Google SketchUp

Published 2006-05-02    Printer-friendly version

This weekend I began some major back yard renovations. When we bought our house, the back yard consisted of a massive deck built, in part, around a derelict swimming pool. With some help from our friend Bob, his hydraulic jack, and about six feet of extension tubes, we levelled the deck. With a little more work we got the pool back into service, and we got a lot of use out of it for three summers. After the liner packed it in, and the lower deck needed further work, we decided it was time to go for some green space in the back yard. I did some drawings and sketches, but it was really hard to get a clear idea of what the back yard would look like with our intended changes.

Then, last Thursday, Google released its own version of SketchUp, a terrific 3D modeling tool. SketchUp 5 costs $495; Google SketchUp is free. Google's interest, apparently, is in having people create 3D models of structures and contribute them to Google Earth (and if you've only used the satellite view on Google Maps, you owe it to yourself to try out the 3D capabilities of Google Earth).

At this point I don't have any particular interest in sharing a 3D model of our back yard with the world. But I do now have such a model, and creating it was (for the most part) a piece of cake. Within an hour of downloading Google Sketchup I had something usable, and with another hour or two "usable" had become "presentable."

The single most useful technique I found in SketchUp is to draw a shape, and then extrude that shape into an object using the Push/Pull tool. Do the tutorials and you'll see what I mean. I also eventually found two very nice ways to draw to exact dimensions. One is to draw the shape, then note the format of the dimension(s) in the lower right hand corner, in the status bar. You can type the exact dimensions using this same format, even though there's no cursor in the field. The other is to use the measuring tape, set it on an edge, and then hold the Ctrl key down to drag a reference line. Again, you can set the exact dimensions by typing, and then you can draw objects in relation to your reference line. Using these techniques I was able to quickly and accurately lay out a drawing of our yard, using a survey drawing for reference.

I did run into a few problems, partly because of my inexperience with the program. I sometimes lost the view of my drawing, either because I was too close to an object, or because I'd wandered off into unused drawing space. But somehow I always found my way back. I also found that objects seemed to attach themselves to each other in sometimes unexpected ways. If I extruded a fence section and set it on the deck, and then tried to move the fence section, I might move a larger part of the structure, with decidedly Cubist effects. But on the whole, I found Google SketchUp powerful and easy to use. 3D drawing has clearly come a long way.

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