No more than a week or two after my blog entry on Sketchup, I got an email from Popular Woodworking taking about a whole new section of their web site dedicated to Sketchup as a design tool. They have their own forum for posing models, as well as a discussion group on Google relative to the models Pop Woodworking has created. There is also a section with some good educational resources that may also be helpful. Check out for more info.
Sketchup does seem to be quickly becoming the de facto (and free) tool for furniture design these days, and this new forum from PWW would further confirm that fact. Even if you don't know how to build in Sketchup, knowing how to manipulate components and explode drawings to investigate joinery techniques is a simple but potentially valuable skill. And I've heard from lots of people that they wished they knew SU better, and very few that feel they've wasted time learning the tool!
4 comments:
Rob, have you taken a vacation or just been very busy?
Ugg. Just been busy. The economy the way it's been, I just haven't had the time to spend in the shop or on my blog. Things are starting to settle down now though, so I hope to get things started up again soon.
Sketchup is very interesting, particularly the API that makes it easy to write programs that generate parts or all of a design. The one thing that has kept me from actually going to it and buying the expensive "Pro" version is that it doesn't run under Linux. All of my systems run Linux, X & KDE are the user interfaces that are solidly wired into my brain and I have no desire to dedicate one of my nice systems with multiple 24" monitors to only running Windows and one application.
All in all, I'm quite frustrated by Google's stance on this.
I currently run Sketchup 7 under Fedora 8/Wine 1.1.9. So far so good.
Will be sticking with Fedora 8 until I find KDE 4 usable. Hopefully 4.3 will make me upgrade.
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