Italked to my son, Josh, the other day and he asked what am I doing with my time? I'm sure he was anticipating hearing about resumes and cover letters and job ads and all that sort of thing.
Which always reminds me of (whispering softly) 'ketchup' when I say it in my mind, but Google's SketchUp is a wonderful, 3D modeling software available online ... (here's the best part) for FREE!
So, here's the rest of the story.
My daughter, Lina, is thinking about building a deck in her backyard. She asked S and I to put some thought to designing a deck for her (and her live-in sweetie, Ron). Being a former designer and a visually-oriented person, I first did a rendering in Photoshop:
Well, then S suggested just HALF of a pergola, so I tried this:
I wasn't very happy with the appearance of this rendering (even after a couple of tries) and concerned that I really had the scale OFF. I downloaded Google SketchUp (hearing ketchup) and began to play with it. Pretty soon, I had this:
That's BETTER! This is a 12' x 20' deck with a pergola over half of it. I also exported a .png file out of SketchUp (hearing ketchup) and into Photoshop where I added the amateur-ish grass and the fuzzy impressions of the modest fencing surrounding Lina's backyard.
I showed it to S. She laughingly responded, "It looks like a houseboat! That's not right. Try something else. How about in the middle?"
(heavy sigh) Okay, I responded. Well, not really. I LOVE design challenges!
So, then I went to town yesterday in SketchUp (hearing ketchup). I completely redrew the model, using groups instead of individual entities, made new posts, moved the pergola over the center, created a rough-but-passable porch swing and basically had some fun while adding to my proficiency:
I was pleased with my learning curve in SketchUp but the deck and pergola design is not done. It's a HALF-BAKED CAKE at this point.
More to come, folks! But I'm really enjoying designing in SketchUp (hearing ketchup).
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