Talk of the Town
Sunday, April 30th, 2006SketchUp, SketchUp, SketchUp! It seems everybody was ranting about Google releasing SketchUp for free last week. So what’s the big deal? To find out, I decided to download it and give it a try myself.
To get my feet wet with the program, I decided to start with something simple. The wife mentioned the other day that she’d love to have a hall table to place in our downstairs entry way. I decided I’d attempt to create a model in SketchUp using some plans I found in an old issue of Wood magazine. My plan was to produce a quick mock-up and then change it later based on her input. After about 20 minutes or so of playing around, I had the basic hall table model shown below.
It’s a little hard to see in the image above, but the legs are tapered on two sides, and the table’s top has rounded under edges on three sides. Now I know what some of you are thinking, “There is no way he got that done in 20 minutes.” Well, I must confess. Yes, I did. But, I happen to have over 20 years of experience with 3D drafting and design. And the fact that SketchUp is very, very, very easy to use helped out too.
Check back later this week. I hope to add some more detail to the model and play around a little with SketchUp’s rendering capabilities. I might even post a how-to article on creating tapered legs. They were suprisingly easy once I figured out how to do it.