Yes, as I've had to deal with importing designs from art departments
that were designed in it. A big problem you are likely to encounter if
you use it is that it creates the poly faces of the geometry come across
pointing in somewhat arbitrary directions. This seems to be because
SketchUp draws all faces as two-sided anyway, so they don't care about
having the polygon faces be continuous across edges. Makes for lots of
clean up in XSI (or crashing in Maya, apparently). The good news is
that the .xsi export built into it works pretty well. Though, there's
no way to import.
When I first started playing with it, I got all excited because you can
just slap doors on walls and stuff. But ultimately, it's just not all
it's cracked up to be. You'd be better off just cutting a hole for a
door and importing a door model in XSI. Or developing a door tool that
does this for you somehow. Because it's just not worth the headache if
your eventual goal is to manipulate the stuff in XSI or Maya or
whatever. If you just want to quickly do some cad work, it works okay.
I haven't played around with it enough, but I was having some trouble
figuring out how to make numerical translations to components. Like if
I want to make sure a wall is exactly 10 feet tall or something. All I
could figure out was how to guess at it, then measure.
All in all, it's mostly just a nice toy for the masses, and a sort of
sketch-pad for designers. Like a 3-dimensional piece of notebook paper.
-Andy
Takayuki Honda wrote:
Anybody played around with this?
http://sketchup.google.com/
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