Sketchy details

Hmm.... it's been a while, hasn't it? Sorry. I've been doing creative stuff, but nothing new. And you don't want to read about me making more owly towels, do you? Of course you don't!

Well, one of the things I've been doing, which I've not written about here yet, is that I've been playing with SketchUp. And I do consider it playing; it's something I can do for fun, for hours on end, without getting bored. Some people play World of Warcraft, I draw stuff in SketchUp. It's a pretty powerful tool and I'm sure that some people do consider it work - but what a wonderful thing it would be to be paid for playing with SketchUp!

In case you're not in the know, SketchUp is a 3D modelling application. I first discovered it when I was designing the kitchen for my current home. I loved being able to visualise what the kitchen would look like when it was finished. More to the point it was very helpful for me to be able to see that the red worksurface that my parter liked the idea of so much would look amazing (rather than... um... a bit too out-there for my taste!)

Since then, I've used SketchUp for all sorts of things! I've modeled most of the furniture in our house as well as the floorplan of our house, which made life easier when re-arranging furniture (why heft 600kg of sofa around the room, breaking your back, only to find it doesn't fit where you thought it might, when you could come to the same conclusion with a few mouse clicks?) I lost many of my SketchUp models when our laptop was stolen a few years ago; I was so upset! I now save all my models on Dropbox so that at least if something happens to the computer I don't lose them.

We've been planning to move house recently and SketchUp has been a great way of getting a general idea of how we might use the space in the house we've found. For example, I was able to experiment with the idea of knocking through the kitchen to the second reception room of our new house, to create a big kitchen-diner.

Not so kitsch.

We recently bought an Art Deco hall stand at a fleamarket. We fell in love with it when we saw it and think will look beautiful in our new house. I just had to SketchUp it so that I could include it in models of the new house to see how it looks.

Love at first sight!

Sometimes I just like to model an item for fun. The Ikea catalog can be a good source of inspiration for this sort of thing because it gives some good information about the size of items.

An Ikea idea.

There are things which frustrate me about how SketchUp works. For example, it seems totally illogical to allow users of a 3D modelling tool to place guide points in a model and still have things stick to other items, rather than the specifically placed guide point, as a default. But the frustrations are small and the rewards are huge, so I try not to get too agitated when I'm struggling.

A skill I think I should develop in the near future is that of creating texture files. There is a good pool of materials in SketchUp, but I always seem to find that I want a particular kind of material which isn't available. I usually end up making do with an existing material, but it'd be liberating to be able to open a drawing application, create a texture, save it as a graphic file, import it to SketchUp and get exactly the look I wanted to achieve.