What about Sketchup ?

Google acquired Sketchup in 2006 and added much function and
many newer releases over the next 6 years along with worldwide recognition.
I have heard that the latest versions are quite respectable in terms of
function. I dont really know what it is good for but what I do know
is that due to worldwide adoption, there are hundreds of thousands of
Sketchup projects in the Google Sketchup Warehouse that are
freely downloadable.

I just checked the warehouse and did search
on "boats" and there are many hundreds that can be downloaded and
studied and disected for parts usage in your own projects.
I downloaded about two dozen of the best looking boats to study the
hull shapes and how they were made and I wondered what the guys
here thought of Sketchup and what it might be good for regarding
boat design.
Here recently Google divested itself of Sketchup and supposedly under
the new smaller company stewardship and single product focus it
is supposedly going to be a powerhouse player of some sort but
I cant really define what Sketchup is relative to any other CAD 3D
product and what kinds of users/applications it is a good fit for.

It may not do anything I need it to do but you cant argue about
the worldwide acceptance or price.

I just thought I would ask here for opinions before I downloaded
and started playing with it.

 

Parametrics, Bezier curve and photo rendering in Sketchup free !

Parametrics, Bezier curve and photo rendering in Sketchup free !

I just found out about these plug-ins here
http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/download/rubyscripts.html

Bezier Rubyscript
A tool for creating Bezier curves in two or three dimensions. Once installed, "Bezier Curves" appears as an item in the Draw menu. Also a prerequisite script for 'onion_dome.rb', below.
Download 'bezier_ext.rbz' (SketchUp 8)

I also see there are many photo rendering plug-ins for the Sketchup-8
That is very encouraging as this would seem to be an awful lot of
function added to the free version.

 

I have found Sketchup to be really useful and "easy" to use for architectural drawings and simple mechanical design.

I have had no luck with their Bezier curves, and all the boatbuilding examples look like kiddie sketches.

 

Rwatson-
Are you using what I think they call the Ruby Bezier curve plug in with SU8 version?

 

The closest to a direct competitor for the free version of SketchUp is probably AutoDesk's 123D.

Scott, I assume you are interested in the free version of SketchUP. What might you use it for? I know folks who are quite enthusiastic about it for furniture design. If you are interested in designing boat hulls then for free software FreeShip or the free version of DelftShip might be a better choice.

I had missed the sale of SketchUp to Trimble, who have been a GPS company. Interesting.

 

Follow-up to my previous message. Some quick internet research showed that Trimble has been moving heavily into the construction industry side of BIM (Building Information Managagement) with other acquisitions and SketchUp, at least the professional version, will enable expansion in that market.

 

Here are five boat projects that have been recently uploaded to the Sketchup
warehouse that seem to be fairly attractive but I wont know the level of
detail achieved until I load each one into Sketchup which I just downloaded.
What I do not know is whether a project is done in the PRO version can
be re-created? using the free version.
I will have to ask some questions along those lines and also ask about
projects that were created with 3rd party plug-ins and the ability to
also re-create or redraw them as well.
The reason I selected these boats is because they all have some
apparent complex hull shapes which was more apparent as you spun
them around on an axis in the Sketchup Warehouse. These project
files are pretty small and if someone wanted to play with them
I could send the files to them or they could go to sketchup warehouse
and download the projects themselves.

 

It was a while ago, and I downloaded the Ruby plugin, and had no idea how to make it work. The instructions were useless.

The advantage of Delfship or Freeship is the ease that you can feed in offsets, and get a hull generated, that will compute the important hydrostatic data.

Its really silly to make a 'pretty picture', and then not be able to have the displacement, Longitudinal Centre of Buoyancy, Draft, and be able to assign weights to major components.

Then, you can 'unroll' developable surfaces, and get lots of really useful data.

 

Were these hulls actually designed in sketchup or were they imported from other software into sketchup?