Lawand's Blog

The other day, while I was going through the great software directory FileHippo, I found Google SketchUp, a free tool to create 3D models made by Google.

Although mainly intended for architects, SketchUp also does a good job for game designers who doesn’t want to spend tons of cash on tools such as 3ds Max or Maya or the such.

SketchUp In Windows Vista

Features

After testing it I found that it’s fun and light-weight in that it doesn’t include tons of options that might confuse newbies, whereas it focuses on the important-basic stuff such as accessibility which is accomplished through simple and intuitive ideas, like:

• Dividing the 3D space into two parts, one that looks like sky and one like ground, so that when you’re looking at an object from the bottom of it, the background is the sky, and vice versa.
• Drawing the negative parts of the 3 axes as dots instead of a solid line.
• Putting a 2D image of a person in the origin of the coordinates, to give an idea of the actual dimensions of a model (such as a building).
• Enhancing control of the view through multiple tools like the Look and Walk.^[1]

To see a list of great feature, click here.

File formats

SketchUp gives the ability to either save the model as a .skp files (SketchUp Model), or export to a .kmz (a Google Earth-friendly format which actually is a .zip file containing a .dae file and some other info), and it can export to other formats, but that’s a feature of the PRO version.

Of course that almost renders it useless, but there’s is a work around for that which I found in a forum thread:^[2]

1. Export your model to a .kmz file (such as filename.kmz).
2. Change the name of your file from filename.kmz to filename.zip ( click here if you don’t see file extension in Windows (2000 or XP or Vista) ).
3. Extract the filename.zip to find the .dae file.
4. Using this free tool, convert your .dae file to a .fbx file then from a .fbx file to popular formats such as 3ds.

Note that this method doesn’t work all the time, but there other (more reliable) methods found at the same thread.^[2]

I wouldn’t have went further in learning and using SketchUp if workarounds didn’t exist, because I intended to load .3ds file into an OpenGL-based project (not exactly doing this out of hobby) besides, the 3ds format has much more compatibility due to the popularity of 3ds Max.

Template models

Downloadable Pre-designed can be found at Google 3D Warehouse, a repository of models created in SketchUp.

Interested?

DOWNLOAD the latest version of Google SketchUp and give it a try.

Bottom line

I always liked 3D models and 3D graphics because I feel that it unleashes imagination and creativity, of course with enough accessibility, so that things won’t be hard and frustrating.

And I find 3D modeling to be more of a hobby that a profession, and free tools (such as SketchUp or Blender) provide an easy way for hobbyists to play.

I hope to find time to work further on 3D design and animation in summer.

there are a lot of ideas to talk about here, but I just wanted to give an introduction to starters and give a path for anyone interested enough, to follow.

References

1. What makes SketchUp great? (Google)
2. Converting Sketchup Models to 3DS (DevShed)