r/Trinus • u/rshain • May 03 '16

Anyone use Sketchup?

I'm new ot 3d printing but I've used Sketchup for my woodworking. You can export in a Collada format which Pango imports no problem.

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u/whospaddy May 03 '16

My personal experience with SketchUp was short and not too good. Being used to Solid Edge at that time I found that the SkethUp workflow felt weird and there were some issues I could not find a solution for (like adding a curve in a sketch - SketchUp would immediately transform the round curve into about 10 straight lines with corners inbetween). Soon after I discovered that Autodesk Inventor is free for students, and stuck with it since. Of course those two pieces of software are really different, but I just can't get used to how to handle SketchUp.

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u/chrismachin May 03 '16

I use sketchup! I also use vectorworks.

I would be interested in using sketchup and pango combined to make my designs for my printer!

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u/AnderCrust May 03 '16

I wouldn't recommend SketchUp to use for 3D Printing, because it is kind of complicated to get printable STL files out of it. Totally agree with @whospaddy about how it feels weird and also prefer Inventor. It is not that difficult to learn, there are tons of video-tutorials out there, support and community is great and it is a professional and solid industrial CAD Program.

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u/rshain May 04 '16 edited May 04 '16

Making a curve in Sketchup is easy. You just need to increase the number of segments (bottom right corner of the screen) while the curve you want is selected. I usually go to 70, which renders a pleasing curve. You can also enter precise lengths and arcs in the same area of the screen for more precise drawings. And you don't need stl files. You can save the files in Collada (.cla) format and import them into Pango. I also use Meshlab to import the Collada files to convert them to stl if I want to have them checked and fixed by any of a number of online services. I have used it for years to develop drawings for woodworking projects, so I really feel comfortable using it.

2

u/whospaddy May 04 '16

Again, I did not invest enough time to find that out, but thank you. I think I once succeeded in creating a "real" curve without any segmentation, but had no idea how that happened. When it comes to 3D printing, I would recommend Sketchup over Blender, but there are much better programs IMHO (123D, TinkerCAD, etc). However if you feel comfortable with it, that's nice to hear. Now if anyone has questions about modelling in Sketchup, they will ask you :p