sketchup 6.0.1099

been revisiting sketchup recently after a friend of mine started using it for actual work at the office. he's a furniture/product designer so i figured it would be more useful to him than to me. My preference has always been 3ds max, though the cost of the software has forced me to look at FOSS options like blender and sketchup. i'l do a post on blender later, for now this is just about sketchup.

As far as 3d programs go, i have to say that sketchup is the first one ive come accross where i could create something within an hour of fiddling around in it. the learning curve is quite streight forward. heres some stuff i did as my early doodles.

pretty decent for a SU newbee huh?
after that i set about creating a jet...in 3dsmax, i would typically model only one side and then use the "symmetry modyfier" to automatically create the other side. well things work a little differently in SU. u first have to turn the object into a component(kindof like a "symbol" in flash) and then make an instance of it and reflect that. now any changes i make to either instance, will occur on the other instance. voila:


havnt figured out how smoothing works here... as in wether it actually creates polygons or what. but heres what you get(edges hidden)


looks like ive found something i'm going to be playing with for a while :)
next i need to figure out how to render in sketchup. any ideas?

meantime check this out, found it on youtube. work of a sketchup guru