SketchUp!
I just heard about SketchUp this week through this Cool Tools post, and immediately jumped into my free 8-hour trial (only used about 20 minutes so far). This thing is so fun for quickly mocking up architecture. You can just draw a rectangle and pull it up, draw a door and push it in, same for windows. It has real-time shadowing and time-of-day sunlighting, tabbed views with different settings for comparing different versions of things. You can very rapidly snap anything to anything, after first optionally constraining directions, so you can make a new window the length of an old one instantly, or pull a bannister down to the height of the counter across the hall without even thinking. You can copy a window that cuts a hole in a building, paste it, and every surface you drag it on it orients itself to and recreates the cut operation. And on and on. I love it. Wish I had $500 to toss away, but I don't have any commercial work that needs it. $500 is a lot for just playing around sometimes. I did get a free SketchUp sketchbook, which is a top spiral-bound set of pages that look like napkins - the credo of SketchUp - to be as easy as designing on a cocktail napkin. I also got some free logo socks (you can see the guy holding a pair)!
SketchUp!
I just heard about SketchUp this week through this Cool Tools post, and immediately jumped into my free 8-hour trial (only used about 20 minutes so far). This thing is so fun for quickly mocking up architecture. You can just draw a rectangle and pull it up, draw a door and push it in, same for windows. It has real-time shadowing and time-of-day sunlighting, tabbed views with different settings for comparing different versions of things. You can very rapidly snap anything to anything, after first optionally constraining directions, so you can make a new window the length of an old one instantly, or pull a bannister down to the height of the counter across the hall without even thinking. You can copy a window that cuts a hole in a building, paste it, and every surface you drag it on it orients itself to and recreates the cut operation. And on and on. I love it. Wish I had $500 to toss away, but I don't have any commercial work that needs it. $500 is a lot for just playing around sometimes. I did get a free SketchUp sketchbook, which is a top spiral-bound set of pages that look like napkins - the credo of SketchUp - to be as easy as designing on a cocktail napkin. I also got some free logo socks (you can see the guy holding a pair)!