Friday, November 14, 2014
SketchUp Nominated for Best of Show
The CAD Insider: SketchUp has been though a few owners over the last few years. After talking with the SketchUp team, I believe that with Trimble at the reins, we can expect great things from SketchUp.
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6 comments:
It's pretty great that a program that started just as a free program that Google created in order to expand their market is expanding to become a well developed program. I haven't taken a look at SketchUp since it first switched owners simply because it just wasn't powerful enough to perform that tasks that I wanted it to. However, after hearing what this author has to say about SketchUp under the hands of Trimble, it seems as though SketchUp can soon become a viable competitor against other CAD programs.
I havent gotten to use sketchup a whole lot but I've heard many great things about it. From what ive heard its not as powerful as something like autocad but with the ease of use and the price, I've seen a lot of designers starting out who use it. It makes it easy to quickly put together concept renderings that look really good without having to get weighed down in the details of autocad. I think the best way to describe the way that I look at sketchup is not a competitor to something like autocad or vectorworks, but really a different type of software altogether that would be used in a different phase of the design process.
Being completely honest, I've only seen SketchUp once before, and that was in its earliest stages before it switched owners when it was a completely free to use program. It was definitely quite primitive then and there wasn't much you could utilize when doing larger scale draftings. Now it seems that it has taken quite the turn and looks to be incorporating some 3D capabilities along with its ever advancing 2D skill set. It really is great to see a program like this grow and develop, especially for something so relevant to what I am doing with my career. I hope that soon, and I don't see it being too far off, that SketchUp will be up with the best of the CAD programs giving them a run for their money.
I think that SketchUp is a fantastic program, and I've had it for years. When I first heard that Google had developed a 3D drafting program I was interested and I downloaded it right away. It was rally primitive and basic, and I also wasn't great at it, but I just walked around my house with a tape measure and drafted different rooms, and within a few hours I was able to draft things quickly and confidently. Unfortunately Google sold it, so it's no longer free and it costs hundreds of dollars to get the version of the program that does layouts for printing. The advantages of selling it though have lead to great improvements, my favorite of which is an app version. You can't edit designs in it, but you can look at them. When I was designing trade show booths, it was really convenient for me to be able to give my boss my iPhone and he'd be able to manipulate and walk around the booth using the touch screen. Now that I've learned AutoCAD I use SketchUp less and less, but even this summer I designed and built a bed and I used SKetchUp for it. If I don't need to export it and if I'm the only person who needs to look at the drafting, it's far faster and I can think better working in it. At some point I'm going to want to learn how to AutoCAD in 3D and/or Vectorworks, but for now I like being able to use SketchUp for simple designs or to start thinking about designs.
My first expose to understand anything in 3 dimensional space was with sketchup in middle school. And back that I knew the software was at a quick glance easy to understand but could do so much more if I looked hard enough. I am a firm believer in that if anyone has the will to learn something there should not be anything in their way to stop them. And google gave me that chance many years ago and it does not surprise me that they continue to grow to this date. While the industry standard is now and will be for a while be under Autodesk's control, I do anticipate google making some big strides.
Like a few of my classmates have said, I also haven't played with Sketchup in quite a few years. I am really interested to see how the program grows as the library of free CAD software available today is really quite low sadly. I am a big believer in free and open source software, and having more and better CAD software added to that list would be great!
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