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A gentlemen, not much older that I (that means elderly), wrote me this week after seeing my American Woodworker SketchUp blog. He asked me if there was a good application out there for drawing in 2D. He is an engineer like me, and also like me learned to draw in 2D on a drawing board with a T-Square and pencil. He said he didn’t want to learn 3D at his age, but wanted a good 2D package to draw furniture plans for shop drawings.
My reply was that the best 2D drawing package out there is 3D SketchUp. I promised to show him how in this week’s post. You see, if an application is a good 3D drawing tool, then using it to draw in 2D is a simple matter of restricting your view to one plane and using only its 2D tools. The plane of choice is somewhat arbitrary, but I am going to suggest the Red/Green plane. To aid in assuring the user only selects the Red/Green plane, and only has available 2D drawing tools I am going to create a custom 2D Toolbar. Whit that I can close all other toolbars. I might even write a very simple Ruby script to ensure that SketchUp opens in a 2D view of the Red/Green plane.
Again, I am going to demonstrate how to do this with a video tutorial. So butter and salt the popcorn and start the projector.
