "thinking for you" applications

[TheAngusBurger]

I use it a bit, but only for fun. Modelled my house and stuck it in Google Earth, and used models from the 3D warehouse to make my dream room:D

I think the community's great, and for what it does it's a great program. Good starting point for 3D/CAD, but I suppose it would soon become too basic.

[tMac85]

It is simple to do, but if you want to finalize it and make it perfect the problems become endless

[yoyo5280]

My mom (who was an interior designer/architecty person) uses it a lot nowadays for fun but she is often complaining about lots of problems it has.

[SuperCompu2]

I love it to death. By far the greatest freeware graphical app out there. Once you get the hang of it, you can model nearly anything.

Sure, it loses the battle when it comes to making things look realistic in the end, but for simple 3D representations needed in a hurry, no one beats Sketchup.

P.S. it's loads of fun. :D

[ChrisA]

How many of you all use Sketch Up? What do you think of it? How come there are not more companies out there trying to create some competition?

personally i think it has A LOT of kinks. Very frustrating and could use some "thinking for you" applications

It's a good idea but like all of Google's stuff, it does only 70% of what you need so you can't use it for anything but play time and entertainment. But I give Google credit it's hard (maybe impossible) job to make something both usable with zero learning curve and full featured. Web applications have to lean to the "being usable" side so I wonder if they will make anything that is actually usable.

[perp]

considering that it's completely free, it's a fairly intuitive program. i admit, you can't do everything in sketchup and creating complex objects like spheres aren't the easiest things to accomplish, but i am a huge fan of sketchup for storyboarding and laying out scenes.

[chedda]

I really like sketchup i use it for architectural perspectives and modeling as my primary tool. It looks primitive and is easy for beginners but has surprising depth for the experienced user. I cannot find anything to match it. I use the pro version and it imports autocad 3ds and exports in loads of formats. If anyone needs an insight try googling sketchup school they also have a great series of podcasts. I find it really intuitive and am now up to speed with the shortcuts etc after a couple of years. The google earth tie in and 3d warehouse plus the huge community also make it worthwhile. Its also worth checking out pushpullbar a sketchup centric forum along with the official site.