Some questions about sketchup

SketchUp
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1

Hello everyone, I am new to the forum, and sketchup is completely new to me. Actually, I am a little curious about how many architectural designers use sketchup, so is it really easy to use?

I have a bold plan to use SketchUp to design my house. Simply put, I use a 3D scanner to scan real-life objects or scenes, build my own model library, and then import these models into ketchUp for subsequent editing and optimization. . This saves a lot of modeling time and maintains the precision and accuracy of the model. Finally, these scenes were imported into my layout to transform into a 3D home.

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But I don’t actually know if sketchup is suitable for such usage scenarios. I have the following questions:

  1. Can models scanned by conventional 3D scanners be directly imported into Sketchup? Is MIRACO 3D scanner suitable for use with SketchUp?

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  2. Can these models be called? And can it be put into the same layout? How to better handle overlap and positional relationships?

  3. Can I export it as a floor plan when exporting? Will information such as lighting and materials in the scene be lost?

  4. Is the free version available?
    5.What kind of computer configuration is required?

  5. Are there any effective resources and tutorials?

Any knowledge or resources would be greatly appreciated.

2

Your profile says you have a free plan. Does it mean that you have a cracked SketchUp version?

3

no, I am new to the forum

4

I’m an architect and I’ve been using it for my professional work for over 10 years, I use sketchup for modeling and layout for 2D documentation.

Scanners use to create point clouds files, you must either convert it into a mesh, there are some softwares free and paid on the market that can do that or get sketchup studio that includes scan essentials, a plugin that can import points clouds.

Do you mean named? If so, yes you can create files and name them as you wish.

Yes you can create 2D floor plans out of a 3D model, I use layout to create my floor plans, there are different styles you can choose, the texturized style will show all the materials, you can also show the shadows but these are just generated by the sun, if you want to use artificial light you must use a rendering engine, sketchup studio includes a v-ray license.

The free version is web based and it’s for non commercial purposes, there is another paid web version called Sketchup Go that has a few more features than the free one but both of these versions can’t use plug-ins, plug-ins can be installed only on desktop versions of sketchup.

You can run sketchup almost in any machine, the minimum requirements are low, but if you work with big projects you’ll have performance issues. As any other 3D software, sketchup uses just a single core so it won’t take advantage of a Xeon or a Threadripper cpu, it’s a lot better a modern i5 or Ryzen 5 that have better single core performance, a discrete gpu isn’t required but it’s better to have one for better performance, if you go with mac, any Mac machine with an M series Mac will run sketchup smoothly just make sure you get at least 16gb of ram.

There are free courses on the sketchup campus website made by sketchup members and official trainers there’s also an official sketchup YouTube channel where you can learn how to use the software.