What's so bad about Sketchup?

[Paul Munford]

What's wrong with Sketchup anyway?


I don't use Sketchup, but many of the designers at my company do.


I get the impression that my colleagues think I am down on Sketchup because I am the CAD manager and I use a 'Proper' CAD package.


People seem to love or hate Sketchup, but I'd like to hear some objective constructive criticism from you.


What is Sketchup good for? What is it not good for? Have you managed to work Sketchup into your design to manufacture process?


Great stuff, thanks in advance for your thoughts,


Paul

[rkmcswain]

This doesn't really help you any, but nobody I know uses it.
The few times I've tried to use it, I get frustrated (because I suppose I expect it to work like AutoCAD...?) and give up.

[tedg]

I've never personally used Sketch Up, but have seen it used. It's pretty impressive what you can do with it, from what I've seen.
For instance, we had this complicated wier/dam project with a pump station we were just doing in AutoCAD. One of the engineers used sketch-up to model the retaining walls and sloped slabs (etc) just to get a feel for the geometry, it was pretty impressive. Wasn't in the budget for me to model in Revit, and this guy is pretty comfortable in sketch-up.

I'm not sure how precise it can get, but it was good for a spacial excercise. I've also seen it used in architectural rendering too.

So I think it has it's uses, but I don't think could use it for construction docuements...that's my take on it.