*** Sketch-up & my PDC project - Instruction/Help needed! Can pay you for your time ***

I'm usually computer savvy but SketchUp is killing me. I can't seems to get anything done and I'm tired of wasting my time. I need to get my design done so I can get my certificate.

If you have a solid understanding of SketchUp & Slicer (just a plugin that does contours) and are good at explaining, contact me. Hopefully you can help me through the steep part of the learning curve and I can get'er done.

Going to try Yardmap, maybe that'll work out. Let me know though if you could help, I'll touch base either way.

Thanks

I know a pretty simple way to make contours in sketch up. It sounds difficult but once you do it once it is actually quite simple.

If you still need to get this done let me know and I can walk you through the process. Alternatively send me your address and I can send you the file with contours.

Thanks Zach! I think the problem is I don't know the first thing about Sketchup... If you could put contour lines on this badboy, I'd really appreciate it

https://www.google.ca/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d1009!2d-79.013418!3d43.9363678!2m1!1e3&fid=7

The property is bordered by trees

Thank you

just perusing through, wondering what sketch up was. it sounds like a computer design program, if so, is it open source? and is there an open source one out there?

SketchUp is Google's free downloadable CAD-ish 3-D design program. Don't think it's open-source, just free. It is pretty easy to use if you have any 3-D design experience, but it could be tricky to get started without experience. And if you have Solid Works/Pro-E 3-D design experience, it will be painful to use.

sweet. i thought open source and free were synonymous. either way, cool. ill look into it.

Maybe they are... I thought open source meant anybody can alter the source code for the software, so it will do whatever they want it to do. I don't know if the source code is available for SketchUp.

@Zach,

Can you point us to any solid resources for using Sketchup for Permie design? I'm about to start a PDC and I've been considering using sketchup as my graphics tool, but I've yet to find any good instructions online for tying a sketch into actual physical elements (solar orientation, contours, etc...). Most of what I've found is great for creating a hypothetical design, but ignores real world geographic placement.

Just to clarify a couple things from above:

Free just means no cost, open source means you can get and modify the source code. Just because something's free, doesn't mean it's open source.

Sketchup was originally released in 2000 by @Last Software, which was aquired by Google in 2007, and then a company called Trimble bought it from Google about a year ago. There's a free version, and a pro version that costs money.

You can find out more about Sketchup it here http://www.sketchup.com, and there's some info about using it for landscape design here http://www.sketchup.com/3Dfor/landscape-architecture

To follow up on Darren's post. The only difference between the free version and the pro version is the ability to import and export certain file types like DWG's and other CAD or 3D modeling file types (unless they changed something in the latest version).

Sketchup is fairly intuitive and reasonably robust for what it is. If you are looking to for info on how to use certain tools there is a ton of tutorials on youtube and other sites as well.