sketch up

[tgm]

I tend to agree with Michael, for presentations and design ideas nothing is quicker than SU once you have some good practice under your belt. The renderings you can produce when using one of the free renderers is amazing.
Granted you have to master working in 3D space, which is not an easy adjustment, I can tell you, but once you start working in 3D, 2D just seems so 'plain'.

We also use it to export 3ds files directly into Aspire, from our base model and it works perfectly. Granted you need the Pro version but for the small cost it's definitely worth it. After using SU for the last 4yrs or so I wouldn't be without it, at any cost.

Every rendering we put out to our customers is unique and changes can be made on the fly very fast. watch any of the hundreds of video tutorials online and you will be amazed. There are plenty people out there that think it's some sort of 'fly by night' kids program when they start comparing it to mega programs that cost tens of thousands but SU has a very big following of professionals that turn to it everyday for presentation use because of its speed and simplicity.

Tom in PA

[jdervin]

Not sure of the truth, but the story as told to me was that a couple of AutoCAD employees came up with and pitched the idea of Sketchup to their company. Suposedly, AutoCAD wasn't interested and allowed them to sell it to Google.

Again, I have no idea if this is true, but if so, it speaks to the credibility of the Sketchup developers.

[adrianm]

Sketchup was developed and owned by a company called @Last which was doing very well with Sketchup for seven years before Google bought them out.

Not sure if the AutoCAD story is true but Brad Schell, the co-founder of @Last, actually sold his previous company to Autodesk. Joe Esch, the other co-founder, worked for them as well.

I bought my copy in 2005. At that time there was only one version and it cost me £315.

Back then @Last reminded me a lot of Vectric and ShopBot, the customer service was great and you always felt involved in the project. It lost a lot when a giant like Google got involved.

The arguments on the @Last forums when the free version turned up raged for quite a while as it was mostly used by architects at the time and they felt Google were only interested in the Google Earth capabilities above all else.

Fortunately I bought it from the start with the intention of using it for woodworking so the changes have been good for me. Especially dynamic components which are fantastic for what we do.

[c_kling]

How are you getting the .stl into artcam?

[bleeth]

Christian: This is a pretty old thread but both Adrian and John are still active on the forum. But in the meantime, Artcam Pro both imports and exports stl format, as well as others.

[jdervin]

Try any of these links and see if they give you enough information:

http://www.3dmodelclub.com/cmsj15/re...le-into-artcam

http://forum.artcam.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=19813

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/artcam...-software.html