Any reccomendations for online resources to learn Sketchup?
I know there are many out there, hoping members experiences could help me seperate the wheat from the chaff.
Guessing the reccommendations might be useful for other members too.
Many thanks
SketchUp - turorials and learning
I put together this YouTube playlist:
If I am honest I would suggest investing time in something more advanced, Fusion, Rhino, AutoCAD, FreeCAD, @tomnewsom?
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Fusion 360 seems to be where it’s at these days…
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F360 appears to be the nuts
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Loads of good ones from when it was part of Google IIRC. I think a lot of the basics are the same.
Any particular reason for using SketchUp? I have a love/hate/hate relationship with it. I’m spending a bit of time – when I can find any – with AutoDesk Fusion 360. But that’s because I want a better software for 3d printing, and the engineering side looks terrific.
In SketchUp being very methodical in workflow was always critically important: saving groups, components and layers as you go. So a tutorial that gives you a strong foundation in that might be time very well spent.
The official channel looks pretty exhaustive: SkethUp Youtube channel
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It’s also pretty much free for non-commercial use.
It’s free for enthusiasts and startups. Just get the month free trial and start from there.
Depending on what @afshind wants and needs it for!
Thanks guys. I’ll look into the links.
I’m dipping my toe in…stage 1 is to design and plan furniture items, to assist with ordering materials and help at the asssembly stage…you reckon SketchUp is suited for that?
Also, budget. SketchUp is free right? Fusion looks…not free : )
3D printing is something I’m interest in, but in the future…having said that I might need to some 3D scanning for a work project.
Fusion is free for personal and non-commerical use
I would avoid Sketchup for anything that requires numerical accuracy. It can be done, but the clue is in the name!
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Circles are polygons, yuk!
But you can dial in as many facets as you like
But they’re still not arcs, and it makes a difference when it gets sent to the laser cutter!
Well, I’m not an advocate of SketchUp, but it has its uses. For 3d Printing, laser cutting and engineering parts I won’t use it. For relatively quick builds of things that need a photorealistic rendering, such as the daft garden designs I used to do for rich people, or the architectural renders that some of our members do: it’s very good.
I started with Sketchup and found this short set of tutorials useful :
http://sketchupforwoodworkers.com
Working in mm, i’ve never had issues with accuracy.
It served me quite well for creating simple furniture designs. It’s easy to print off an isometric drawing with all the measurements labeled ready for some good old fashioned sawing and chiseling.
It can be frustrating - I found that modifying the earliest parts of complex objects can lead to bizzare results and this is where you crave for proper ‘parametric’ cad programs where objects are modelled as a series of repeatable steps/processes each of which can be tweaked at a later time.
Also they seem to have taken the solids tools out of the free version (Union/substract etc) which is a shame as it was a very intuitive way of building complex shapes
I have learnt ‘on shape’ which is free to use but your projects are published in a public repository. It’s powerful and the learning curve is reasonable.
Going to try fusion in the next few weeks.
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An example of a rendered SketchUp model from my garden design days – SketchUp image on right, photo of finished product on left.
The whole project was done on SketchUp – and paper, because I’m a graphite sort of s guy – planters and trellis were sent off for CNCing directly from the model, metalwork was designed and turned into measured drawings for fabrication, and pretty pictures were available for the client.
At the time it was pretty extraordinary to get that much power from software that was free generally, and cost only a few £hundred for the professional version plus a rendering plugin. Also: relatively shallow learning curve, and relatively quick to create with. I’m not an expert with it, but could always get presentable enough results. It’s unforgiving in many ways though, and non-parametric, As @Twm said, working in mm always worked out accurately for me, though I think there may have been a bit of rounding somewhere along the line?
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@Dermot who did you use for CNCing the planters, were they London based?
also, does anybody have experience with Rhino and translating designs from that software into a useable file ready for a CNC workshop? Currently I use sketchup for all the same reasons Dermot has pointed out, but I am now struggling to export to a useable file for CNC workshops to use.
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