Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by haberman 2965 days ago
What about SketchUp? I'm very new to 3d modeling, but I've been modeling my house over the last week or so in SketchUp and it seems pretty nice.

Are 2d CAD and 3d modeling different kettles of fish?

5 comments

I know there's plugins and I don't know what the pro version is like but for instance free Sketch Up doesn't even have the ability to draw an arc from three points and while it did have two points+tangent it made some internal and opaque decision on whether it would ever snap to that tangent.
If you're making 2D things, like blueprints for a human to make something, SketchUp isn't as useful. I admit, I haven't tried it in a few years, but when I did before its fundamental purpose was almost polar opposite to my needs.
Well AutoCAD has some tools for drawing 3D but their actual 3D program is called 3D-MAX. This is derived from the old 3D-Studio program that they bought from Kinnetix years ago. Funny thing is in the shop environment 3DMAX is not used. It is the bastard child of Autodesk. Solidworks is predominately used in machine shops these days.They have a SolidCAM that works well for generating G code for CNC usage.

Autodesk also has a newer product called Revit. I have not used it.

Autocad's main customer base is the AEC industry, while 3D-MAX is used in video game and visual production. Solidworks, on the other hand, is used for modeling mechanically detailed structures - like you would produce in a machine shop.

Revit, on the other hand, is used for building information modeling. It's main domain is designing buildings.

Except for Revit and Autocad, which are somewhat interchangeable within their users' domain, none of these products really serve each others core userbase well. Hence, they are not really comparable. It's like saying Word is a bit like Excel since you can compose tables of numbers in each.

If you were to offer one to the core user of the other they would complain as much as if you were giving a steak for a vetenarian to cook.

Sketchup is intended as a 3D "sketching" tool. The post to go this through in detail would be quite long but the gist of it Sketchup does not scale very far in terms of model complexity. You can model e.g. a factory floor or a complex office building in Autocad while still being able to navigate the model. Not so much in Sketchup.
AutoCAD and Sketchup are very different. AutoCAD is vector based for starters. Zoom into a curve in Sketchup and you find that it is segmented. Solids in Sketchup are made up of triangles. In AutoCAD they can be actual solids.