Google Sketchup for Dummies
SketchUp is Google's free 3D drawing program. It's easy to use, but it's even easier when you watch someone with a lot of SketchUp experience use the application and explain what they're doing.
Aidan Chopra is an experienced SketchUp user. In fact, he wrote Google SketchUp for Dummies. (Here's PC World's generally glowing review of Chopra's book.) He also created several videos available on his YouTube page that will get you quickly up to speed on the way SketchUp works. Link
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I forgot to mention that John Park wrote a great how-to for Make on designing a workbench with SketchUp. He also has a video on Blip.tv showing the process.
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I agree that the Dummies book is excellent. There are some additional blog entries and videos on the Fine Woodworking website that nicely complement Chopra's book and videos.
http://blogs.taunton.com/n/blogs/blog.aspx?webtag=fw-designforum
yo peeps, make sure you also check out go-2-school.com for some really great sketchup stuff.... podcasts, dvds, forums. excellent sketchup training resource. dig!
Unfortunately though, SketchUp is one of the few Google apps that isn't offered in a working Linux version. I tried it under Wine, but it complains about my display and won't run.
That's not a total showstopper for me, but it's not important enough for me to fire up the legacy Windows box very often. It's not like it's Lightroom or anything...
Kind of funny that anyone figured a "for dummies" book was necessary for SketchUp. The whole point of the program itself is to serve as more or less a "3D for Dummies" kind of thing. I don't mean that as a criticism, either; SketchUp rocks! When you first run the program and spend an hour with the tutorials, you've already mastered pretty much everything.
does this work with second life? (i.e. can you import 3d items from sketchup to sl?) that'd be cool...
Nup, doesn't work in Second Life. You're stuck with parametric geometry. Everything else generates too many prims when you import it.
Sketchup is ambrosia!
Its a shame Google don't have a release yet for Linux, though.
interesting. i never heard before about google sketchup i think i give it a try and play a little bit around with it, a nice tutorial has Aidan delivered :)