Just pop in the warehouse, find a refrigerator that you like and paste it into your drawing. In the past, somebody (meaning you) would have to draw it. Here is how it works: Say you are drawing a kitchen, and you would like to show a refrigerator in the corner. This is a spot where drawings hang out just waiting to be used. This stove by Wolf is available with just a couple clicks.Īnother great feature of SketchUp is the component warehouse.
After you build a piece, you can actually go in it and look at it from all angles – and see things you have never seen before. But if you just want line drawings with some simple shadows for presentation, it is remarkably fast. You can slow it down with textures and photos if you want. In no time I was drawing simple shapes, zooming in and out, rotating, spinning, whatever, and doing it as fast as I could move. But it didn’t take me long to figure out the basics – and get hooked. It takes a different mindset to use SketchUp. The drawing maneuvers are like no other program I have used (again mostly Adobe products). Knowing it was an obvious waste of time but wanting to give Ron a few valid reasons why I wasn’t going to use it, I visited Google and downloaded SketchUp. This program needed to cost at least $500 if Ron expected me to look at it (I scoffed).
I don’t know where he found out about it, but I do know I wasn’t in a hurry to check it out.
Sketchup for woodworkers free#
He said it was free and it was for 3D drawings. That, of course, is when the best things happen.Ī friend of mine, Ron, who I would say is very IBMish, recommended that I check out Google SketchUp. Anyway, after a while, I just gave up on it, decided it wasn’t for me and just stopped looking. I would say they were very IBMish and I am very Macintoshish. I usually need to just work through things and figure them out, and none of those programs fostered that style. They weren’t going to work for a guy like me who often lacks direction until it shows up. They didn’t seem conducive for designing. It seemed like those programs were for folks that already knew what they were building but just wanted to get it in a very nice and presentable form. I used them for a couple of hours at the most, and could tell right away that they weren’t for me.
Sketchup for woodworkers for free#
I loaded them on my computer and tried them for free for 30 days. I looked at CAD programs, VectorWorks, Rhino-something, and others. For the most part, I wanted to be in the shop and only use the computer when I needed it. I wasn’t sure how much I would really use it, and after 9 years of driving a computer every day, I wasn’t in a hurry to drive more than I had to.
Obviously, it was time for a 3D drawing program, but I wasn’t interested in learning a new program. With Illustrator and its 2D drawings, I just couldn’t see these things. A leg, for example, that looked well proportioned when viewed straight on was often actually too thick when viewed at an angle. The details were sometimes related to joinery, but were more often related to scale. This became a more important issue as I noticed I was missing details because I couldn’t see the piece from different angles. You can fake the 3D, but it is still just a 2D drawing. The third and biggest drawback is that it only does drawings in 2D. So, if you want to dimension a drawing, you have to individually draw arrows, layout the text between the arrows, rotate everything, and hope that it doesn’t need to be resized (because it doesn’t happen automatically). Second, it is made to produce top-quality graphics, which means there are a lot of options but no templates, especially for anything related to woodworking. First of all, it is difficult to learn, so I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone except those that do graphics for a living. I used the templates most often on curved pieces, and Illustrator is great at drawing curves with precise control.įor all of its positives, Illustrator has its drawbacks. The beauty of Illustrator was it’s ability to draw anything I dreamed up and to control the printing, which came in handy on full-size templates. After that I had to scale down my drawings, but that wasn’t very often. The artboard would allow me to draw up to 200″ at full-scale.
Sketchup for woodworkers how to#
I already knew how to use it from my previous life as an art director, so I made it work for woodworking. It is used by designers throughout the world to do every kind of drawing, and it has more than enough capabilities to do nice drawings for woodworking. When I started doing drawings for woodworking I used Adobe Illustrator.
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