Way back when I was in college, I took a 3D modeling and animation class in which we used Alias/Wavefront on SGI boxes. I learned two things in that class that have stuck with me to this day. The first is that saving all of your work onto magnetic tape is not the best long term storage decision if you don’t own a tape drive and never plan on getting one. The second and more important thing I learned in that class was this: 3D modeling is tedious and difficult.

It seems like every couple of years, I have an idea that I think may be worthwhile to model in 3D. Sometimes it’s planning a home improvement project, sometimes it’s creating an image for a design or illustration. When this bug hits me, I download the latest trial version of 3D Studio Max or whatever other program seems hot at the time. Usually after about an hour or two of trying to accomplish something that seems rather trivial, I give up in frustration and swear off 3D forever (or at least another two years). The tools for modeling in 3D are extremely finicky and technical. I understand that any tool requires a certain degree of expertise to take full advantage of it, but that’s not a good excuse for simple things not being simple to make. The tool I was looking for is one that would let me get my ideas out quickly in a rough (but usable) form. I’m generally not interested in animating a talking car, usually I just want to see how a few shelves or a new desk will affect the look of my office.

This weekend must mark another interval of my two year cycle. I had some ideas I thought would be best explored with a 3D modeling program. Hoping for the best and anticipating failure, I downloaded another 3D demo program and gave it a go. This time was surprisingly different from my previous forays into 3D, because this time I downloaded the demo for Sketchup.

Sketchup may be old news for those of you who follow Google’s acqusitions, but it was new news to me. Sketchup is the most intuitve 3D modeling program I have ever used (although, as previously stated, I don’t have extensive experience in this area). It comes with 3 well designed walk-though tutorials which can be completed in a matter of minutes. When you are done, you are ready to start building things. And not just simple things, in a matter of minutes you can rough out some pretty crazy designs that would have taken weeks to learn to accomplish in a traditional 3D program.

Sketchup has a fairly spartan interface, and I applaud the developer’s ability to keep the feature set focused. Sketchup allows you to quickly and easily draw lines on the surface of any object. The lines work similar to the drawing tools in Flash, where intersecting lines automatically slice each other. Once you draw a shape into a surface, you can use the pull tool to easily extrude that shape out of the surface. After that, you can grab any point or edge and drag it, Sketchup will automatically snap you to the currently existing planes. It’s a really great way to model. No more clicking and dragging points in 4 separate window views, you can do all of your drawing and shaping in one main view and it works fantastically. Sketchups primary asset is it’s ability to guess what plane you are try to draw/drag on and snap you into it. It does such a great job of it that you can easily forget how hard this was to do in the past.

Sketchup also makes it easy to add dimension lines and labels, which makes it great for planning out construction projects. Sketchup also let’s you take a snap shot of any camera position you set up, and will automatically animate between your different camera snap shots. This is great for creating simple presentations for your clients. You can also export your camera animations using any encoder codec you have installed (see below for an example).

Like anything, Sketchup is not without some issues. In the short time I worked with it I found the majority of the tools to be incredibly intuitive. However, there were some things that I wasn’t able figure out. This doesn’t mean Sketchup does have solutions to these issues, it’s just that the solutions didn’t make themselves as apparent as I would have liked.

For example:

I highly recommend giving Sketchup a test run, it’s truly a great piece of software. In a matter of a few short hours, I was able to bang out the model you see below.

27 April 2006: Who would have thought my blog was so influential? In response to my complaints about Sketchup’s high price, Google has released a personal version of Sketchup for free. Based on the feature list, there are only a few things that the average user might miss when using the personal version vs. the pro. The inability to export images at a resolution higher than your screen combined with the elimination of the ability to export in any vector format, effectively kills a user’s ability to print out decent quality plans. The elimination of the ability to export the views as animated MOV files is a bummer, but it’s certainly something the average user could live without.