Comments on Sketchup

[Larry Jaques]

OK, $500 to join and then roughly $100/yr for updates. Wow.

-- "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." --Edward Abbey

[FrozenNorth]

Can you say business write-off? See, I knew you could. :-)

[Swingman]

:)

... cheap at ten times the price, and pays for itself multiple times each and every project.

Money making software when wielded with a modicum of business sense and without preconceived notions.

[Robatoy]

00, Sw>

The trick about those 'write-offs' is that you need to show a taxable profit first. *S*

[FrozenNorth]

I am sure Swing is making money, or he couldn't afford that Festering stuff. :-)

[Robatoy]

The same for the purchase of a tool which will give you capability others don't have. That allows you to create your own markets. The whole thing about my investing in computers and software, as far back as 1986, was to have the capability to show a customer what I was about to build for them. Prior to that, I used to use Lawson charts and draw things on a board by hand. Show and tell goes a long way. Ultimately, there only two justifiable reasons to invest in equipment: a) It makes you more efficient and there is a ROI which can be projected. b) The guy across the street, the one you're competing with, doesn't have the capability you're about to invest in.

[Upscale]

Yeah, but only one of those reasons has gloat factor automatically built in. :)

[Marty]

Thanks for your helpful comments see my additional comments and questions below.

Marty

So how do you show details of components such as mortise/tenon joints, location of dado, rabbits and dimensions of each etc on the components that have them? Sure the cut list will show the overall dimension of a component but not these details. When you go into the shop to build these cabinets how do you know how to cut all of the details needed to build them?

For example I just finished a kitchen island for our house (34" x 60") with 6 doors, 3 drawers, face frames, storage for books, shelving under the drawers, swing up mixer shelf with a drawer below it. I ended up with about 10 pages (legal size paper) showing all of the details I needed to build each component. I used a 2D CAD program to do this and can't imagine doing this with a single Sketchup drawing.

May get this but have to think about $20 for this feature.

I have played with scenes and don't see how I can explode a drawing using scenes with out affecting the other scenes. As for layers I have used them in other CAD programs and again don't see how I can explode a drawing, add a number annotations as to how a project is built and do it with layer and/or scenes.

Do you know of tutorials that show how to use Sketchup scenes and layers to show the details I need? That would be very helpful.

Marty

[Robatoy]

Overheard: "No point buying a cnc in this town, that mad Dutchman is two years ahead already."

[SonomaProducts.com]

Hello... Maybe I am just an experienced CAD user but I opened the scene tool and saw instantly how it works.

Turn off all parts except part #1 Create a scene that has the camera angle you want of part #1 Create annotations on a layer named part #1 Use the scene controls to capture what parts and layers are turned on.

Now do the same for part #2, etc., etc.

So each scene has a viewpoint and only the appropriate things turned on or off.

This does not do explosions unfortunately. Cheapest CAD program I know that does OK explosions is a few thousand dollars.

[RicodJour]

SketchUp is flexible and I'm sure there are better ways to do it than mine, but it works and it's easy enough to do. I have no experience with those plugins that were mentioned, so I basically just create an exploded layer or layers and copy the components to the new layer and move them to where I want them. With scenes you'd have the first scene with everything together, and the exploded layer turned off, then in the second scene you'd have the exploded layer turned on and the original layer turned off. That's the quick idea, but it's better with at least one more layer as there's usually a central master part/ assembly that everything else is attached to, so that can stay and be visible in all scenes.

When you run an animation the change between scenes occurs in a series of frames - a movie, and one layer turns off and the other turns on (and the view changes if you've been tweaking the view in individual scenes). By using a number of scenes and moving parts in a logical order, that exploded parts assembly really will look like it's coming apart or going together.

I posted links to two of the bigger free tutorial sites in an earlier post. If you really want to get tweaked, check out Sketchy Physics.

R

[Larry Jaques]

Add my grin, too. :^)

That's the way to do it! You would probably like using Chief Architect or SoftPLAN, too, but they're tougher to get up and running with and are 5x the cost.

So, how many/which of the of the $500 v. Free functions are you using? LayOut, etc? I still haven't spent the time to come up to speed with it.

-- "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." --Edward Abbey

[Leon]

Snip

Once you do this time and again, like anything else, you tend to do things the same. This speeds up design AND production. Basically use a rule of thumb that works for you. Tenons are sized X amount according to the material size. For me I have made thousands of cabinets door joints that are stub tenon. I "always" make the tenon the thickness of the panel that the door will receive, 7/32", and I always make the tenon 1/2" deep. Cutlist sees the tenon whether visible or not if you make the part into a component and actually draw the tenon on the part. So basically a rail with tenons that is visibly 10" long when assembled will be recognized as 11" with the 1/2" tenons added to each end. Cutlist tells me to cut the rail

11". I know that the part is a rail and will need to have a 1/2" long tenon cut into each end and I will need to cut a groove 1/2" deep and 7/32" wide to receive the tenon and panel both the rails and stiles.

For the odd detail that is unique you may still need to copy that detail to another area of the drawing and print that detail separately for reference.

Uniformity speeds the design and the execution.

[Robatoy]

Zactly. My drawer boxes are always an inch smaller than the cavity assigned to them. Something you do on autopilot. Rails are 1" longer. We do this, we know this. To a newb, a lot of that can be really intimidating

Zactly again. That is why, even when I design/build one-off small cabinets, I stick to the 32 mm system. It's where I live. (That router sure makes life a lot easier now too. It came with http://cabinetpartspro.c=om/and that's a joy to use.)

I highly recommend that one becomes, even if somewhat cursory, familiar with the concept behind the 32 mm system. The Intarweb tubes are full of info.

[Jack Stein]

No, this is his lame attempt at an excuse to justify his trashing something he knew next to nothing about. Rotoboy was trashing sketchup as a toy long after Swing, and millions of others were using it for designing houses, kitchens etc, etc. Swing wasted a lot of time arguing with the scum bag.

[Swingman]

While your above example is quite possible with SU using scenes and layers, the question is why would you want to?

IOW, if you're designing and building a car, why have the parts for the motor in the same file as the body? :)

Example: Following are two SU files of end cabinets that a client ordered to match a kitchen cabinet style hutch I had previously built for her. The client lives in a different city, so the ability for her to be able to download the free version of SU and view the files was important in doing this long distance.

This first file, made strictly for design purposes and was made up of components from both the proposed end cabinet design(s) I was working on at the time and the file I had originally used to build the kitchen cabinet hutch, is the actual file was e-mailed back and forth to give her a choice in the design and to determine which end cabinet style (Frame and Panel, or match the "kitchen cabinet" look of the original) she would prefer.

(Keep in mind that the original hutch was designed to go in a kitchen, thus the "kitchen cabinet" type case work involved in both files):

This second file was what I call an "as-built" file and what was used to both make a cutlist, and to build the actual cabinets:

That said, I know in advance how I want to build things like frame and panel doors, so I really don't need to go into detail with mortise and tenons, etc in most of my SU models.

My goal with SU is mostly overall dimensions, stylistic elements, and enough component detail to generate a cutlist for the particular method I'm going to use to build the end product.

PLUS the thought process involved in building the piece on "paper" first before ever going into the shop, which keeps you from building yourself into corners without a plan and having to field engineer your way out. :)

I can't advise you there ... I don't use it. Instead I do the exploding myself using scenes and layers to explode a copy of the original component to be exloded.

There are a few tutorials on youtube on using scenes and layer, but perhaps this simpler file of a support assembly will give you an idea of how to use scenes and layers to do an exploded drawing of a component, made up of other components:

all the examples above, what you are looking for are example of the use of scenes and layers to effect some of the things you are asking about WITHOUT cluttering up your drawings with multiple copies of the same thing spread all over universe, which makes for a much bigger file and one that is harder for your graphic subsystem to display, particularly if you're short of horsepower in that regard.

That is not to say that is not a valid method ... I just prefer the tidiness and ultimate organization of using both scenes and layers, instead of multiple copies of the same components just shown in different scenes.

FWIW, another tool that is very helpful for accomplishing these types of tasks is the "Hide", which can be used to great effect with "Scenes" to hide elements you don't want to show in that scene.

[Swingman]

Cabinet-Carcase & Base Style-AsBuilt.zip

Damn Thunderbird ... or dummy operator.

[Robatoy]

ey!

Out on a weekend pass are you Douchenozzle?

[Swingman]

Here are the two links with the spaces missing in the file names:

BaseStyle-AsBuilt.zip

Apparently "%20" is no longer automagic with either Mozilla product?

[Han]

Swingman wrote in news:7vCdnXI2RJTMAQ7RnZ2dnUVZ [e-mail]:

There is a space between Base and Style. That gets lost with the wrapping.