Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

3 Jan 2002

 

Award-winning 3D architecture modeler coming to Mac OS X!

Tom Wyman of SketchUp contact us about their award-winning 3D design modeling software for architects and related design professionals. SketchUp was created for designers to quickly create and modify 3D designs. Tom comments:

We have had so many Mac users bug us about a Mac port that we decided to do it. Brian Makare, our President, and myself will be at Macworld in SF next Monday and Tuesday.

SketchUp Features

SketchUp is a "sketch-based" 3D design tool for the computer, enabling quick and easy 3D design modeling. The product was a 2001 Cadence editor awards winner and has garnered much attention in the trade press.

SketchUp has a unique 3D interface and way of drawing in 3D wherein the user draws the edges of the desired 3D object or space utilizing inferencing capabilities that are built into the cursor control. This technique enables the user to draw in 3D quite easily. A Push/Pull technology allows the user to simply create a shape in iso view and push it or pull a desired distance. The program supports boolean addition and subtractions and has Autocad DWG import/export compatibility. SketchUp allow supports animation capabilities. A summary of the features can be found here.

Currently SketchUp is available just for Windows users but as stated above so many Mac users have made request for this software that they will be coming out with a native Mac version shortly.

A Windows-based demo is available for download.

Architosh Analysis: We are happy to see that some developers are quite responsive to Mac users asking for native versions of their software. Clearly this is not always the case, but then again Mac users are used to having access to much of the best 3D software being that so much of it started out on the Mac platform anyway. Form-Z and ArchiCAD are excellent examples of this legacy. So it is wonderful to see a great product not born on the Mac platform respond so well to the smaller Mac minority in the architecture field. We hope that the SketchUp folks start a trend in this regard.

SketchUp has really taken the industry by storm and having seen the demo in action we can understand why. The product will not compete with the likes of Form-Z or 3D Studio Max in the architecture space, much less high powered tools like LightWave, Cinema4D or EI Universe, but it fills a niche area as an affordable designer's modeling tool and should become very popular in schools are well.

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