Need Advice!!!

chanty63

Hey I'm new to Sketch up and I was wondering what quick general advice one would give a new bee.!!!

troyhome

First of all, Welcome~
I would read this forum and look over the work people do; you can learn a ton from just cruising around here. If you have more specific questions there are member always willing to help!

Have fun here.

Alan Fraser

If you still have the Welcome screen at startup, then use it. If you have already turned it off, then it's accessible at the top of the Help menu. Check out the video tutorials in order, starting at the beginning.
You can really hone your skills by reading these forums and also find answers to some common (and not so common) aspects that the Help tutorials have omitted; but on the whole they really are very useful at giving a newcomer a quick start to the program. Don't be afraid to use the Pause button and try to follow the examples yourself as you go through each video.

dsarchs

Here -- http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?p=819231#p819231 -- is a post for bringing SketchUP models into the new crysis (game) engine. Even if you're not interested in the crysis game engine (although it has really cool potential for realistic walkthroughs) or even rendering engines in general it has some excellent advice about proper modeling technique in SketchUP. It's pretty well written and includes a bunch of clear images illustrating each concept.

The main things I would take away from it are:

How and why to pay attention to which direction faces are facing
why and when to use groups
how to apply textures and basic manipulation of these

Just to be clear, 3. General advices on modeling is the section I thought would be helpful, although the rest of the topic would be interesting/useful if you have any desire to learn how to prepare a model for most any rendering program.

unigami

@dsarchs said:

Here -- http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?p=819231#p819231 -- is a post for bringing SketchUP models into the new crysis (game) engine.

I'm glad that you posted that link...I had never seen that tutorial and I really learned a lot about texture mapping from it. It is nicely written and as you say, has lots of good visual examples. Nice recommendation.