Even if you ve never dabbled in the software, SketchUp All-in-One For Dummies makes it easy to get started as quickly as the ideas pop into your head! SketchUp offers a vast array of tools that help you get your building, woodworking, and design plans out of your head and into a real model. O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.The first step in making your ideas a reality Get SketchUp For Dummies now with the O’Reilly learning platform. In the last part of the chapter, you go on a quick tour of the program, so that you know where things are. This first chapter is about putting SketchUp in context: where to get it, how it compares with other 3D software, and what you can (and can’t) do with it. In SketchUp, you just build, and SketchUp takes care of stuff like perspective and shading for you.

To use SketchUp, you don’t even need to know how to draw. You build models with familiar elements: lines and shapes. In SketchUp, you don’t think about 3D models as complex mathematical constructs (the way computers think). After debuting in 2000, SketchUp changed all that.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, 3D modeling software was expensive - so expensive that the only people who used it were professionals and software pirates (people who stole it, basically). People went to school for years to learn that software. Once upon a time, software for building three-dimensional (3D) models of things like buildings, cars, and other stuff was hard to use - really hard.

Comparing SketchUp with other 3D softwareįinding out what you can and can’t do with SketchUp

Sketchup for dummies