This is both a blessing and a curse in our experience – you can quickly generate drawings from your model, but you are pretty stuck with the drawings looking and working the way the software wants them to. The appeal of the larger software packages like Revit and ArchiCAD is that the documentation side of things is baked into how the software works. Well our answer to them is that you can do all of these things – but not right out of the box. You cant do construction documents, you cant do details, you can run schedules. People always say to us ‘SketchUp is fun and everything but you cant do ‘x’ with it’. So it sounds like SketchUp is the perfect solution then? Not exactly. It is also comforting to know that your subscription fees are well spent, as Trimble invest pretty heavily in updates and improvements to both SketchUp and Layout – not something that can always be said of the bigger players in the BIM software market. SketchUp is also pretty affordable, compared to the big-BIM packages, at a price that belies a surprisingly powerful and versatile piece of software. Plug-ins and extensions further extend SketchUp’s capabilities to include, scheduling, quantity take-offs, energy analysis and photo-realistic rendering meaning that this ‘silly’ little program is now capable of some pretty serious stuff. In addition to 3D modelling, however, it is now also possible to produce detailed and accurate, scaled 2D drawings using SketchUp’s sister package: Layout. It was originally intended to be the closest thing to drawing by hand, albeit in digital format – and that charm and simplicity are still evident even in its most recent incarnations. SketchUp remains easy to learn and intuitive to use. Since then, they have fervently set about revamping and retooling this little modelling package into a pretty serious BIM contender. Trimble, a large construction & engineering technology company, purchased SketchUp from Google back in 2012.

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