Is Sketchup good for designing board-games?

mittalpa

Hi

Little bit of rant:

After stumbling upon Sketchup, I got so excited because everything seem to be so easy. For my Board Game, I have drawn the layout of design but now I need to add text into several sections. But..

I am finding it very difficult to work with 3D text tool. It doesn't appear to be crispy enough.
Normal text is crispy but it lacks moving/tilting abilities.
Printing or previewing seems to be tricky. This I may need to research a little bit more.

.. there may be more problems but that's always the case

Now questions:

Can we design crispy games like Monopoly in Sketchup?
All in all, I feel that I am at crossroads now. Should I continue my journey with Sketchup or jump to something else for board-game design?

Please advice with alternative tools.

Thanks

Pankaj

remus

If you want to add ext to your designs you should take a look at the textag ruby by tig, it should be lised in the ruby scripts index. Its a lot easier to use than the native SU text tools.

mittalpa

Thanks .. But where do I find it? and how do I use it?
Are there any instructional videos to use ruby in sketchup?

remus

If you go here to download it: http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=153&t=8045

Once youve doenloaded it you'll need to put it in your SU pluins folder. You should be able to find this in the SU directory.

Once you have done that (re)start SU and you should have a drop down thing called 'plugins' in the menu bar. In here you will find the button to activate any rubies you have in your plugins foder, althoguh sometims you will ahve to look in the 'tools' menu for your plugin.

Textag itself is fairly self explanatory once you get it started, the only thing is that you need to select a face before starting it up.

mittalpa

Thanks Remus. I will check it out..


I did check it out and I really liked it in terms of placing the text. 

One major limitation I can see right away that it doesn't have multi-line option. I guess the work around to that for right now would be to place multiple tags. Not sure how good that is in long term. 

If anyone has better ideas to deal multi line issue, please pitch in. Thanks
Pankaj

Anssi

SU is primarily a 3D design tool with no emphasis on typography. I would recommend for a board game designer to use some 2D illustration software, like Adobe Illustrator, FreeHand, Xara, or Corel Draw. These treat text and lines as vector graphics, so the output would always be the best the output device allows. Also a hybrid vector/raster package like Canvas might be good. With some more limitations, even Photoshop could be used.

SU 3D Text objects are converted into facetted 3D entities when entered, and the real text objects can only be placed relative to the screen, so using SU in stead of a 2D drawing package is a waste of energy, the powers of SU are elsewhere.

Anssi

Wo3Dan

@mittalpa said:

Hi
.......
Now questions:

Can we design crispy games like Monopoly in Sketchup?

All in all, I feel that I am at crossroads now. Should I continue my journey with Sketchup or jump to something else for board-game design?
.......
Pankaj

Mittalpa,

Could you upload an (a handdrawn) example to show what you want to achieve?
I think SU is excellent for designing board-games, even with text.
And you can even 'add' perspective view to all the board parts to make it look more interesting before printing/exporting.

Wo3Dan

Alan Fraser

I'm with Anssi on this. I can't imagine why anyone would want to use a 3D modelling program in preference to a 2D drawing program to design a 2D board game like Monopoly.

SU doesn't have text, for starters. It may have a Text tool, but what appears in the drawing space is not text, it's a polyline approximation of text. Specialized drawing packages like Corel or Illustrator not only keep the text smooth with bezier curves instead of straight line segments, but they also keep it editable...even after you have performed all manner of manipulations on it.

They also have gradient fills, graduated transparency, drop shadow effects, control of line width and a hundred and one other things that are totally outside the remit of a 3D modelling package. If you don't have access to a Pro drawing package, there are plenty of free ones around, like the Serif range.
http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/DrawPlus/default1.asp

The attached pic was done in seconds in Corel. You couldn't hope to get the same kind of effects in SU.

mittalpa

Thanks guys. After great deal of research and try outs, I concluded that SU is not yet there for fine designing. Its power is in quick presentations and models.

Saying that, I have not finalized the tool I will use but am glad that at least I won't spend more time with SU for this purpose. But, I will surely use SU for lot other reasons.

till then so long.. (not for long)

Pankaj

ps: Thanks Alan for pointing to new tool.