Macworld San Francisco was as exciting as ever this year, with an entertaining keynote, a huge show floor, and thousands of attendees. Exhibitors showed off everything from iPod headphones to iPod radio transmitters to iPod cases.
Fortunately for the people who came to Macworld for the Macs, there were still plenty of non-iPod products on the show floor. Adobe showed off the newest version of its Creative Suite--along with Lightroom, its new competitor to Apple's Aperture. Guitar Center demonstrated tons of neat musical instruments and software packages. And Apple let visitors play around with the new MacBook Pros (or would they call them MacBooks Pro?).
My job was to traverse the show floor looking for a gem. Not just a product that has a big PR campaign associated with it, but one that does something truly original and useful. Past the rows of video games and rainbow iPod cases, I finally found my pick. So which product got my Coolness Vote this year? A neat design tool called SketchUp.
A view of a "log cabin"-themed iPod. From start to finish, sketching the model took less than 10 minutes
In the jargon of architects and graphic designers, SketchUp is a computer-aided design (or CAD) program. In other words, it lets you design three-dimensional models of houses, furniture, cars, and just about anything else you can imagine. Of course, CAD programs have been around since before the Mac itself--so what makes SketchUp different? Well, as its name suggests, you use it for sketching models, rather than building them in painstaking detail. So while you might use a program like VectorWorks or AutoCAD to put together the exact blueprints for a house, you would use SketchUp if you'd just thought of a really cool idea for an MP3 player design and wanted to see it from different angles.
Once you have an idea for a design, you simply open up SketchUp and start drawing. The program has the standard shapes you'd find in a program like Illustrator--rectangles, circles, arcs, and so on--so with a few clicks, you can put together a rough two-dimensional outline of your model. That's when the fun begins.
To turn your flat sketch into a model, you "extrude" (or "pull") a shape into three dimensions. Suddenly, your rectangle is a box, or your circle is a cylindrical Roman column. You can repeat the process, too—extruding the side of your new box, say, so the box becomes deeper. You can also "sweep"--or rotate--an object. That's the process that you'd use to turn a circle into a sphere, for example. And there are many other ways to get 3D models, including dragging around the pre-designed models of domes, trees, and people.
Once you have something in three dimensions, you can start drawing two-dimensional shapes onto the sides of your three-dimensional ones. It's a cinch to draw windows right onto the façade of a house, for example, or to draw a screen onto your new MP3 player design. And as it turns out, those new shapes are extrude-able, too. In a cool tutorial provided with the program, you actually design an entire staircase by simply drawing the steps onto a wall and then "pulling" them out into three dimensions. You really have to try it to realize how cool it is.
Another view with 2-dimensional figures added. Very easy to do with this software.
|
Related Reading Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition |
|
Still, even when you've done all the extruding, you'll have nothing but a model with white walls. Luckily, SketchUp comes with a fantastic paint bucket tool, so you can fill your model with color. Want red brick walls? SketchUp has the red-brick pattern built in, so you can just select the pattern and click on all the walls. Same goes for log-cabin patterns, environmentally themed patterns, and of course, regular solid colors. If you've used the paint bucket tool in Photoshop before, you'll feel right at home.
At this point, you can drag your object around to see how it looks from different angles. As you pan, zoom, and rotate your object, the image updates itself in real time; there's no annoying lag as the program renders a view from your new angle. Add a shadow if you want—the program calculates the shadow on the fly, even as you drag your model around at high speed!
Once you've finished playing around, you can export the model in any number of formats. If you're serious about design, you can export the model to industry-standard AutoCAD format, and then import it into a "real" CAD program for more advanced fine-tuning and rendering. Or, if you're satisfied with a regular two-dimensional picture, you can simply export the current view to an image format like TIFF or JPEG and email it to your friends or post it on a website.
Whatever you design with it, playing with SketchUp is addictive, plain and simple. Even if your designs never go into production, the program is a great way to spend a few hours (or days) playing around with concepts bouncing around in your head. Beyond just playing, though, the image-export feature of SketchUp opens up plenty of neat possibilities. You could start a blog filled with your ideas for industrial designs, for example, where each day you posted a picture of a SketchUp model you were working on. Or you could use iPhoto's new photocasting feature to share your designs automatically with co-workers, clients, students, and friends.
If you're really serious about design, though, SketchUp has one of the coolest software features you'll ever see. Hold on to your desk chair for this one: SketchUp can superimpose your models on the surface of the planet using Google Earth. (A quick aside: if you don't have Google Earth for Mac yet, download it now. Then put aside the rest of your day to play with it.)
Now, Google and friends have spent a lot of time putting pictures of every last mile of the planet's surface into Google Earth. The trouble in Google Earth, though, is that most of the world looks flat. With the exception of big cities, buildings don't actually "pop" out of the surface of the planet like they do in the real world--instead, you just see two-dimensional pictures of buildings superimposed on the three-dimensional surface of the earth.
Luckily, that's where SketchUp comes in.
With the help of a free plug-in, you can survey a location on Google Earth and load it into SketchUp. Once there, you can draw a building model right onto the surveyed site. Then you can then export your sketch back into Google Earth, where it will appear, to scale, on the surface of the planet. In other words, you can use SketchUp to re-envision the way your neighborhood looks--and then see the results in the context of your town, county, state, country, continent, and world. (Want to impress a date? Take a truly breathtaking zoom from outer space straight into the front door of a model of your dream house.)
That's not all that the Google Earth integration is good for, though. Once you draw a concept of a house or development, you can email the model—as it's shown in Google Earth—to as many people as you want, completely free. When they get the email, all they have to do is double-click on the attachment to open the model in their own copy of Google Earth. (Pranksters might get a kick out of drawing a big "X" on top of their annoying neighbors' houses, for example—and then emailing the sketch to the neighbors.)
Unfortunately for cheapskates, SketchUp is a $495 piece of software. (Luckily, teachers can get a copy for free and students can get a copy for $49 a year.) If all you want to do is see what other people have built with SketchUp, you can download a free viewer program here. But if you want to build models yourself, it's tough to justify the cost unless you're in the design business—or have a lot of spare cash. Still, you can download a free demo version of the program from www.sketchup.com, which allows saving, importing, exporting, and all other program functions for eight full hours of testing.
The only downside? Eight hours will be up before you know it.
Adam Goldstein is the author of AppleScript: The Missing Manual and also a full-time student.
Return to the Mac DevCenter
Copyright © 2009 O'Reilly Media, Inc.