 |
Google SketchUp, Free SketchUp got a little burst of PR when Google recently re-released it for free (after having acquired it a while ago). As I've got some experience with higher-end CAD programs, I thought I'd download a copy and take a look. While no one is going to mistake SketchUp for AutoCAD (or even its lower-priced brethren in the drafting market), it is a fun little drawing program with intuitive tools that work well for their intended purpose of coming up with quick structural drawings. The basic tools here are pretty simple: for the most part, you'll be drawing rectangles, lines, circles, and arcs. The real key is that there is a smart extrusion tool (they call it "push/pull") that is constrained to operate along the major axes and that quickly turns rectangles into rectangular solids. Armed with this, creating a building is pretty much as easy as stacking up blocks was when you were a kid. You can also drag a line around, so you can distort a block to create, say, a gable roof. After you've stacked up all the blocks you need, turn to the paint bucket tool to make them look prettier. You can paint on a variety of textures - bricks, metal, wood, glass and so on - to make things look generally architectural. There are tools for moving and orbiting so you can see your model from different directions. You can also adjust transparency and shading, as well as control shadows, to get a variety of presentation effects. And that's about it. There's also a tie-in to Google Earth, as well as an online warehouse of models. I tried to test some of that stuff, but either they don't have enough servers on it yet or their servers are still overwhelmed from the launch effect, because I just got consistent timeouts. So for me the promise of putting models on Google Earth, or getting other people's models to start from, remains unfulfilled. Even without that, though, for a free program this is an easy way to bang out basic CAD-type drawings, as long as you don't have any requirement for professional CAD features.
Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics. Published May 3, 2006 |
