I have been in design and production for residential and commercial cabinets for about 10 years. I find that Sketchup Pro is one of the best modeling spaces, hands down, for everything in residential construction and I see some great plugins like Plusspec, Medeek, and others doing great work for all the different products that go into building.
Currently, I only know of one main software add-on that uses Sketchup and that is Mosaic. There are many others that make attempts to provide pre-built libraries of cabinets that are not modeled for production purposes (parts and hardware included).
As yet, I haven’t seen a one stop plugin that can quickly aid the modeling process from schematic to the very act of preparing cut sheets and exporting nesting or at least .dxf files for CAD/CAM: all while being non-intrusive to the modeling experience and current UI of Sketchup.
So, my question is twofold, does anyone know of such a plugin and if it doesn’t exist, does it sound remotely possible to produce such an thing? When I look at PlusSpec and anything Medeeek has produced, I think yes. But I’m more an artist than a programmer so what do I know. If anyone could enlighten me that would be great.
That’s one I had heard of, but for the life of me I couldn’t see that it was being kept up to date. I was wrong on that point. So thanks db11, that’s a good lead.
Garry’s website is pretty bare-bones, but the plugin itself has been in active development since its introduction.
In my experience, Garry is very responsive to queries and issues.
The UI isn’t the most intuitive, but it is highly logical — and the extension is extremely capable and full-featured. He’s produced a series of video tutorials that cover all aspects of use to help you through the learning curve.
The demo isn’t crippled in any way — just limited to 7-day trial. Best to download it on a week when you have enough time to devote to learning it.
You can produce just about any combination of case, face, frame, door, shelf, drawer, divider and hardware that you can imagine. It’s very comprehensive and flexible.
I haven’t tried the layout and CAD/CAM features, since I’m on a Mac, but they look equally complete — including line and connector holes, labeling etc.
I must have just not been paying attention to his sketchucation site at all. Totally missed the four years of development. This would have saved me so much time the last two years.
I trialed CabMaker on a small kitchen project, but held off buying because much of the value is in the optimization / layout. I’m planning on buying a PC (primarily for render purposes) later this year, and once I have that, I will buy a CabMaker license for the next large cabinetry project.
CabMaker 5 has released version 5.0.148 and I am working on the next release. That is 148 updates in 4.3 years.
During that time I’ve added many features that clients have requested. You will find that I am very much approachable and am interested in clients needs. You may email me directly and I can set up a Skype session to show you what can be accomplished with CabMaker.
Looks life a solid option…going to be reading through your Sketchucation forum to get the full story and then work on the trial. After that, if everything goes well, you should hear from me. That’s a heck of a lot work you have put in!
have tried bootcamp, but it’s just to much strain on my older systems in my opinion. I have a PC, but it’s doing time as a studio network server right now, so it would take some additional effort to get working. Just glad to find a plugin that lets me work on the design side for right now.
I’ve been working with cabinetsense for a while and it works very well. It will also export to CNC and to a program called cutlist as well as an excell spreadsheet. Give it a whirl! The support for the extension is also amazing!