SketchUp Experience

I was pleasantly surprised what I was able to achieve in this mini-project. I was off to a rocky start – I had to restart after somehow messing up the what plane the first rectangle is drawn upon – but got into the hang of things eventually. Using the tutorials given, I was able to learn the basic functions and tricks fairly easily, stoping the video after every step to make sure I had oriented myself correctly before continuing.

One of the biggest initial struggles was not knowing what the exact dimensions I was working with at the beginning. I made rough estimates based on how large were things in relation to my height, but the end project is not quite to scale. After getting the rough shape of the house down, I worked on expanding the roof and then later adding the porch, stairs, windows, and doors. The first two were certainly an exercise in expanding what I had learned to take on new challenges, but fairly rewarding when I figured it out.

I had to sacrifice pretty early a lot of the perfectionist yearnings for exact dimensions, details, and colors, for the practical matter that I was lacking information, expertise, and the paid software. I imagine that as I improve in my knowledge in SketchUp I would be able to move beyond a some of these limitiations.

My main takeaway from this project is that there are good tutorials to use, but I need to slow down and make sure I understand every step before continuing. In the past, I have had I lot of trouble learning new program because I get so easily lost. Making sure I was able to process every small thing in the tutorial before I moved on meant that I was actually learning instead of constantly trying to catch up.