The End of the Sketchup Journey

I have just spent a week learning  Sketchup, or getting up to novice user stage.  I am now fairly comfortable with how it works, although things like arrays are still a mystery, but I know they can be done.

The man who started at work has now gone, and with him no doubt my boss's enthusiasm for things Sketchup or any other 3D for that matter.

My last stage was to use Layout, and I found this simple and easy to use.  It is very similar to the idea of Autocad's Paper Space.

Two things that need fixing (or is it just me not using it correctly!?):

1. To get a linework only hatch to appear is not that easy.  The only way I can see is to use monochrome hatches, which probably would work - or just use standard hatches and print in black and white. As you can see from these elevations, I did not show hatches.

2. When dimensioning, it seems you are not able to control the lengths of the witness lines, but that might be because I have not found where these are altered.

Yes, the linework looks terrible, but that would be me not setting it up nicely.  There is a man on Youtube who shows you how to get this looking pretty, by creating two views and importing them both so they sit on top of each other, which seems a bit of a drama to do.

Getting there, sort of...

Why oh why cannot the programmers of Sketchup, get out and have a look at the way Autocad does pan and zoom? (He ranted).

How hard would it be to have the mouse wheel do a pan instead of orbit?  Just gets cumbersome coming from Autocad to do such basic things. Maybe there is a way of customising this.

A quick google found another person who came across the same problem:

Quoted here from SketchUcation by by Macho3001 » Sat Nov 23, 2013 1:17 pm

"My problem is this: - I work on models in both sketchup and Revit/ AutoCAD/ Max Design. Unfortunately, the middle mouse button in sketchup and the other Autodesk software is EXACT OPPOSITE. While Sketchup uses Middle Mouse Button (MMB) drag to orbit and Shift+Drag to Pan, Revit-ACAD-Max do the exact opposite, MMB drag to Pan and Shift+Drag to Orbit. After having been a long user of Sketchup over the years I have learnt that Sketchup way of assignment is more suited for productivity and ease of use, as one tends to orbit (& zoom) more, rather than pan, while navigating 3d space."

Well, there you go: the answer is just hold down middle  mouse button and shift at the same time!

Progress on the house model has been achingly slow, but it appears the outside is done, albeit a bit rough.  This is an actual house renovation I am working on at work at the moment, all that is happening is the garage at the front is being stretched.

This is a Vray render:

This is the Sketchup model:

This is an Enscape Render (Instant rendering-unfortunately my trial period has run out so I had to be happy with a screen shot.  Excuse splodges!

The rationale behind Sketchup as far as I can see at the moment

I am having a few issues, as a beginner, which with time may prove to be not quite right, so read on with that proviso. Especially that poor soul on the Sketchup team whose job it is to monitor stuff like this.

1. It seems a bit iffy that you model in one program , and use another to produce output. People obviously cope with this, so this could be just pickiness on my part.

2. You put a window in a "wall".  Great. Not so great if said wall is 2 surfaces, because then you have to dig another hole in the inner surface. Not so easy if other things are in the way. Throw in the situation of a brick veneer and a timber stud wall and suddenly windows get very irritating.

3. You want to do nicer windows? Easy, just download and install a plug in that does this. Oh wait....anything any good costs $$$.  Some of the free ones are not up to date. Want a roof tool that means you just pick a surface?  Can be done, except the one I chose said no way to the roof in this picture.  So it had to be built in pieces. It turned out I had made it too big anyway.  Vali Architects put out some nice stuff. Just $118/year.
Tempting but at the moment I am just trying to master the basics, so drawing things from scratch is the name of the game.

4. Just saw a Youtube where a man is manually putting on ground lines.  Surely this is the goal of 3D to do away with this sort of madness?