Easel

Have you ever have a dream home? Personally I always dream a home of Japanese Architecture with the Tatami mat and the Rice Paper window. They are so serene and beautifully simple. I also always like little Zen garden around or in front of my house. The ornamental rocks and the stones pavement. There are all too perfect to be true. And all of them are just my imagination.

How about transforming imagination into something others can see too. I would recommend Google SketchUp. Downloaded for free from Google. For Serious user they also provide the paid version which is I don’t know why and I’m not interested. As for me, I just like to savor my imagination.

Here are some of the screenshot from one of my project.

The About Google SketchUp 6

Some of the menu and tools

My house in X-Ray View

In Wireframe View

Most Practical and clean View...

Parallel view instead of 3D Perspective to view Plan from above

This house is actually not really my dream house but it is kinda cool if I really can build this house for myself. I took the original idea from some light Google Images search to find a Japanese-like house. But this house is not really Japanese-like but I like it.

Back to Google SketchUp. I like this software because its simple to use and using it is just like playing game with a lot of powerful tools and limitless possibility. Even my lowly laptop can render the image fast enough not to make me annoyed. Even though sometimes it does crash but frequent “save” would save the day.

One thing that I don’t like. The keyboard short-cuts are made naively based on the Initial letter of the Tools name and not based on ergonomics (I really like what Adobe does to their products). So I would need to see the keyboard everytime I want to choose a tool. Or sometime its annoying that I feel it’s faster to just use mouse.

Overall…I like it so muct. It’s free of charge (but sadly not open source)….