Charlotte Lee, Author at Elmtec Sketchup

CAD Tips & Tools for Product Designers

Posted on February 11, 2022June 10, 2024 by Charlotte Lee

So you want to make beautiful 3D drawings, whether it’s cad for furniture design, cad for product design or cad for gardens and buildings? What exactly is cad product design, and what are the advantages of using cad software? This guide reveals everything you need to know about computer aided design, the many cool advantages of using it, plus some excellent cad product design tips and tricks to help you shine from the start. Are you ready to discover the magic of cad?

CAD for Product Design

What is computer aided design? CAD means using computers to help you create, modify, analyse and optimise a design. The product cad design software increases designer productivity, boosts design quality, helps designers improve their communications, creates clear documentation, and can even form the basis of the manufacturing process itself.

In 1957 Dr. Patrick Hanratty created the first numerical control system. The French engineer Pierre Bézier, who once worked for Renault, tinkered with the idea between 1966 and 1968, ultimately developing something called UNISURF, a system created to make designing auto parts and tools easier. This formed the basis of CAD software.

The first commercial applications of CAD for product design and industrial design were restricted to big business, mostly in the vehicle and aerospace sectors. The cost of early systems went way beyond what most companies could afford. These days CAD has evolved from creating simple 2D designs into a tool for making complex, multi-layered, hyper-real 3D images that can be consumed via a VR headset, utterly convincing and 100% accurate.

Why do designers use cad? Cad is used for an enormous array of reasons and touches more or less every industry on earth. If it needs to be designed and made it’ll involve CAD at one stage or another, often from start to finish.

Detailed 2d and 3d drawings sit at the heart of everything. You can make stunningly real architectural designs using CAD and know exactly how much of each building material you’ll need for the real-world build. You can create workable site plans that can be easily understood and appreciated by everyone concerned, and craft the perfect engineering components for your project. You can design furniture, create textures, and animate everything to create exciting, convincing presentations. You name it, you can use CAD to design it.

Sketchup is a powerful piece of CAD software, one of the best cad softwares around. As popular furniture cad software, product design cad software and cabinet cad software it enables designers to create fantastic 3D models and then share them with other users via the 3D warehouse. But why would you want to choose cad when there’s plenty of pens and paper just waiting to be used? As it turns out there are many benefits to harnessing a great cad program for your next project. Here are some of the advantages CAD delivers to designers.

Advantages of Using CAD

Why do product designers use CAD? The old pen and paper method takes a very long time. Making drawings by hand is time consuming. Making changes to a drawing, especially when a change has lots of complicated inter-dependencies, is even harder. Thanks to CAD you can create designs and make changes to them in record time without losing the plot.

Your drawings are not restricted to 2d representations. The 3d drawings cad allows are more real-looking, more convincing, and more fun to examine as you move around the drawing, looking at it from every angle. The powerful visualisation and modelling capabilities enhance product design quality. And human error is much less of an issue because the software carries out the potentially enormously complex calculations for you.

Sketchup by Elmtec does all of this and more, a fabulous product CAD software package that doesn’t just give you all the 2d and 3d design functionality you could possibly need, it’s also super-fun to learn and easy to use.

Useful CAD Product Design Tips

Now it’s time for some useful CAD product design tips. Get these under your belt for even faster, more enjoyable cad adventures.

Get to grips with the basics of Sketchup

There’s an abundance of excellent free Sketchup learning tutorials, videos and courses for designers to tap into, covering every imaginable issue and project type. Combine these with the fact that Sketchup is intuitive and fun to use and you’ll be making amazing 2D and 3D product designs in no time.

Invest in Research

Research is your best friend. The early stages of a product design should involve rigorous research to determine exactly what your potential customers, users and other stakeholders need. It’s also helpful to take a good look at existing products with the same function. Can you do better?

Design for Manufacture

Designing products for manufacture requires experience and knowledge of the production process. Because mistakes can cost a lot, it’s sensible to factor them out from the beginning by designing for manufacture, something that’s supported perfectly by Sketchup. This means considering practical design requirements, the need to design for the real world. It involves the materials used, their availability, whether they work together, the costs involved, how long they will last and more. As you can imagine it’s always wise to design with simplicity rather than complexity, something else Sketchup supports admirably.

Design for the Future

Looking ahead is the name of the game here. Product designers often consider future needs as well as current ones, future-proofing their designs as far as possible in an uncertain world. You might, for example, want to design parts that’ll work well in future projects as well as current ones.

Look and Feel

The visual elements of a design are just as important as the practical side. You’ll need to take the importance of aesthetics into account when designing products for a consumer market. It’s good to know how the exceptional 3D design and visualisation capabilities in Sketchup enable product designs to be engagingly presented, evaluated, edited and completed.

SketchUp for CAD Product Design

Now you understand the basics of the history of the CAD design system and know why it’s so much better than old-school pen and paper, maybe you’d like to test drive Elmtec Sketchup for yourself? You can visit our downloads section for loads of great tutorials and learning resources, and download our generous free 7 day trial of SketchUp Pro here. You might also enjoy a free trial of V-Ray for Sketchup, which delivers awesomely good hyper-real images with ease.

SketchUp vs AutoCAD: What are the Differences?

Posted on February 09, 2022July 14, 2023 by Charlotte Lee

Autocad or Sketchup? If you’re wondering which is the best for your project, your team, your company, your college or yourself, how do you make the right decision? The only way is to go compare, and that’s exactly what this article will do. Is Sketchup better than AutoCAD? When the tricky question of Sketchup or Autocad raises its head, read on to find out the similarities, the differences, and everything else you need to know about two of the planet’s best loved computer aided 2d and 3d drawing software tools.

What is Autocad Used For?

Autocad is an original. It dates way back to the early ‘80s when nobody had a computer on their desk at home, very few of us used one at work, and plenty of us didn’t even know there was such a thing as a computer in the first place. It’s hard to imagine a world like that, but easy to picture how revolutionary Autocad was.

In 1982 Autodesk, the parent of Autocad, released the first version of Autocad. And it totally revolutionised the CAD industry. Originally designed to operate in 2d and the darling of mechanical engineers the world over, these days Autocad is recognised as the standard against which other CAD packages are compared. As you can imagine there are a great many versions to choose from.

AutoCAD classic – Generic AutoCAD for all 2D and 3D design projects.
AutoCAD Mechanical – Mechanical toolset for ‘design for manufacturing’.
AutoCAD Architecture – Toolset for the architectural design industry.
AutoCAD electrical – Electrical design tool set.
AutoCAD MEP – MEP – mechanical, electrical and plumbing building systems.
AutoCAD Plant 3D – Piping and instrumentation diagrams.

The sheer variety of Autocad tool sets demonstrates the breadth of Autocad applicability. There’s also an entry-level ‘lite’ version called Autocad LT, and there’s a free but limited edition exclusively for students.

What is Sketchup Used For?

Here are some more AutoCAD 3d vs Sketchup facts. In comparison to Autocad, Sketchup is relatively new. Developed in 2000, originally as an all purpose 3D design tool, it quickly extended its functionality and scope to cover a huge variety of different uses and sectors. Today, Sketchup is used for all this and more:

Civil engineering design
Architectural design
Landscaping
Garden design
Interior design
Office design
Mechanical design
Product design
Video game design
Education
Furniture design
Creating 3d models of every imaginable object, from pot plants to park benches, ergonomic chairs to light fixtures

Is Sketchup compatible with Autocad? It’s good to know you can easily import Autocad files into Sketchup.

Autocad vs Sketchup - Price Comparison

Which is better, Sketchup or Autocad? There’s certainly a dramatic price difference. So how much do the different programs cost? The pricing for AutoCAD is straightforward:

Monthly: $246
Annually: $1986
3-Year: $5658

Pricing for SketchUp is a little more complicated because there are several different levels of service:

SketchUp Education: £44/year
SketchUp Pro: £235/year
SketchUp Studio: £549/year

It’s free to get started with Sketchup is free – but not with Autocad, unless you qualify for the limited free student version. And there’s a stark difference between the annual cost of the two tools, with an annual Sketchup Pro price of £235 and annual Autocad fees of $1968.

Differences Between Sketchup and Autocad

Now let’s dive deeper into the differences between Sketchup Pro vs Autocad. First, the user interface. Sketchup is famously simple and intuitive, providing clear tool icons and handy shortcut keys. Autocad provides more ways to use the facilities and tools via menus, tool icons, shortcut keys and the command line.

Both platforms are compatible with a wide range of relevant file types – but Autocad supports more file types. Check the details out to see which program offers the file type you use.

As we’ve revealed, Sketchup has a more flexible, affordable pricing structure. And while AutoCAD is recognised as a CAD platform, Sketchup is a 3D design package with great CAD capabilities.

Sketchup is recognised for its ease of use. It’s also remarkably easy to learn, with a simple-to-navigate learning curve. AutoCAD can take a lot more effort to learn.

AutoCAD requires a more powerful computer platform, a minimum of 8 to 16 GB of memory whereas Sketchup requires just 4. And AutoCAD requires 7GB of free disk space whereas Sketchup requires just 500MB.

Sketchup offers the 3D warehouse, a massive resource of free 3d images and objects to download, play with and use in your designs.

On the whole Sketchup is widely recognised as more geared toward 3D modeling than AutoCAD. AutoCAD, in contrast, is a 2D CAD package with 3D capabilities.

AutoCAD vs SketchUp

Is Sketchup better than Autocad? They’re just different. Now you’re clear about the differences. Which tool will become your best design friend? Maybe you’ll choose to use both, flipping between them depending on your project. If you’d like to try the brilliant Pro version of Sketchup FREE for 3 days, click here to download it. You can also test drive the dazzlingly good v-ray for Sketchup rendering free trial, for hyper-real 3d imagery that’ll blow your mind. And there are countless great learning resources and tutorials to explore.

Why You Should Switch to SketchUp for Construction Drawings

Posted on February 04, 2022June 13, 2024 by Charlotte Lee

You already know how to do construction drawings. But do you create your construction drawings in Sketchup? If not, why not, when Sketchup for construction drawings is such a respected, popular tool for doing exactly that? When you’re tasked with making accurate, attractive, client-ready construction drawings, Sketchup is very hard to beat. Read on to find out why it’s wise to switch to Sketchup for construction drawings, and how Sketchup Pro might just change your working life for the better, forever.

Using Sketchup Layout for Construction Drawings

Layout is a Sketchup tool designed to generate documentation from SketchUp models. Layout is perfect for creating amazing 2D presentations – in other words drawings – from 3D models. Layout documents can even include insured 3D models, and you can insert images into documents too, for example your company logo and the client’s logo.

How do you make Sketchup construction documents in Sketchup Layout? It’s ridiculously easy. First you create ‘scenes’ in Sketchup Pro. These Scenes provide orthographic views of the front, leftside, rightside, topdown – and so on – of the object you’re designing. Then you simply import the Scenes you created in Sketchup Pro into Sketchup layout. It’s good to know the design modifications you make in Sketchup are immediately updated in Layout. As you can tell, Sketchup layout construction documents are simplicity itself, and that has a real impact on costs and time.

Benefits in Using Sketchup Layout for Construction Drawings

Next we’ll list the various benefits that reveal why designers should switch to Sketchup for Construction Drawings. First, as we mentioned, your modifications to Sketchup models are immediately reproduced in Layout, seamless and accurate.

Because the Layout documentation features are included in Sketchup Pro, you achieve maximum efficiency in construction drawing production. Layout’s linear and angular dimensioning tools can be used to instantly change the format, scale and precision of dimensions, making Sketchup detail drawings uncannily accurate.

There’s extensive documentation customisation and editing capabilities to help you make short work of any and every construction project, including:

Callouts
Line weights
Stroke styles
Font formatting
Line spacing
The ability to import images

You can export your completed construction drawings in a variety of popular, typical formats including PDF. And you can accurately scale, rotate and resize items with high precision. The intelligent vector mode offers sharp edges and speedy rendering times.

Because Layout allows SketchUp model views to be inserted anywhere in the pages of your construction document, they provide particularly engaging 3D views of your design. And Layout quickly transforms documentation into inspiring presentations.

So far, so good. Sketchup construction details are looking pretty good so far. But there’s more. Is Sketchup good for construction documents themselves? It’s a yes. The reasons we’ve provided make Sketchup an excellent tool for creating professional construction drawings. Do I need to get or install a separate license for Layout? Because Layout is a feature of SketchUp Pro, it’s covered by the SketchUp Pro license.

Sketchup Construction Library

Using Sketchup for construction drawings means you get access to the Sketchup 3D Warehouse Construction Library is an excellent resource full of free 3d objects you can download, manipulate and use. There’s an enormous choice of different construction elements and components, everything from net partitioning to indoor handle sets, pressure vessels and radiators, floor trusses, nuts and bolts.

The Warehouse provides ready-made images of cross arches and advanced framing technology, various types of flashing, and expansion joints. You can download the roof insulation you need, plus masonry foam insulation, exposed beam ceilings, and roof trusses. Vents and joints are always available, as well as a choice of door shades, guttering, rain screens and foundation slabs. There’s even a UFO parking depot, should you ever need such a thing!

Doors, bathroom equipment, kitchens, lifts, ovens, shower panel systems, you name it, there’s a 3d download of it. These models are joined by a multitude of amazing materials, textures and other resources, all great learning aids designed to save lots of design time.

SketchUp for Construction Drawings

Are you ready to give it a go and maybe change your working life for the better with Sketchup Pro construction drawings? Now you know why Sketchup is perfect for making complex drawings simple, click here to give it a go via our free 30 day trial of Sketchup Pro. If rendering is going to play an important part for you, why not click here to give a v-ray for Sketchup free trial a go. You’ll be amazed by the hyper-real results. You might also want to check out Sketchup’s enormous range of learning resources including exciting tutorials.

Work smarter, not harder with SketchUp Layout tips in 2023

Posted on February 02, 2022December 12, 2023 by Charlotte Lee

How SketchUp Layout Tips Can Help You?

With Auto-Text updates and Find & Replace, LayOut helps you work faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Viewport-based Auto-Text labels

In addition to existing labels that pull entity or component attributes from SketchUp viewports in LayOut, we are introducing new Auto-Text tags that can be selected from the Auto-Text menu in label creation or templated labels.

You can use all of these labels in scrapbooks or with transparent label leaders. This means that you can drag Auto-Text labels in from a scrapbook, hit enter to drag the label leader, and then the value associated with that viewport automatically displays.

These tags include <SceneName>, <SceneDescription>, <Scale>, <Ratio>, and <Coordinates()> parameter input.

With new and improved viewport-based Auto-Text labels, you can use more of the information embedded in SketchUp models while composing documents, making your templates more powerful and efficient. For instance, you can pick your Scene name or description using an Auto-Text tag to automatically populate a drawing title. Then use a <Ratio> tag to show the scale of the current viewport. If the scale of the model viewport changes, the scale call out will automatically update.

Explore how to use them in our Help Center documentation.

Page Management Auto-Text

Manually creating and maintaining a table of contents can be time-consuming and error-prone, but it doesn’t have to be with new enhancements in title block management.

<Page Count>

Complementing our existing <PageNumber> tag, <PageCount> displays the number of pages in a range you can define. With <PageCount>, users can specify the start page (where a particular range starts), character style, and the last page of the range. This feature is useful when developing an index or table of contents at the beginning of your LayOut document.

<Page Name>

With the <PageName> tag, you can use the name of a page that is not the current page. For example, if you want to display the name of a page in the third position of your document, you’ll input <PageNumber(3)>. Even better, the page name dynamically updates when pages are added, deleted, or re-ordered, saving time when developing and finalizing your table of contents.

Sequence Auto-Text

A long-standing feature request, Sequence Auto-Text is a new Auto-Text tag that automatically increments when duplicated. These tags are used to annotate drawings and figures rapidly, create numbered drawing titles, legends, and many other use cases that would previously require text editing between each copy. Like <PageNumber> Auto-Text, you can duplicate and repurpose the Sequence tag as many times as you’d like.

If you delete a sequence tag, you can renumber text boxes for a given sequence tag across an entire document quickly and easily using a single command – Renumber Sequence.

To help you get started with all of the new Auto-Text features in LayOut, we’re adding two new pages to each of LayOut’s title block scrapbooks.

Find & Replace text

There are several ways to quickly create and copy text across multiple pages in a LayOut document, but modifying text across an entire document has always been difficult. You need to inspect every page and text box of your document. That’s why you’ll love Find & Replace in LayOut! With Find & Replace, changes to text in a selection, a page, or a document is a much quicker process. This not only helps speed up the quality assurance process, but you can update drawing titles, page numbers, specified building materials, and fix typos more efficiently.

As in other applications, Find & Replace can be activated with the Ctrl/Command + F shortcut and from the Text menu in LayOut.

Zoom Selection

Eliminate zoom lag with the new Zoom Selection context command adopted from SketchUp. When LayOut pages grow in detail and complexity, they can become hard to navigate with the scroll-to-zoom functionality. Now, you can jump to your desired Zoom level in a given selection in LayOut, lowering the likelihood of unwelcomed lags on zoom in or out.

Performance and Quality Improvements

Native M1 Support for SketchUp on Mac

We are now offering a universal installer that enables SketchUp Pro to run on Mac devices with the M1 hardware platform (introduced in late 2020).

The 2022 installer also supports SketchUp’s installation and operation on Mac devices that have Intel processors. This means Apple users don’t need to determine which chipset powers Mac in order to install SketchUp Pro.

Entities Builder API

Generate large amounts of geometry faster using the Ruby API with the new Entities Builder API interface. For users who generate large amounts of geometry, you’ll notice a much speedier process.

Using the existing .obj importer code in the image above, the tower with 22,000 faces imports at 389 seconds, or about six and a half minutes. With the new Entities Builder API interface, the same tower imports in under nine seconds.

Other noticeable quality improvements include Explode Performance, camera clipping, and section planes.

Listening to you helps us improve SketchUp so that our suite of products remains a vital part of your design workflow. Keep giving us feedback and share your work with us on social media.

If you’re interested in learning more about the 2022 release, check out our full release notes. As always, thanks for choosing SketchUp. If you have any questions or comments, check out our forums.

Learn more:

Explore all of the 2022 updates in new Skill Builder videos

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SketchUp 3D Warehouse: Best Features for Landscape Designers

Posted on January 31, 2022June 13, 2024 by Charlotte Lee

Your imagination is packed with stunning landscape design ideas. You’re keen to express them using the best, easiest and most fun CAD software. If you’re considering using Sketchup for landscape design, you’re in for a treat. Sketchup landscape design software is quite simply one of the best tools available for creating beautiful landscapes that look real, expressed as superbly clear 2D drawings and in hyper-realistic 3D. No wonder Sketchup landscape design is such a popular choice with the world’s professional landscape designers. Read on to find out how the software’s landscape 3D warehouse supports the very best in exterior design, whatever your project.

Using Sketchup for Landscape Design

Is Sketchup good for landscape design? Yes, it’s an excellent tool for landscape design, helping designers bring their ideas to impressive life thanks to 2D drawings that are easy and enjoyable to achieve, and supporting creativity perfectly. Sketchup is widely used by landscape and garden design professionals across the globe. It comes with exceptional 3D modelling capabilities to help convince your clients to approve your design and inspire them to sign on the dotted line.

There’s a businesslike, logical and brilliantly streamlined workflow that takes you smoothly from the concept drawing stage to the site plan – including planting plans – with ease. And you can easily cater for practical essentials like site surveys and construction detailing.

The Sketchup 3D Warehouse is one of the most popular added benefits of the software. It is crammed with all sorts of valuable elements for landscape design, from trees to flower pots, garden benches to outdoor lighting and the plants themselves, plus a series of seriously handy extensions or plugins.

Sketchup Landscape Design - 3D Warehouse

The landscape design 3d warehouse in Sketchup is free to use. It provides an enormous choice of ready-made 3D models for you to use in your designs, saving a great deal of time and therefore saving money. The collection includes all the landscape design essentials you can imagine, with all manner of outdoor furniture in every imaginable style and material, plus garden plants of every type, including evergreen and deciduous, flowering plants, annuals and perennials.

Landscape plants are always useful in your line of work, and Sketchup 3d warehouse landscape collection contains an inspiring variety of greenery, all available for instant download and very easy to use. Terrains are another great resource, again ready for download and include grass of every kind and length, scatter rocks, gravel and aggregates, steps, hedges, even remarkably realistic forest floors.

If you need water, it’s catered for as well. Sketchup pro landscape design provides 3D ponds and rivers, streams and lakes, water textures and water features sets, water effects and more, all yours with a few clicks of a mouse. Plus lawns and lawn chairs, bricks and stones, patios and garden umbrellas, garden gates and garden walls, even realistic sleeping cats to add personality, life and fun to your landscape designs.

Sketchup Landscape Design - Extensions

Sketchup is loved for its many cool Extensions. So what do Sketchup Extensions do? They’re much the same as plugins, designed to support even better landscape design by providing more functionality, short cuts, and specific ways to design certain elements. All this boosts your landscape design potential as well as saving time, money, and hassle. Here are a few of the most popular Sketchup extensions for landscape designers.

The Artisan Organic Toolset is a powerful collection of organic modelling tools that supports excellence in creating terrain, rocks, tree trunks, plants, furniture, sculptures, fabric and more. It offers great subdivision, sculpting, and soft selection.

The Simplify Contours Tool reduces the number of contour segments, importing contour line drawings you’ve made in other CAD apps. Sketchup often converts polyspline contours into polylines with multiple straight line segments. The tool cuts them down, making the file smaller and therefore easier to work with.

Sketch3D allows you to make super-easy transitions from 2D to 3D, perfect for landscape designers and a top short cut. Instant Road creates roads, pathways and waterways automatically on terrain.

MODELUR for Urban Design helps you create and test different urban design alternatives fast, with real-time calculation of urban parameters like the number of flowerbeds, parking spaces and so on. Its interactive 3D Zoning warns you when your design doesn’t meet zoning regulations, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It boosts productivity, helps you make great decisions, and allows you to iterate and evaluate different designs quickly and effectively.

This is just a small number of examples. Every Sketchup extension is designed to help you do more, do it faster, and do it better, and there are hundreds to choose from.

Sketchup Features for Landscape Designers

Now you know how to enhance your Sketchup landscape model life using the top class resources provided by the software. With Sketchup, landscape architecture design is a dream. As well as a warehouse jammed with handy 3D items there’s a wealth of powerful training and learning resources and tutorials on every imaginable subject plus numerous useful YouTube videos to study.

Would you like to give Sketchup a test-drive and discover the magic for yourself? We’re delighted to offer you a free 7 day trial of Sketchup Pro, making Sketchup landscape design software free to use for a limited time. You might also enjoy exploring our v-ray for Sketchup free trial and see for yourself exactly how amazing it’s hyper-real 3D rendering is. Happy exploring!

Explore Dairy Housing and Design in 3D With CowPlan

Posted on January 28, 2022June 13, 2024 by Charlotte Lee

"I started with SketchUp around 10 years ago when a builder introduced it to me as we were doing some work on our home in Bristol."

Ivor: Cow Plan

Ivor, it's over to you, take it away!

My name is Ivor Davey and I run Cow Plan Ltd (www.cowplan.com). I grew up on a mixed farm in north Cornwall, and studied an agriculture and animal science degree.

Rather than returning to the home farm, I started working with UK farmers and supplied cow housing equipment, including mattresses for cows and pillows (honestly).

I have a passion for design and animal welfare and developed a reputation for cow comfort, attention to details and pretty plans. I travelled extensively in this role throughout the UK, Europe and parts of the States.

A range of SketchUp models from Ivor’s previous projects.

In 2014 I set up CowPlan where I took on a dealership for my old company. This meant I could also offer further products for the dairy sector and offer more consultancy and advice. We offer key products to the South West UK dairy farmers. It’s a niche market and most UK dairy farmers know of me now. I’m also known as an independant milk robot specialist and love seeing technology being used increasingly in this sector.

Creating simple 3D models for clients meant Ivor could be involved in more developments.

I'm not CAD trained so I am self taught at all the 2D work we produce. This has not limited the opportunities and CowPlan now employs two CAD specialists as part of our small team.

Ivor: CowPlan

I started with SketchUp when a builder introduced it to me as we were doing some work on our home in Bristol. This was around 10 years ago. I love playing with graphics and realised how quickly I could learn this as a tool. I’m not CAD trained so I am self taught at all the 2D work we produce. This has not limited the opportunities and CowPlan now employs two CAD specialists as part of our small team.

Slowly I started using Sketchup to draw cow housing equipment, from simple brackets to basic layouts. Now this has progressed to whole farm layouts, green field sites and multi-million pound developments.

CowPlan Robot barn – 3D concept video on straw yards

Love it! How do you service your clients and new developments using SketchUp?

We offer a 3D service to most larger projects, but the project does not alway warrant this level of work. 3D can offer so much to a project, however it is not always easy for my clients to see the benefit. For example, planners find little benefit from a 3D image, over a standard 2D elevation drawing which we also produce.

The key to when Sketchup benefits seems to be when we are working with a larger team. If it is a family business with many partners involved or on some large estates where the farm manager is reporting to bosses, agents, processors and retailers or even Earls it can be significantly beneficial. We present as 3D images which are easy to export. We sometimes offer renderings, but not always.

Normally I create many scenes and produce a fly through video. I then edit to add details and music, titles and credits and share this via You-Tube or similar. We have even presented on some larger projects by exporting to VR and showing off with the VR headset.

Every model gets better, so the most recent is probably the most impressive. This is still too early for me to present to the Sketchup community but keep posted on my social media feeds and you’ll see it soon. One of the larger projects we worked on a couple of years ago was for Beckside Farm in the LakeDistrict UK. They required a new rotary milking parlour and cow cubicle shed. They are also prominent on Facebook with their local community. This was a large development, in a local community, in an area of outstanding natural beauty. The video helped them present to their community, planners and milk buyers and ensured planning was passed in 12 weeks (almost unheard of). This has been running as a new dairy for around 18 months now.

To see more of Ivor & CowPlan’s work, 3D modelling designs and renders, you can find them on social media here:

So who is Ivor?

Our brand new SketchUp top trumps give you a speedy breakdown and the 411 on everything you need to know about Ivor…

From where he calls home in the digital design space, to his secret SketchUp power, you’ll find the ins and the outs of his SketchUp Journey here…

If you want to have a personalised SketchUp top trump made for you, email us at marketing@elmtec.co.uk and let’s get the ball rolling!

Work smarter, not harder in 2023 with SketchUp Pro

Posted on January 26, 2022December 16, 2022 by Charlotte Lee

2022 is off to a great start with brand-new updates in SketchUp Pro and LayOut. The SketchUp 2022 release includes new and improved modeling tools, additional search functionality, time-saving enhancements in LayOut, and so much more. These updates will help speed up and simplify your workflows so you can stay focused on your designs.

Before we get into the release, let us introduce our newest scale figure, Niraj Poudel! Niraj joined SketchUp in 2014 and is a key figure on our customer success team. He loves helping people optimize their SketchUp workflow and is passionate about early-stage sustainable design. Niraj enjoys the outdoors, playing guitar, and finding new ways to bring a smile to his daughter’s face in his free time. Learn more about our latest scale figure.

Now that we’ve met Niraj, let’s explore the 2022 release.

SketchUp Pro (desktop)

Search in SketchUp

First introduced in SketchUp for Web, Search is now a SketchUp Pro feature that allows you to quickly find and activate native commands and installed extensions. Instead of spending valuable time trying to find or remember a tool in SketchUp, you can type in the name or workflow-related query such as ‘elevation’, ‘boolean’, or ‘chamfer’ to quickly find it.

If you’re new to SketchUp, this will help you get up to speed on the UI and toolset, allowing you to focus on your design rather than trying to find a tool. Search by name or search for what you want a tool to do in SketchUp and relevant results will appear.

For more experienced users, this will help reduce the amount of screen space devoted to toolbars. For example, instead of displaying all seven Joint Push/Pull toolbar icons, you can now search for ‘Joint Push/Pull’, and all commands associated with the extension show up.

The best way to bring Search (default shortcut: Shift +S) into your workflow is to customize the shortcut so the command is easy to find.

New and improved modeling tools

In 2022, we’re speeding up, streamlining, and enhancing workflows by introducing brand-new tools and considerable updates to older ones. You can see the details in our release notes, but here are some highlights:

Lasso Select

The Lasso Select tool allows you to draw custom selection bounds without reorienting the camera. You can also create multiple discrete selections in one click-drag operation and select entities much faster with stylus inputs.

Lasso also comes with a new default shortcut: Shift + Spacebar.

Stamp Copy

A new modifier state for the Move tool (introduced in 2021.1.2), Stamp enables you to make multiple copies of an entity, ‘stamping’ each with just a click. This tool is handy for naturally dispersing objects across a given area. For example, you can quickly place scale figures or other entourage in a landscape design. It’s also helpful in making multiple copies along one axis at irregular intervals, such as displaying crosswalks in an urban design model.

Tag Tool

Streamline model organization using Tag, a new tool that allows you to click entities or pre-selected entities to apply tags. With the Tag tool, you can speed up model organization by tagging objects directly in the modeling window, rapidly clean up unwanted tags, and improve reporting fidelity by bulk modifying the tagging of component instances.

Freehand

We made a big update to the Freehand tool. With smoother curve entities, you can create organically drawn lines and Follow Me extrusions with more natural variance.

Because Freehand’s output is smoother, the tool creates more segments. Immediately after drawing a curve, you can decrease the segmentation of the curve incrementally. SketchUp provides visual feedback with each increment. Freehand also receives axis locking input to specify a drawing plane, and it’s now possible to draw across adjacent faces on different planes.

Hot tip: freehand curves are particularly satisfying to create with a stylus.

Tangent Inference Lock

Using the new tangent inference toggles for 2-Point and 3-Point Arc tools, you can now quickly specify and lock arc tangency from an existing edge or arc. Not only is the tangent arc more predictable, but it also allows you to create curved faces in a shorter amount of time.

Scene Search

If you generate architectural visualization outputs or construction documentation, you probably create a lot of different scenes to communicate the design details. This results in having to visually scan long Scene lists with coded names. With Scene Search, a new search filter adjacent to the Scenes tab, you can now quickly identify and jump to your desired scene.

More modeling modifications

In 2021.1, we focused on improving the consistency of how modeling worked from tool to tool, specifically on our ten core tools. There are a couple of notable tool behavior changes to Tape Measure, Classifier, Position Texture, and directional inferencing tooltips in this release. Read more about these changes in our release notes.

Best CAD Software, Tools and Plugins for Garden Design

Posted on January 24, 2022June 10, 2024 by Charlotte Lee

There’s a garden design project on the cards, and you’re busy researching the most popular cad for garden design. So which garden design cad does the best job, offers the most flexibility and potential for creativity, and provides the most resources? And which has the best tools and plugins? What about tutorials and courses to support your learning curve? It can be a minefield, but we’re here to help.

Read on to find out all about the best CAD software for garden design. By the end of this article you won’t just know how to make the best choice of tools for a truly professional job done fast and well, you’ll be inspired to create stunning garden designs incorporating all sorts of wonderful green stuff. Welcome to our world!

Best Software for Garden Design

Is the best garden design cad free? It can be. There are many excellent CAD software packages that are perfect for Landscape and Garden design, and one of the most popular of all is Sketchup, an excellent tool for landscape and garden design so good it’s used by design professionals worldwide.

Sketchup lets designers like you bring their garden designs to stunning realistic life with 2D drawings and 3D modelling. It offers a superb streamlined workflow, which takes you smoothly and logically from the concept drawing stage right through to the actual, accurate site plan – including your planting plans. The software allows you to create workable site surveys and intricate construction detailing, whether you’re designing a tiny garden from scratch or remodelling a huge existing outdoor space.

SketchUp’s simple, intuitive garden cad software tools let you create and work on a totally accurate 3D model that brings your ideas to dazzling, realistic life. It’s ideal for Mac or PC, incredibly simple to use – even for beginners – and it’s powerful enough to delight professional landscapers. There’s nothing it can’t achieve.

One key factor that puts Sketchup in the ‘best’ category is how easy it is to learn and use, another is the sheer, thrilling abundance of excellent resources in the 3D warehouse, free to use. Proven software plus every extra tool and resource you could possibly need makes it a top choice.

How do Landscape Designers Use CAD

Effective landscaping involves so many different factors. It’s about creating beauty, but it’s also a highly practical matter. You’ll want to take account of everything from drainage to planting, ground preparation to installations. It really helps to be able to model your features in advance then view them in context, and Sketchup garden design cad lets you do exactly that, saving you time and money. The amazing scale models it generates are brilliant for client walk-throughs, being wholly accurate, visually attractive, and wonderfully convincing.

So what are some of the key aspects of using Sketchup CAD for garden design? Sketchup garden design cad software features a simple, intuitive way to:

Import your CAD files in various standard formats, providing all the flexibility you and your clients need.

Import surveys, plot plans and even Google earth and Google maps images to enrich the client experience and ensure every detail is carefully considered.

Create accurate site plans to truly represent your designs.

Generate excellent, highly realistic terrain and contour representations that give a clear picture of all the elements you have in mind.

Get detailed breakdowns of all the construction elements, the planting and more, pinning down exactly what’s needed to do the job in the real world.

Sketchup’s garden cad software is perfect for creating any size of design, from small planters to large scale landscapes. There are plenty of exciting and inspiring resources in the 3D warehouse for you to tap into as well. All this means Sketchup saves you time, saves you money, saves you effort, and provides marvelously engaging 3D models for convincing, successful client presentations. Last but never least, it even supports accurate and successful installation.

How to Create a Landscape in Sketchup

So how do you make a landscape in CAD? Let’s summarise the process for creating a landscape using Sketchup. It’s surprisingly straightforward:

Draw out your terrain, either using the Sandbox tools or by importing geolocated terrain.
Add your details to the terrain – the boundaries, any existing structures and planting.
Make design changes and adjustments as required

Seriously. It’s that easy. If you’d like to try it for yourself, we recommend you get started with Sketchup by downloading the free trial and having a go. It isn’t just extremely intuitive, the software’s simplicity means it’s also a lot of fun. Forget the frustration of learning a complex garden design cad, treat yourself to the Sketchup experience instead.

Sketchup Landscape Design Resources

One of the most inspiring things of all about Sketchup cad for garden design is the abundance of cool online resources for Sketchup landscape design. If you get stuck, there’s a tutorial designed to help. If you want to know exactly how to achieve a certain design element, there’s an easy-to-learn course for it. Maybe you want a particular tree. You might well find it inside the 3D Warehouse, available for instant use.

Loads of popular courses and tutorials in garden and landscape design.

The Sketchup 3D warehouse, stacked with a huge variety of 3D models for landscape designers.

Lots of free extensions and plugins, including fantastic short cuts for creating curved landscape shapes and placing plants, a fantastic free extension 3D tree maker, ways to make instant terrain, and tools to help you achieve faultless feature based terrain design.

CAD Software for Garden Design

We’ve given you a snapshot of garden design cad, free and paid-for. Next, how about visiting the Sketchup downloads area, where you can download yourself a free 7 day trial of Sketchup Pro to play with? You might also get a kick out of the v-ray for Sketchup free trial, or want to check out the many free resources and tutorials that support users so effectively.

If you’d like to ask questions, we’re always happy to answer them. In the meantime, enjoy experimenting with the planet’s best-loved garden design cad software, the garden cad software the professionals love.

What does the 2022 rendering atmosphere look like?

Posted on January 21, 2022February 09, 2024 by Charlotte Lee

V-Ray For SketchUp

V-Ray® for SketchUp is a 3D rendering software that combines real-time and photoreal rendering — all in SketchUp. From beginner to pro, Chaos® V-Ray has all the tools you need to visualize your SketchUp projects from start to finish.

See your designs in real-time.

Seeing your Sketchup designs in real-time has never been easier. Now with V-Ray Vision, you can visualize your designs in real-time while you work in SketchUp. Move around your model, apply materials, set up lights and cameras — all in a live real-time view of your scene. You can also package your V-Ray Vision result for others to experience just like you did in SketchUp.

Rendering that’s as real as it gets.

With true-to-life lights, cameras, and materials, rendering with V-Ray is as real as it gets. For any project, you can see exactly how it will look. It’s as close you can come to the real thing before it’s built.

Bring your scenes to life.

Employ our curated collection of smart assets — including high-quality models of furniture, accessories, vegetation and people — and stage your project with just a few clicks. The all-new Chaos Cosmos asset browser lets you easily drop render-ready 3D content right into your SketchUp scene.

Getting Started On Enscape

On January 19, Enscape are kicking off a new 4-part webinar series: Rendering is Like Photography. Architect, photographer, and Educator Aryan Mirfendereski will share aspects of photography that you can use to enhance the quality of your architectural visualizations. In this first session, they will look through the eye of the photographer, discuss what makes a good picture, and why images that we think are good, are actually good.

We hope you can join the enscape team! (and if you can’t, still register, and enscape send you the recording 😉).

Click here for more info!

The Chaos & Enscape 2022 Merge

We have some truly exciting news for you today!

Enscape and Chaos have announced , that they are to merge into one company.

Bringing together Enscape, a leading developer of real-time rendering and design workflow technology for the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industries, and Chaos, a world leader in photorealistic rendering technology, will establish a global leader in the 3D visualization and design workflow software sectors, with a focus on the AEC, Visual Effects (VFX) and Product Design verticals.

Together we will develop and strengthen our product portfolio to create a comprehensive end-to-end visualization ecosystem to meet the evolving needs of architects, designers, and artists from diverse industries to visualize their ideas in the best way possible — from concept to completion.

Learn more about the merger in an official press release from Enscape.

Twin Motion 2022.1

Twinmotion 2022.1 offers a host of new features that make it even easier to create and share stunning visualizations and immersive experiences for architecture, construction, urban planning, and landscape design.

Some New Key Features

Path Tracer

Create final-pixel imagery comparable to offline renderings, including compromise-free global illumination, physically correct refractions, super-sampled anti-aliasing, and much more, with the new Path Tracer.

This DXR-accelerated*, physically accurate progressive rendering mode can be easily enabled in the viewport with a single button push, or used to output stunning still images and panoramas, right from Twinmotion, in minutes. It can also be used to render orthographic plan views with shadows.

Twinmotion Cloud Early Access for all!

Share your projects with any stakeholder anywhere in the world! With just a computer, tablet, or smartphone and a web browser, users can view and interact with a presentation or panorama running on a high-end GPU in the cloud. With this release, this feature is now available to all users as part of the Early Access program, including educational licensees
and trialists.

In addition, new Panorama Sets enable you to curate specific points of view for a review, rather than providing a fully navigable scene. It’s also now easier to share links and update presentations.

Thousands of new assets

We’ve added two more categories from Quixel Megascans, bringing over 200 new 3D plant species, each with multiple variants, and over 2,000 new decals to Twinmotion. We’ve also added the ability to select which variants from each 3D plant set are used.

In addition, there are nearly 150 new interior and exterior furniture assets. Meanwhile, it’s now possible to use custom Reflectivity, Glow, Bump, and Metalness textures with both standard decals and the new Quixel Decals library.

HDRI Skydome and Skies library

Used in conjunction with the Path Tracer, the new Skydome feature enables you to create more realistic skies and lighting for convincing exterior shots. We’ve provided an extensive library of 285 skies to select from, or you can use your own custom HDRI texture.

3D Modelling Techniques For Architects

Posted on January 19, 2022December 12, 2023 by Charlotte Lee

As an architect you’re naturally interested in 3d modelling techniques, and you’ll already know how important they are. Types of 3d modelling, free 3d objects, free 3d models, they’re all on your radar. This article is for you. We’re going to dive into the best modelling software for architects like you, and explore some of the most essential modelling techniques. By the end of the article you’ll know all about Sketchup and how it’ll enrich your work as an architect in numerous exciting design and client-focused ways.

Best 3D Modelling Software for Architects

What are the most important features of 3D modelling software for architects? And what is 3d modelling used for? You’ll need to create excellent quality, photorealistic 3d renderings of your designs as well as engaging 3d design presentations to convince clients and get them on board. You will want to 3d print architectural model and achieve truly accurate modelling of structural designs.

Great project visualisation is crucial, as is the ability to clearly, accurately represent a wide variety of materials and textures in a way that the client and every other stakeholder can easily understand and appreciate. Accurate design and construction drawings are a must for the actual build, and construction parts lists are exactly what you need to specify what you actually need to get cracking on real-world construction.

Sketchup is an unusually intuitive cad programme, and there’s a brilliant free version to tap into. It saves you time thanks to being such a simple drawing tool to use, creating every aspect of 3D modelling with ease. Sketchup 3d provides stunning walkthroughs and flyovers, both central to its architecture sector functionality, and it supports better productivity in all sorts of ways. Known and loved for outputting superb 3D renderings, it’s also perfect for accurate, scaled 2D drawings.

Why Architects use Sketchup 3D Modelling Software?

So why is Sketchup always listed as one of the Best 3D Modelling Software Applications for architects?

It’s intuitive and easy to learn.

It’s enjoyable to use, designed to act as an extension of your hand so wonderful for drawing fluidly and confidently.

The drawings it outputs are remarkably realistic and lifelike.

You can render surfaces in a wealth of styles.

It integrates beautifully with 3rd party software and plugins.

It saves time.

It supports creativity.

Clients are invariably blown away by the engaging walkthroughs and exciting flyovers.

It will deliver scaled, accurate 2D drawings as well as 3D renderings.

You can place your design in the real landscape, on the actual site, thanks to integration with Google Earth.

The Sketchup Warehouse provides many pre-designed free 3d models for you to use as you wish, saving time and hassle.

3D Modelling Techniques for Architects

How is 3d modelling used in architecture? All architects use 3D modelling to represent their designs. It’s no surprise when the power of 3D modelling is so clear in an architecture context. There is no better way than hyper-real 3D to help clients and other stakeholders visualise architectural designs. There are many different types of 3D modelling. Here are some of the most important 3d modelling types for architectural designers.

Wireframe Modelling

The first method of how to model 3d is wireframe modelling, sometimes also called edge modelling. It involves making an abstract edge or ‘skeletal’ representation of the real-world object created using lines and curves. The process involves outlining a three-dimensional object then filling the space between the lines with polygons. This is the fastest and most simple way to create great 3D visualisations, and this type of 3D modelling capability is readily available from Sketchup.

3D CAD Modelling

How to make 3d visualisation via 3D CAD Modeling? It involves first creating a virtual reality object with all the same properties as an actual physical object. It features the right material, it’s the correct weight and size, with the same optical properties, physical properties, and everything else. It outputs a virtual model of the way the object will behave in the real world, without the need to actually build it. Architects use 3D CAD modelling to design structures and adjust materials, textures, colours and features as projects develop and again, Sketchup admirably supports all of these requirements.

BIM Modelling

BIM simply means Building Information Model. BIM modelling provides a digital representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a project. While Sketchup is not a BIM tool, it does include a number of BIM features and also provides a BIM library and Sketchup extension warehouse, where you can download and import free Sketchup objects to play with.

3D Interior Modelling

The outside of a building is interesting, but it’s the interior that really gets clients’ hearts beating faster. This means the interior representations of your design, being the most engaging to clients, are also some of the most important aspects. And that’s why interior modelling is so important to the architecture sector. Sketchup’s 3D design features and walkthrough renderings make interior designs highly engaging, convincing, and attractive.

3D CGI Rendering

As you can imagine, stunningly genuine-looking photorealistic 3d renderings are the ultimate tool for client and stakeholder presentations. It’s good to know they can be readily created in Sketchup thanks to the popular animations feature. It lets you create an animation by making scenes of your model, each with different settings. Once you’re ready to animate, there are three easy ways to create your animation. It’s a handy capability in an architectural design context for design evaluation as well as design adjustments and client presentations.

3D Modelling for Architects

It’s exciting stuff. Can you see how Sketchup can improve your design process, speed it up, add more flexibility, make it more enjoyable, and create output your clients will appreciate even more? You might want to inspire yourself even further by downloading our generous free 7 day trial of SketchUp Pro, the all-singing, all-dancing version. And you’re going to love the v-ray for Sketchup free trial, revealing the sheer magic of stunning 3D rendering.

You could even check out the huge collection of Sketchup learning resources including tutorials and video content designed to help you know how to do 3d modelling. And here’s a link to the 3D warehouse. Inspired? Good!