Hi Sketchucation,
I intend to do a more detailed post on here when I can about how I used Sketchup for the initial designs for Packed Pixels, but as I'm sure you'll understand my focus at the moment is on our Kickstart campaign.
In brief though my history with 3D goes way back to cutting my teeth on POV Ray (anyone remember that?) and even writing my own basic 3D renderer on an Acorn Archimedes. I later did some professional work on 3D Studio (the DOS based pre-Max version) doing various bits and bobs including modelling a full leisure centre. The switch to 3DS Max was very welcome when that was released!
I don't remember now when I first discovered Sketchup but it was many years ago now. I do remember instantly falling in love with it. The fact it seemed to read my mind as to which axis I wanted a line to be drawn in was just awesome.
Over the years I have used Sketchup for all sorts of things. I have the property I'm renovating fully modelled on it with very precise measurements. This has been great for planning out the fine detail of each room we get to so we know exactly what we are doing.
I have also designed various pieces of furniture on Sketchup which I have then made. This then led onto a major project I did a few years ago where I designed my own CNC router from scratch on Sketchup, right down to nuts and bolts level. This I then built with the designs for custom parts taken straight out of Sketchup and sent for manufacture.
The combination of Sketchup and my own large format CNC machine (it takes 8'x'4 sheet material) has been fantastic. All sorts of things have been made; 3D carved door signs and headboards, curvaceous desk, coffee tables, etc. At one point I was even making weaving looms for my mum and her friends.
About 2 years ago we started development of Packed Pixels after many years of being frustrated in our professional lives with not having enough screen real-estate when out on client sites. We looked around at the existing portable monitor solutions and found them all to have drawbacks and so set about designing our own.
My experience with Sketchup made it the natural choice of package and the initial designs came together. We then reached a point where we needed to make a physical prototype. I personally had always fancied a 3D printer but given we were so busy it seemed that another gadget to learn was a step too far so we sent out the designs to three 3D print houses for quotes. When the quotes came back in we quickly realised that it would only take between 2 and 3 prototype runs to make buying our own 3D printer the cheaper option. So after looking at the options we went for for second hand (hardly used) BFB 3D Touch. At the time Makerbot only had the single model and it didn't have a big enough print area for Packed Pixels whereas the 3D Touch has a pretty huge print area.
As with the CNC machine the combination of Sketchup and a 3D printer has been great. Not only have we been through several iterations of design with Packed Pixels we've used it to produce all sorts of natty little solutions to problems around the office and home.
Once we got Packed Pixels to a point where we were happy with the case design we started talking to injection moulding companies and we quickly found that we had reached Sketchup's limits. Because Sketchup is a polygon based system it doesn't do curves and instead splits curves up into small lines. You can get away with this in 3D printing because the resolution of 3D printers at the moment is worse than Sketchup's resolution. The same can't be said for the high precision CNC machines which cut the injection moulding tooling. There is also the issue that the software used by tooling manufacturers expect IGES files. It was at this point we had to move Packed Pixels away from Sketchup and we moved to Autodesk's Fusion 360 product. This was primarily on cost grounds as it was in Beta at the time and therefore free! It is still very much a product in active development and so there have been frustrating crashes but these happen less and less and the new features they keep adding are great. BUT, it still lakes the utter ease of Sketchup.
The story of Sketchup and Packed Pixels doesn't end there though as we reached a point where we needed renderings of Packed Pixels and we found Fusion 360's built in render tools had some limitations we could work around easily and so we exported our designs back to Sketchup and played around with the various rendering plugins. In the end we found ArtVPS' excellent Shaderlight product to be the best balance of power and ease of use. You can see the results at http://www.packedpixels.com
If you like what you see please take a look at our Kickstarter campaign here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/753230753/packed-pixels-an-extra-monitor-for-your-laptop-0
I run two of our prototypes and while doing the renderings it was very useful to have the Shaderlight preview on the left Packed Pixels, the main Sketchup window on my laptop screen and all my Sketchup tool bars on the right Packed Pixels.
Cheers,
Matt Relf