A few years ago I found Google SketchUp when I was looking for some cheap CAD software to design a shop building. After a little bit of playing I was amazed at what could be done with this tool & even more so given that Google made it available as a free download. I saw that there was SketchUp Pro, but it didn’t seem necessary for what I wanted to do. At the time I was using both Windows and OS X machines, so the fact that SketchUp was available for both was an important bonus. I have since left the Windows world entirely and Google has sold SketchUp to Trimble.
With time and use I began to see why there was a Pro version available. I had a credible 3D model of my shop, but I also needed to provide my builder with 2D construction drawings. I could make do with a section plane slicing off the walls just above floor level, but this felt like a bit of a hack. Placing the dimensions in the model made sense initially, but was cumbersome working with the model over time. LayOut (which seems to be the main reason to get the Pro version) is the companion tool to produce construction drawings & is capable of solving the problem elegantly by linking the 2D and 3D representations. Nonetheless, I persisted with the free version and created the 2D drawings; since my building was fairly straight forward, they served the purpose nicely.
A couple of the things that I really love about SketchUp are its simple interface and inference engine which make model construction a fairly intuitive process. I also found the tape measure tool which allows quick measurements of the model’s elements to be extremely handy. While I have some training in mechanical drawing, it dates back to the era of the drafting board. In the current era, being able to create models with actual dimensions rather than constantly doing scale conversions is an enormous time saver, to say nothing of the corresponding reduction in errors. After using SketchUp for a while I was totally sold on using modeling software for sketching and making “blueprints”…time to consider the Pro version to get LayOut!
Modeling a building sized object was my introduction to SketchUp, but I also wanted to use it for smaller objects with higher precision dimensions. An example is a chunk of aluminum 6 x 4 x 1 inches with features (arcs and holes) drawn to standard shop precision (.001). A task like this begins to quickly expose design limitations in SketchUp. First the issue of size and precision. While SketchUp appears to be able to handle .001 or .0001 precision, some research yielded a post by one of the primary SketchUp developers explaining that SketchUp and LayOut do not work properly at these precisions. Both tools are apparently targeted more toward the architect and furniture maker rather than the machinist. The second significant issue for me was how SketchUp handles curves. At its heart SketchUp is a polygon modeler, so curves are represented as polygons along with everything else. Normally this isn’t much of a problem, but it can become troublesome when one is designing something via sketching it out and expecting to make accurate measurements. For example, if I have a circle, then slice off a portion, and now want to measure the corresponding chord length…well, all I get is a rough approximation. This makes accurate measurements and dimensioning either very difficult or impossible.
SketchUp and LayOut are excellent tools for their intended purpose, unfortunately with experience I discovered that my needs were different. The moral of the story is to have a clear understanding of goals prior to selecting tools (doh!)–I had leapt at the chance for “free” and had not thought clearly about what I really needed. After my initial trial of SketchUp, I was hoping to find that it was a generalized 3D modeling tool that did everything, for free. Well that is a fairly unreasonable hope, particularly in light of what the professional CAD packages cost. That cost difference makes SketchUp all the more impressive.
An update as of November 2018. While evaluating alternatives to SketchUp, I found a tool much better suited to my needs: Moment of Inspiration (commonly referred to as MoI) and have been using it now for a few years over multiple releases. MoI represents a paradigm shift from polygon modeling to NURBS modeling and as such excels at representing curves, surfaces and hence solids, which are after all what most CAD drawings are ultimately trying to convey. MoI has no issue with scale and precision so it is equally usable by architects and machinists. As of version 3 it does not provide dimensioning capability, however because MoI is extensible, a dimensioning script is available at http://moi.maxsm.net. Version 4 (currently in a late beta state) is likely to provide some dimensioning capability. I consider MoI very reasonably priced given what it is capable of, what other CAD packages cost, and the developer’s attention to his enthusiastic community of users. I use MoI as a 3D modeler to produce 2D construction drawings from which I build things, others use it in far more complex workflows to produce amazing art and 3D models used in manufacturing and animations. Two-thumbs up: MoI is a very versatile and powerful tool!