More on 3D - how easy is it.

A couple of people have asked how easy it is to do the 3d drawings of the inside of the boat. Well all I can say is that I downloaded the Sketchup software the other day, spent a few minutes reading some of the tutorial and started drawing. You don't have to worry at all about perspective or angle of view because the software does all that.

The internal plan of Herbie I showed yesterday took an afternoon to do. It does take a little while to get your head round which plane you are in when you are drawing a line, but the system helps you by colouring the line red blue or green as you pull it. You do have to resort to the undo button quite regularly when you get things wrong. Most things go really easily but the odd feature can require some patience and ingenuity.

Rectangles pull into blocks easily, circles pull into cylinders easily and so on. Colours and textures you just click from a menu. Look at this sink. Everything is a cylinder or a cuboid and I just picked an aluminium finish off a menu. I suppose it took three or four minutes.

The really hard bit is manoeuvring into tight spaces to draw underneath things or in corners- you keep ending up the other side of the wall! Doing much detail in the boat corridor is not worth the bother.

What I am looking forward to having a go at is modelling up a new galley table arrangement because I don't like our existing one. I believe when the boat was first built that it had a single dinette there, but the previous owners stripped it out. It would have looked something like this and convert into a single bed. I fancy restoring it, but I'd have a lot of measuring to do first as space is tight.