Hi,

I use Sketchup for designing custom yacht interiors. This ranges from initial concepts, trim details, furniture, cabinets, build drawings and cut lists. The customers like the presentations and the crew like the views, details and exploded drawings. I like how I can focus on being productive and creative, while enjoying the process. Sometimes it feels a little like being paid to play.
If you want to see some of what I do, take a look at my website. There are quite a few pictures, some drawings and a few concepts and presentations.

Dan

I am also running sketchup 8 on 10.7.2 , but am not having any problems with rubies showing up. or functioning. I did have most of mine installed under Snow Leopard, then upgraded to Lion. Don't know if that makes any difference.
Are you installing the rubies into the user level library or into the system level one ? Mine are at the system level and I believe that they need to be.

Dan

David,

You can open the user library by clicking the Go menu then hold the option key down, it will appear about half way down the list.
To get to the system user library, double click the hard drive icon in the upper righthand corner. The library folder will show up in the finder window.

Dan

I use Sketchup regularly in my work as a freelancer/consultant in the custom yacht building industry. The uses range from initial interior concepts to construction details and construction drawings with cultists. My clients are mostly interested in results and less interested in which program or formats are involved, at least on the interior.

I think what is more important is what you bring to the table besides being able to draw. Dave is a good example, he does absolutely beautiful drawings with clear details, but more importantly, I'm sure he knows how to build what he draws. He is likely to find any problems and from his experience will find solutions that will save the builder time or maybe make a better piece because of his insight.

In my case I do drawings and details, but what I am really selling is years of experience and solutions in my industry, I just happen to use Sketchup and they accept that.

Dan

Look at this short tutorial on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzbk8kYSmfE This shows how to snap an object from one point to another point on a different object, without dragging the object to the point. They indicate that you need to hit the arrow key a second time to make it snap, at least on a mac you then need to left click the mouse. This works great when you are moving the piece on multiple axes. I have not seen this referenced anywhere else, but I probably just missed it.

Dan

Keea, press the shift key and the center button to pan.

Dan

This is a link I came across for a "A unique collection of over 175 complete books on woodworking and related topics of interest to woodworkers. The Library continues to grow, All Free, 24/7."
Most of these are late 1800's to early 1900's, there is a huge amount of information here and well worth browsing through. http://www.evenfallstudios.com/woodworks_library/woodworks_library.html
Enjoy
Dan

I've been charging $55/hr, that may include any of the following; concept sketches,overall design concepts, construction details, cutlists, , and building physical prototypes. Mostly this is for yacht interiors, but some house furniture.

Dan

Dave I agree with you on the problem of repeating grain patterns, for most wood you need long samples for them to look natural. And for them to look good each texture needs to be carefully mapped to the component. Unless you are using veneer they need to be from different boards or at least different parts of a board. If you look at the drawer faces on the Cherry cabinet in my previous post you will see what a quick and dirty job I did on that. If they were veneer they should match and if solid should not, they do neither really. The exceptions would be burls and crotches. These are normally not very big to start with and are commonly booked and butted. On the top of the credenza, if I was building it, I would use 2 wide book matched and at least 6 long, and more likely 4 wide by 8 long. This makes for small pieces, but with much burl you would be lucky to get 10" x 14" usable pieces anyway. When done it should look fairly convincing.
Here is another site that has some decent samples of panels that are about 4' long, the actual images are about 700 pixels long. http://www.oakwoodveneer.com/index.html
Look under samples. They are big enough to be useful but not perfect.
Dan

You are welcome, glad I could share this. The attached image is a book and butt matched Mahogany crotch. These, if cropped at the right places, will tile seamlessly. Just like if you have a stack of consecutive veneers to cut for a table top. If you are just book matching (most common for long pieces) you only need to crop out a book matched pair. With book and butt you need two wide and two long.
Dan

Finding wood textures that are big enough to be convincing is hard, most that you see are sample size at best. Here is my best source, and it takes some work but if you love fine wood it is fun. Go to http://www.veneeronline.com/ they are a large veneer supplier. You can look through the stock that they have on hand. It may take some poking around to find what you want. Click on "longwoods", click on a wood type. Now you should be looking at thumbnails of veneer bundles. Click on one, you should see the long pieces of veneer, click on one you like. This should bring up "the panel wizard" pick how you want the panel matched, book, slip etc. Move the green rectangle around until you are happy, on the right there are options, panel size and component width. Click build panel. If you are happy take a screen shot. You can take that into a simple image editor and adjust contrast, color, etc. Attached is a cherry cabinet render done with wood samples from here, Also there is a small Anigre panel it's about 36"
Dan

Thanks for the input guys, I appreciate it. Maybe I'll do a couple more in this vain and see how they come out.
Dan

This a table that I designed for a customer recently. As we built the boat and I got to know the owners, their likes and dislikes over several months, I designed this. The initial design had only minor tweaks and was built. They have been very happy with it. This was just one of the many details that were done specifically for this project. The way this is laid out is more for future customers and my portfolio, I kind of like the "sample board" feel. I was wondering what other woodworkers thought of the presentation. Generally I've gotten positive feed back from people. I think it gives people a bit of a feel for the design process.

Dan

Yes but mostly to define specific details more clearly. Overall I prefer to just do a nice SU drawing, often with minimal texturing. Mostly I'm trying to show the overall feeling and intent, spatial relationships etc. I have found all together to often that to much detail is often very distracting for my clients. As we proceed we will hand pick veneers and hardwoods to suit the specific customer.

One of the first things to try when programs act up in OS X is deleting the plist. They can get corrupted. When you start the program it will make a new one. Go to your user account----library ---- preferences------com.google.sketchup and send it to trash. It commonly fixes things like this. See attachment
Good luck
Dan