Hi all, has anybody else have a story about you discovery of Sketchup?
I studied industrial design and loved rendering. Just through my journey in life I started doing garden design and moved into Landscape Architecture. It was 2004 and I got a job of Landscape Architect in the context of Local Government. At this stage I have very little experience computers so I had to get my head around the computer thingy. I was sent on a 3 day course for Autocad basics. In the first 10 mins the lecturer showed us the “new” 3d program called sketchup. He played a short video on sketchup modeling. my hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and under be breath I thought “come to daddy” we have been friends ever and it changed my life 
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Early in 2003 a colleague alerted me to “take a look” at SketchUp. I downloaded and installed the then 8 hour trial, played with it for about 15 minutes and went and bought it. Love at first sight.
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Also in 2003, at work, I was drawing 3D sketches in 2D using vanishing points with Mac Draw.
As Anssi wrote, I discovered SketchUp (SU) by pure hazard while doing a search on the Internet. Since I was also using a Windows computer at work, I was able to persuade my employer to buy SU.
Then, SU became my favorite piece of software. Later, when a Mac version became available, I adopted it and soon, I was able to switch from one system to the other to produce whatever models I needed.
Very soon, I became a regular in the various SU help forums like @last, Google SketchUp, SketchUcation and here.
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Some time around 2014-2015, I had the urge to try designing a tiny home on wheels. Not being sure where to start, I searched the web - don’t remember the search terms I used - but quickly found, and adopted, SketchUp.
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I had to design and build kitchen and hallway furniture. Sketchup was the cheapest and easiest way to start. I also found it by chance while browsing the internet.
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I was an assistant at an architectural practice when Google released the free SketchUp 6 in early 2007 which I started to mess around with in my spare time.
Later that year at another practice there was someone who was producing visualisations for the practice using SketchUp – this is where I discovered the beta version of Layout.
I just checked my records and I purchased my own copy of SketchUp 8 Pro in 2010 and haven’t looked back since.
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Late 2002. A friend illustrated the answer to a question using an image from a SketchUp model and that drew me in. Bought SketchUp for the first time as a birthday gift to myself in January 2003.
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As with most I found it in 2003 when I was in the planning department for a certain Doughnut corporation. I was looking for a fast way to work up store concepts for non standard stores. I had no problem in the layouts with AutoCAD but was looking for a fast way to do easy 3D visuals. I’ve used it in every job since then.
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2007, starting architecture school, just gotten myself a laptop. First year students had to draw everything by hand, but there was a SU class, 5 intensive mornings.
Back then I was already keen on volumes, spatial geometry and things like that. so it matched quite fast.
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2004 for me, I was a 3DStudio user since it came on 5 floppy disks but switched almost overnight to SU once I realised just how quick it was (and still is).
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Also 2003, I would have seen SketchUp mentioned on a Mac news web site, and so gave it a go. Back then the trial version gave you 8 hours of use, and if you were only taking a look now and then, 8 hours would last a long time. During those 8 hour, SketchUp 4 was released, and so I would play with that when I had spare time.
Eventually I had a use case for SketchUp, and went ahead and paid $495. By then SketchUp 5 was coming out, and so my first Classic Pro license is the Mac specific license for SketchUp 5.
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2013 for me. A late bloomer I suppose. A work colleague told me about SU. Checked it out on the web. Thought it would be very helpful for my job at the time. I’ve been circling the SU bowl ever since. 
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I read about SketchUp in 2007 when the first free version from Google came out and had to try it out. Used it ever since for hobby things like doodling, woodworking and 3D printing. Bought my first paid version last december…
It’s a mighty program in all it’s simplicity and still learning new things like quad modelling and SubD.
And a real nice community too!
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Don’t remember the year but version 5 or 6, I was drawing up plans for an addition and the software I was using at the time (won’t mention it by name) was giving me a hard time doing what I wanted to on a gable end wall and I was yelling at my computer, my oldest son heard me and said did you ever try SketchUp, no never heard of it. Sounded like some kind of kids software or like MS Paint lol. After struggling with the addition plans for another day, I downloaded the 8 hr trial, starting playing around, joined and read through a ton of posts at Sketchucation, ending up buying it after like 2 hours of playing around.
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kind of life changing Huh
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Does your son use sketchup?
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No, at that time they were using it in one of his high school classes for a project.
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I discovered it in 2010, I was going to start my 5th semester of architecture, the only program we were taught was autocad, we could take a course to learn Revit but it was almost impossible to get a seat. Autocad 3D was unbearable for me, it takes a lot of steps to model a single shape, I also downloaded Revit and try to learn by myself but I opened the program and the UI was overwhelming , I was going to pay for a course that costed $500 for three months, I was watching some tutorial on YT trying to learn the basics of Revit, two days before paying and getting involved, an sketchup video popped up, I opened and it looked so simple, I watched like 10 more videos and downloaded the program, by then I was sick of windows so I switched to MacOS a few months earlier, so I had to install Revit on a partition with boot camp, but sketchup ran natively on Mac so that was a great start, I followed along some few more tutorials and it caught me, I spent almost the entire night just playing with it trying to model more complex objects, o was on vacations so I could oversleep the next day, but I was so exited that I just slept for 3 or 4 hours cause I wanted to keep playing with the program, the rest of my vacations if I wasn’t working out or with friends/family, I was using sketchup, I made a test of modeling the entire project of the last semester and took the time just to compare how faster I could do it compared with how long it took me with autocad. I regretted myself not knowing this amazing software before, I could’ve had a lot more time to sleep instead of preparing the project with autocad. The next semester I had a solid knowledge of the software cause the learning curve isn’t steep at all for beginners, I was able to model all the projects very easily, I didn’t have VRay so I used photoshop to improve the quality of my images, I didn’t know how to use the styles or style builder to make my own style, then I exported images to illustrator to make the panels, and 2D dwg to add the measurements and some text. Exactly one year later I was playing around with sketchup and decided to open LayOut, again I watched some tutorials and I fell I love immediately, it could save me the autocad and illustrator steps, I kept learning by myself and the next semester I did every exclusively using sketchup and layout, even my bachelors thesis and also my masters thesis in Germany, I learned Archicad cause I worked on an study that used this software, I also liked it but when I left that job I couldn’t afford an Archicad license so I went back to sketchup, I created my own study and sketchup is in most of the projects the only tool I use, beside some plug-ins like vRay and enscape. I learned Revit a few year ago cause a friend tried to convince me that it was the 8th marvel in architecture, but it was even more expensive than Archicad, I could afforded by then but I wouldn’t change sketchup for nothing. I love 3D not just architectural modeling, and a program was making some noise, Blender, it’s an open source program so I downloaded it but I didn’t open it for at least 2 months, an afternoon when I had almost nothing to do I opened it and was again overwhelmed with the but since it’s free I decided to give it a try, after some weeks following some tutorials I modeled a small project we were working on, and rendering it with the basic knowledge I had, I noticed immediately that it was easier to model it trying to be as accurate as my eyeballing was, at the end it doesn’t have to be 100 accurate for a rendering, I liked a lot the software and used it for most of the renderings, we used to subcontract people to make the renders, but since I got good at it we had to hire less people to do that job. Sketchup and blender were the perfect tandem. Now I use VRay, enscape and twinmotion eventually, but sketchup is essential in my workflow. Blender I keep using it for hobby modeling and try to learn the new features like geometry nodes.
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$375 in August 28, 2002 when I saw it at an @Last booth at a trade show at the Javits Center in New York City (can’t remember if it was MacWorld Expo or an AEC tradeshow). As mentioned in this other thread,
I had been using Alias (Sketchtech) Upfront for 9 years prior, and it was becoming apparent that further development wasn’t going to happen any more, so I was looking for a replacement. SU looked so similar to Upfront, I thought it was basically a knock-off. I had just caved and bought ArchiCAD the month before, and wished I had seen SU first. I do remember being just about sold already when someone demonstrated moving a section cut through a model in real time, and that sealed the deal for me.
At the time, the bulk of my work was mostly 2D in PowerCADD, though it had perspective tools as a part of Wild Tools (very old example page here), and I just used SketchUp for exterior shells and perspective views. Gradually over time SU grew to be a greater and greater percentage of the work flow untill now where it’s the majority, but PC still comes into play when I need it.
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Back in 2022 I was in college and a professor showed it to us. I already had a good amount of experience in CAD but a free one from Google was really cool.
It took me a little while to recognize its power. I was so used to very technical interfaces that I thought it was kinda “cartoonish”, but now it’s one of my main CAD systems.
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