M Clark
A hybrid going back and forth between sketchup and production cad is what I am hearing others are also doing. I have been experimenting and admit that the aditional design tool is empowering.

The times when you could do anything in Archicad in less that three hours are gone with Archicad 7 ...

... therefore SketchUp, until we get similar set of tools in Archicad (hint? wish?) is the pick of the season!

However:

I have felt compelled to do too much in it occasionally, and have to literally get up from the table, walk around the office, and then go back to it. Does well for the muscles, too 😉

The model goes to Archicad or wherever it should go after this.

The plus: intuitive, fast, conceptual, architectonic

The minus: addictive, pulls you to do more than you should (walls with thickness, dimensions, yada yada), horrible slowdown on large poly count, less than manageable handing of the curved surfaces

Still - for the quick response to an inquiry and a sketch for the initial meeting, nothing better exists!

I'm glad to see this topic come up as I am once again exploring Sketchup after having given up on previous versions.

Typically I hand sketch for early schematic design and then move to ArchiCAD sometime in mid to late schematic design. Frequently though throughout the design process I will print out a plan or view and start sketching over it by hand. I just feel that I can review ideas more quickly that way.

When working in Sketchup I like the obvious benefits of working in 3D. However since I am doing fairly complicated residences I find I almost always have problems with roofs. So when I bog down spending as much time to get three or four roofs to work as I did on the rest of the design I get frustrated and tend to give up. The other issue I have is that when designing for me it tends to be an iterative process. Move this wing, pull this room out, push that space in. When I try to do this with a fairly developed model it falls completely apart and I find myself starting from scratch which is too time consuming. I have also had very limited success with importing sketchup drawings into ArchiCAD and usually end up redrawing in it from scratch as well.

So my questions are, is this just growing pains and the roofs, etc. get better as you get more experience or do they always have problems? and, does the import work better now? and, is there really an easy way to work with iterative design or do you always have to start from scratch?

I would really like to here from Sketchup users because it seems like it should be very useful and it quite frankly is fun to use, but I never feel like it is paying off in productivity.

Pursing more information on my original query, I interviewed members of a production architecture firm I have been working with. I posed the same question to them. They are using a hybrid of Sketchup and Auto*** working back and forth and often simultaneously. Initial building model concepts in Sketchup and plans in CAD. As the building refines, the two programs are used simultaneously. Building sections are generated in sketchup and jpg images are incorporated into the print set. Seems a little convoluted but knowing when to do what in which program is what seems to be working for them.

I must admit I have been using a similar process for a while by scanning my original design sketches, and my structural engineers details and incorporating them directly into plotmaker.

I used to use SketchUp for all my modeling, then did CD in AutoCAD. Even though SketchUp could export to DWG, I usually had to redraw everything in 2D in AutoCAD, for plans & sections, & sections, & sections... That is why I started looking around and ultimately came to know & use ArchiCAD.

I still use SketchUp for some massing studies & very initial sketch ideas, but go straight into AC as early as I can. I was actually hoping that when (if) my AC skills become as second nature as I used to be with SketchUp, then I can let go of using Sketchup completely.

To answer your question, if you get over the intial frustrations and learn some inferencing - find some ruby plugins - and practice, you can get quite good in doing whatever you want in 3d pretty easily. As with any software though, you have to be disciplined, take notes, & be organized to really be efficient (look into saving components & building libraries..).

I think though, once you start to model past the massing stage in SketchUp, you will eventually have to re-do your work again if you need to document your work for someone else in a traditional drawing format, because of the fundamental differences of the 3d entities themselves between SketchUp and AC.

It should be very clear that SketchUp is, to put it mildly, dangerous beyond mass modeling! Proper documentation - although they have included a very PlotMaker like LayOut, and a separate softweare at that! - is still very far away, and it should stay there IMHO.

Some of the landscapers, swimming pool designers and furniture specialists that work as a subcontractors for us use SketchUp and submit design for approval in it - perfect, and quite enough.

Don't try to do the house in it. You can, OK, but what then?

Although the conversion to Archicad still has something to be desired, it is quite usable as it is. PROVIDED you don't go too far in SketchUp - otherwise you spend too much time cleaning the model up.

I agree. I'm a big SketchUp fan for mass modeling and for quick 3D modeling, but I seldomly load the SketchUp model into ArchiCAD. I want the Virtual Building to be correct, so I rebuild it from scratch in ArchiCAD. It's almost as fast, since I don't have to twiddle all the corners that are not correct.

I suggest to use SketchUp for 'sketching' and not for construction modeling.