Jewelry Newby already dislikes this software

I am getting set up to design jewelry and print it on a ANET A8. I am a cluster when it comes to technology so any advice is appreciated. I did the 4 tutorials and they seem oriented towards rectilinear uses like architecture and interior design. What am I not getting?

I think the first thing is that SketchUp’s primary use case is architecture which would explain the direction of the tutorials. The second is that you haven’t gotten into it very far so it’s probably a little early for giving up. Although it wasn’t intended for creating jewelry designs, it is possible to do that. You’ll need to learn the basic tools and you’ll probably want to look into some extensions like SubD and Artisan.

And also note that for designing small objects, you will get into trouble if you don’t scale up your sizes - SketchUp, with its foundations in architecture, will merge points and edges that are ‘very close’ together. Use metres for mm, or feet and decimals for inches, so that ‘small’ edges and near-adjacent points aren’t wrongly merged, messing up your intended geometry.

It can certainly be used for the purposes which you describe, and others have made good use of it, but this wasn’t its primary intended purpose - as DaveR says, SketchUp has its roots in architecture.

There is a voluptuous nature to jewelry design that I need to figure out

There are a few examples in this forum in the SketchUp Gallery category - see for example

SketchUp comes with basic features and you enhance them according to your needs with plugins. There are good amount of plugins that might make your workflow easier and faster. So if you can describe problems that you face in your workflow, community here can help better. Are you having diffuculties on modelling or exporting your model?

You can start reading this blog post: Get started with 3D printing: make the SketchUp logo

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