Need help picking extensions

Commercial and Collaborative Work
1

Biography
I was a custom home builder on the North Oregon coast for 11 years. I started in 1989. I have built a little over 50 homes. I started designing homes in 1995 by hand and purchased my first design software in 1996 (Solid Builder – Digital Canal). In 2000 I went full time into the residential and light commercial design field. I have been busy ever since. I also panelized homes between 2000 and 2008. I am not sure how many I designed… 500?

I have used Solid Builder from the beginning. They have recently upgraded to a VR type program that has a very nice presentation, but the flexibility is still not there. It is called CADsoft.

My designs have become more complicated not less, so I have been looking at Sketchup to meet my design needs.

I am over whelmed with options. What I am looking for is an extension with wall assemblies. I need the true thicknesses of the materials so that I can position the foundations and intersecting walls correctly. But, I am working with a lot of curved roofs and walls and editing the assembled wall seems to be tragic.

I am using Sketchup Pro

I will be needing help in the future as my business in growing. I also will need rendering help as many of the homes will be marketed globally.

Thanks,
Jack

2

As for walls and foundations, and much other construction details, you could use Profile Builder.
https://profilebuilder4sketchup.com/
For rendering with a fairly good desktop you could use some of the real-time renderers like Enscape (I use it and it is a great rendering tool), Twinmotion, or Lumion. They are easy to learn and you get great to amazing renderings, depending on time invested to learn them. Also, all of them have VR, panorama, and video creating options included in the software.

1 Like
3

Profile Builder with a bit of dedication will do almost anything you will need, and Enscape is ridiculously easy to use. Unreal is a rabbit hole you probably don’t want to go down.

1 Like
4

I have been using Profile Builder 3. I push pulled the walls through the roof to solid tools trim, and the walls exploded. It was a single assembly.

5

Thanks for the rendering ideas.

6

Medeek Wall & Medeek Truss @medeek Nathaniel should be able to sort you out :smiley:

Plusspec is another good option to consider.

Or, if you don’t need to produce a detailed parametric model, you could customise SketchUp with a host of free/basic/cheap extensions such as 1001Bit Tools, ProfileBuilder, Architect Tools, Vali Architects… and learn some of the many techniques to making them work together.

2 Likes