marlyse.comme, myself and my life
Friday, October 28, 2005
Cool
Found a 3D application which works very intuitive and smooth : SketchUp(5) and dug my head into it during the past week - whoopee, I missed that! Away from web coding and web design, back into spacial thinkingness and creation.
I’ve been working in the past with a lot of different modelers, from Strata to PixelPutty to FormZ and VectorWorks. Often the applications have such a slew of options, whistles and bells and even though great et al but which CAN get into your way when it becomes a hassle to constantly stay updated with the latest version and wade in memory through the manual to remember which tool is where and does what when and how exactly.
I’ve made a lot of money with FormZ, used it mainly for architectural representations, and I love the capabilities of it, especially when it comes to organizing large projects, the ability to assign key strokes to what the user thinks is important which makes for a very fluid environment, next to it’s libraries and layers and groups and all and it’s still my favorite workhorse, but sometimes it gets just too much in it’s technical approach and also the radiosity engine I haven’t used in a while.
On the other hand, there is the Electric Image Modeler, also using ASCIS engine like FormZ, and beauty to work with: where FormZ is technical, this one is aesthetic. Too bad it’s not getting anymore developed and it’s a matter of time until it will vanish only due to the fact that it won’t be any longer compatible with my computer’s operating system. The modeler brought ease and fun to modeling (next to its own hat of frustration), working with its solid bodies, being able to just cut objects and easily boolean them into bigger objects, the way one can work with fluid curves and nurbs for organic objects, wow, all of that is a class all by itself.
SketchUp(5) combines both sides to an extent except it is not a solid modeler and also has absolutely no nurbs. But it allows the technical approach with customized key shortcuts, has groups and layers and components and libraries and logic snaps to points or faces for fast modeling (which is very FormZ like), is very intuitively built - the current tool will display the logical options with a control/right click, for each situation its own group of options - is easy to navigate and easy to build models from, only a few tools (not the overwhelming approach of FormZ, but much more a simple and clean interface like the Electric Image Modeler), has needed tools like building construction lines extremely well implemented and the whole experience is that of a smooth and fun application.
In line of learning this application I mixed the fun with the needed : I’m setting up our guest room as an auditing room (Scientology counseling) and need a very specific, basic setup of table and book case which works well for the job but easily can get stacked away in the room for when guests are here. To accommodate all of that I’ve designed the 2 furniture pieces, they can get stacked into each other and only take little space while still housing all the commonly needed material/devices and both are rock solid for me working at them. They are built simple enough that we should be able to build them in a day (next to staining and treating the wood) and even though simple in form, they still show enough detail to not look cheap (thanks Bear for pushing me on that). All of this I was able to design and draft in SketchUp(5), next to this little movie which shows how the room is currently furnished and how it will look then with the furniture stacked and also when it’s setup for an auditing session.
created in the wee hours - it was 12:56 am to be exact | trackback |
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