The architect's answer: SketchUp 3—an elegant AEC and multimedia solution

CADalyst, Jan, 2004 by H. Edward Goldberg

ONLY A FEW AEC AND multimedia software programs are elegant--they perform as advertised, are easy to learn, and have a good price point. SketchUp 3.0 from @Last Software is one of these programs. It's been at the top of my annual "Essential Presentation Tools" column, May 2003, along with Adobe PhotoShop and Power Point, since it arrived on the scene three years ago.

SketchUp grew out of the shared vision of @Last Software's founders, a small group of AEC industry veterans who saw a need for a more intuitive and accessible 3D design tool--hence the company's mission statement "3D for the rest of us." SketchUp has evolved since its first release. Features in v3 give it broader applicability throughout the entire design, presentation, and construction document phase. To think of SketchUp as only a presentation tool is to underestimate its power and versatility.

Novice computer users can quickly gain value from this program. AEC professionals who are mildly comfortable with computers should be able to create a usable presentation with about three hours of practice. A more experienced CAD operator should be able to create a professional presentation in that time. For users familiar with sophisticated modeling and rendering programs such as VIZ, 3ds max and form * Z, SketchUp 3 is an excellent adjacent modeler for all objects, except for organic forms. SketchUp has a unique, but limited, animation capability that's excellent for fly-bys and walkthroughs.

To run SketchUp on the PC, @Last Software recommends that you use Microsoft Windows 98 or above on a 600MHz or higher Pentium III processor with 40MB of free disk space, 128MB RAM, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or higher, a scroll-wheel, three-button mouse or Windows-compatible pointing device, and an OpenGL-compatible 3D graphics card running in 32-bit color mode.

What You Get

SketchUp comes equipped with a tool palette that includes pencil, rectangle, circle, and curve tools to draw lines and shapes. Once you create shapes, you can extrude them with the Push-Pull tool to produce 3D models. You can then modify these models using move, rotate, and scale tools. Finally, use the texture tool to add bit-mapped textures to any face of the model. Click an icon to apply shadows that you control with sliders and lists for time of day, season, and location anywhere on the planet.

In SketchUp 3, you can add two types of text to drawings. The first is Screen text that remains fixed to a point on the screen and is ideal for titles and captions. The second is Leader text that links to a face on a model implicitly or via an arrow. As you rotate the view of a model, the leader text follows its object and maintains its orientation to the screen. When the leader arrow is obscured, its associated text automatically disappears.

Figures 1 and 2 show a simple massing model I made in 30 minutes. I often send this type of concept model to a client immediately after visiting a site or discussing a building program.

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

SketchUp offers additional features that multimedia and presentation experts will appreciate, such as shadows, textures, and an excellent motion presentation capability. SketchUp provides a free reader so your clients can interactively walk through a design on their computers.

SketchUp's animation capability, TourGuide, helps you set up pages based on current camera position, view settings, and shadow settings. The SketchUp Slide Show automatically and smoothly interpolates between views by morphing between pages. You can also output TourGuide presentations to an AVI video file for delivery on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. Another new option for Web delivery is the ability to output scenes to VRML (virtual reality markup language). For more traditional 2D output, SketchUp supports a reasonable range of static bitmap formats including JPG and TIF (figure 3), as well as the EPIX format for processing in Piranesi (figure 4; Informatix Software's paint program that makes presentations appear hand-rendered; www.informatix.co.uk). SketchUp 3.0 also provides filled polygon output to EPS and PDF format.

[FIGURES 3-4 OMITTED]

SketchUp Plugs into Other Programs

At Autodesk University in December, @Last Software announced new import plug-ins for Autodesk's Architectural Desktop 3.3 and 2004 and ArchiCAD 8 v3. The plug-in, which shows up as a drop-down menu from the main menu bar in each interface, automatically converts a SketchUp file.

SketchUp to Architectural Desktop. With this plug-in, you can import SketchUp files into Architectural Desktop, translating SketchUp geometry into native Architectural Desktop entities. SketchUp vertical faces are translated into walls, horizontal faces become slabs, and sloped faces become roofs. Some components in SketchUp 3, such as doors and windows, automatically create Architectural Desktop matching content.

I used this new plug-in to design the building in figure 6. I found SketchUp easier to use and much more versatile than Architectural Desktop's own built-in Mass Model module.