[Oa] Google Sketchup

[Andrew Crawford]

Eric Broekhuis wrote:
> I usually us Sketch-up to do the design and create the actual patterns
> in a cad program. I do cad drafting for a living, so it is is much
> faster for me to make the patterns in cad. but It could be done in
> Sketch up. For doing buildings I start with a model from the 3d
> warehouse. A lot of the models come with actual photos of the building
> mapped to the faces. Then I save the top and front views as images and
> import them into my cad program to trace. It makes it easy to get the
> right offsets and window locations. You can also build the model in
> Sketchup from a photograph. There are plenty of tutorials on how to this
> online. I will get some photos of my work posted soon. I'll also get
> some screen shots from my sketch up models. Any recomendations of good
> photo sharing sites would be helpfull?
> 
> Eric

That sounds like a good approach.

I typically develop my patterns in a vector graphics program (like Corel
Draw, Adobe Illustrator or, the open source Inkscape) rather than a CAD
application.  I can see where CAD would work great for that, though.

As for photo sharing sites, I think Flickr is one of the most popular
and, is in widespread use by a lot of paper artists:

http://www.flickr.com

I haven't used it a lot myself but, the basic service is free.

Andrew Crawford