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Showing posts from June, 2013

About SketchUp 2013 and the meaning of "free"

Most CAD and 3D-related websites have already gone over SketchUp 2013 by now. I'm not into repeating all of this, so this is more a personal reflection. SketchUp has become widely successful for many (valid) reasons. When I discovered SketchUp for the first time, they were at release 2 and ran by @Last software, who had lots of prior CAD experience. I remember suggesting to introduce it into our CAAD classes and we got a classroom license just a day or two before the first lesson. I quickly created some HTML overview pages and we were running. It will not come as a surprise that the software was a huge success. Reason for success: simple to use, quick modelling (push-pull!) and well-thought out graphical display styles, without jeopardising accuracy (inferences, axis locking). When Google took over, there were some hesitations, but overall the result was very positive: a free version became available, the 3D Warehouse was only in its infancy, but grew at a tremendous s