a lot of woodworkers remain reluctant to usecad software due to they didn't use to be intuitive or easy to use. i can say that onceyou take a few minutes to learn the basic functions you will end using them for allyour projects. the drawing, understanding and measurement of the plans will be muchquicker and easier. today i want to talk you about sketch up,one of the most popular 3d cad software. it is very easy to use and the free version hasalmost all an amateur woodworker can need. we can download it in sketchup.com. clickon download sketchup and select personal projects. this way you will get the free version ofsketchup, sketchup mak. and you'll be able to try the pro version for a month. selectyour profession or interest. your operating
system, agree the license and click on download. click to install it. next select the folder if you want, install. and finish. agree the end user license agreement, continueand that's it. choose the template you want to work with. i am gonna go with woodworkingand millimeters. and start using sketchup. in the make edition there are only a few thingsyou can not do, as import or export cad files,
export to pdf, print to scale, etc. you canview the complete list online here: http://help.sketchup.com/en/content/sketchup-make-and-sketchup-pro almost all the tools in sketchup are veryintuitive, so i am gonna tell you a a few important tips, that can be so useful if youare a beginner. imagine i want to make a cube of 500mm. firsti have to draw a square with the rectangle tool. click on the point you want to start,drag it keeping an eye in the dimensions box at the lower right corner; and click againto set the final point. it can be complicated sometimes to find the exact point but we caninsert the dimensions manually. so i'll type 500;500 again and press enter .to give it the height we need select the push/pull
tool and again type 500. as you can see in the entity info window,all the parts of my cube are in the layer 0. any thing you draw, do it in this layerand you'll have no problems. then, you can create a group or component and place it inthe layer you want. to convert the cube in a component or groupyou have to select it. take care with the way you select, if you click and drag fromright to left, the selection will includes all the elements that are only partially insideof the box. from left to right, it will include only elementscompletely within the box. if you want to include everything, you cando it using control+a
once it is selected, right click and “makecomponent†now i can make a new layer and place it there. take special attention ifyou are going to duplicate these components because they will keep the same propertiesof the original, so if you modify one, you'll modify them all. this can be so useful sometimesto save time. if you don't want this to happen, you can make a group instead or make the componentunique. we can make as much layers as we need, makethem visible or hide them. and we can also activate the “color by layer†option soyou can easily know to which layer belongs any component.
another interesting feature is the dimensiontool. if you don't see it with the other icons, you can find it on the tools menu or activatingthe construction toolbar. with this tool you can easily draw dimension lines between any two points in your model and move them to a layer as any other element. you may also want to activate the styles andviews tool bars, they really come in handy to quickly change the camera, activate thex-ray, and show or hide colors, solid faces and textures. we can also create scenes of our model where we can change the view and select the elements we want to show.
you can modify the settings of the scenes going to window / model info / animation. in the menu camera we can change from perspectiveto parallel projection. and finally, something a lot of you had asked,you can change the units any time you want in window/model info/units.