Architects/Design Builders

I will take SketchUp and all its limitations any day of the week over Revit. I’ve never used Blender so I can’t speak to that but from what I understand it is better for organic modeling than orthogonal models.

you need to sort out your GPU trampy

Blender’s issue for me, is that it’s great if you want to eye ball stuff and not that great when you want to model accurately. Components and inferencing are the two major modeling Sketchup features that I lack in blender.

The third is Layout so this would be great:

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Inferences in Blender

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I was referring to your Nintendo GPU

I used to use AutoCAD, FormZ, and other CAD software not worthy of mention here.
Now, I use SketchUp for everything CAD. I design buildings, create presentations, make nearly instant modifications to meet client expectations, create design development drawings, create construction/permit drawings, and during construction, use it to solve issues not immediately apparent to the contractor.
I use SketchUp for furniture design (for my own use).
I have used SketchUp for designing theatrical sets.
I am currently using SketchUp for creating miniature model templates.

I am happy to answer questions about my opinions about SketchUp.
:sunglasses:

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Thanks tpdes. I wonder if you’ve ever tried Vectorworks?

I have been using SU since 2012 end to end, concept to construction plans. The biggest lesson that would have made the first year easier would have been; draw everything on Layer 0 or “untagged” as it is now, as you draw, highlight each component and make it a group, and then put it on a separate Layer or Tag. Geometry sticking together was a massive headache at first.

I had used AutoCAD since the early 90’s but once I was introduced to SU I never used it again.

Hi, Peter.

I have not used Vectorworks, sorry. I neglected to mention I also used 3D Studio for a time, and dabbled with Revit. While those softwares offer considerably more power in certain areas than does SketchUp, they also come laden with so much baggage, you wind up spending an inordinate amount of time learning things you wind up not really needing.

SketchUp is quick to learn, and is so easy to get useful results, it’s easy to overlook its peculiar quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Thom

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I also tried Revit. I was fighting against it while learning, modelled a full house for a project I had at the time. I was trying to do something in Revit that I couldn’t. I went to their own online help and they adviced me to use Sketchup for that. I’m talking about something related to modeling a mass in Sketchup and importing it into Revit afterwards. This was in Autodesk’s help page. Then I found about SketchUp section tool, Layout, Sketchucation and section cut face plugin… Never looked back at Revit again.

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I use SU and lO exclusively as a designer draftsmen of remodeling projects and ADU’s. I print a pdf from layout to send to the building department. I find my self needing a pdf editor and am about to buy into one of them. This may be off topic, but what’s everyone using as a pdf editor. I’m thinking Adobe but at $15 per month, it’s twice what I pay for may whole MS office apps with cloud storage.

I don’t know what your specific requirements are from a PDF editor but I use the free version of PDFSam ( pdfsam.org ) to extract and merge PDFs…

spooky… this just appeared in my YouTube feed

Try Xodo pdf. I have issues with measuring areas but it’s a great editor.For areas markup, the best I found was actually Autodesk Design Review

I’ve seen the video above is for libreoffice draw. You can edit stuff there, but honestly it takes ages to open a vector pdf file from layout.

You can also check Bluebeam Revu. It’s probably overkill, but it’s not rental.

Yep off topic, but what are you editing?

This must depend on what you expect in performance and what you need to do. For example I just use Preview in Mac. It has some export options, different markup tools (some crude “drawing”), and I can combine and split documents (though this can be cumbersome at times, works OK for what I do). You can’t make forms AFAIK.

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JGA01-
Do you mind if I ask what 2D Cad product you use for CDs?

Did you not see the earlier response? I asked the same question:

Funny, personally I can’t see any reason to us/pay for AutoCAD for 2D CAD, but then I never tried so…

I agree- I went to sketch up because I was looking for a reasonably priced drafting solution, I don’t want to spend the big bucks on Auto-Cad. I don’t need a 3D model though so it seems like I am spending more time than I would have with a 2D program. I used to use VISIO before it was bought by Microsoft and I really liked it.

Thanks for pointing out the response.

Hmmm??
I haven’t looked for a while, but MacDraft was a pretty good tool for @D at one time.
PweerDraw/PowerCADD was also but I think they are essentially online support.

Though it’s been a while, if I was going to just do 2D CAD I’d look again at CADintosh:
https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/cadintosh/
Even works on M1 Macs.
(I just downloaded it for another look).

Funny, all this assumes a Mac.

You might wanto put some parameters out here. What are you trying to draw and what platform(s)?