Google Sketchup

[Chris_Elston]

As everyone has said, Sketchup is great for concepts. It's also great to check dimensional data very quickly, to see if it's possible.

I guess let me lead by example to show this off. Here are a couple of a concept sketches we made in the past seasons.

In 2010, there was a 3 inch rule, we wanted to quickly see what that meant so we used google sketchup to see a picture of what this rule looked like.

In 2011, the same with the 80 inch rule, several of us did not know if there was enough room to design a gripper, once again using sketchup to show it's gunna be ok...

In 2011, we wondered if a robot could fit between the mini-bot pole and wall and a few other things, again sketchup helped us see visually the design constraints and moved into CAD after that.

Credits: In the 2011 the field was drawn by someone else here at CD, we downloaded it and used it. Thank you who ever you are.

[scottydoh]

Originally Posted by Tetraman

I would define Sketchup as a sandbox game - whereas you are given a set of simple tools to play around with simple shapes. It's perfect for beginners and for getting quick ideas down. And there are some advanced capabilities that can be applied given time, lots of time. Give yourself enough time and you can use Sketchup the same way you could use other programs.

A Computer Aided Design program is not a sandbox game. You are not limited by the capabilities of the program, but instead by your willingness to dig deeper into Inventor and/or Solidworks and get the result you are looking for.

That's a fair answer. Thanks.