The Woodworking in America conference is an opportunity to indulge in sensory overload, and for the third year in a row, I’ll be doing my part to keep your head spinning by teaching two different sessions on using our favorite design and planning tool, Google SketchUp. On Friday morning at 9:30 and Sunday morning at … Read more
One of the secrets of working effectively in SketchUp is keeping control of all the bits and pieces in your model. The more they look (and act) like individual hunks of wood, the closer modeling is to playing around in the shop. My thinking is that every object that would be an individual piece in … Read more
I will be at the Atlanta Woodcraft store teaching a three-day weekend class on using SketchUp, Friday July 15 through Sunday July 18. There are a couple of seats available if you want to join me in learning how to use the software that we use here at Popular Woodworking Magazine for planning our projects. … Read more
Since the recent upgrade to our website, we’ve been working away at improving the section of our site devoted to using Google SketchUp. It has been a big job, and the reason for that is the depth and breadth of what we have online-more than 200 SketchUp models that are available for free, and many … Read more
We use SketchUp models as the basis for planning the projects you see in the pages of Popular Woodworking Magazine, and they are the source for our printed illustrations. We add scenes and layers to basic models to get snapshots of different points of view. We copy pieces and parts to add dimensions, and sometimes … Read more
As we do with every new issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, we’ve added free SketchUp models of projects to our collection. This group of models is a great example of how you can use SketchUp as a tool for building. If you download SketchUp and install it on your computer, you can gather tons of … Read more
This post in response to a question from reader Doug Smith about making bracket feet, as seen in the model of the American Cabinet in our 3D Warehouse Collection. SketchUp is extremely fast when you’re making rectangular shapes, but curves can slow you down. Objects that curve in two directions are even more complex, and … Read more
