Sketchup Newbie

[shells76]

Hi,

I'm a beginner in using sketchup (and to this forum too).. been playing with it only the last couple of weeks. To start off with, I'm an interior design student in Vancouver. I thought Autocad was tough enough, but sketchup proved me otherwise. It drove me nuts at times, not knowing where my mistake lies...

Sketchup seems to have characteristics of a woman. A function works differently whenever I switch from computer to computer (all PCs).

But I think I still want to conquer it... otherwise I'll feel very unjustified.

[Ecuadorian]

With the right learning materials, SketchUp can be a lot easier to learn than AutoCAD. And these are the very best introductory materials:
http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos.html

Start with the 28 "new to sketchup" videos:
http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos/new_to_gsu.html

Learning the basics of AutoCAD took me two months; learning the basics of SketchUp took me a day.

[Gaieus]

Hi Jasemine an welcome.

Although - unlike for Miguel - it took me a bit longer than a day to get the basics of SU but once you get it, it is going to be very easy to advance. There are also a couple of tutorials already uploaded on our front page, have a look.

[Ecuadorian]

Didn't mean to sound snobbish, just wanted to point out how good those videos are. Those videos were added in August 2007, so those who started to use SketchUp before that, had to make do with traditional text-and-still-images guides.

I forgot to mention that it was a full 24-hour day in front of the PC watching those 28 videos and making the exercises (well, I did sleep a little), and that I had played with SketchUp in the past but never took it seriously (just random push-pulling).

Motivation is of paramount importance: I was force-feeded long lists of AutoCAD commands in college ten years ago, and I never liked the program, whereas with SketchUp I really wanted to learn it as soon as possible to use it in a project that was difficult to do in other software. Youtube is the new classroom!

[Gaieus]

Obviously I didn't mean that you're snobbish or anything and I can understand it was more like a "metaphor".
Indeed however I started to play around first - instead of watching videos or even reading the manual - and only started to look for information when I'd already reached my limits in finding out things on my own.

BUT I can say that SU had been fun (and quite easy to discover) even to that point otherwise I'd've probably dropped it.

So Jasmine, if you learn a couple of basic ideas and rules (how NOT to screw your models), it will be fun and easy to learn SU and become proficient in what you want to achieve.