I am absolutely clueless and useless at sketchup...i have no idea what im doing... any help will b highly appreciated
go onto the sketchup website and there are tutorials around there somewhere and also if you just play around with it and not try to get anything specific it will allow you to get more used to the tools and how it works
Start with making a box. Work off of one axis (red, blue, or green) and then expand from there. That's how I learned, THEN found the tutorial website. Just make flat 1 dimensional shapes and build off of that. It's EXTREMELY easy once you learn the tools - that's the only hard part about it.
I personally prefer Pro/E, to me it's a more intuitive way of modeling; maybe it's just cause I'm an engineer.
Have to agree even though i've only used Pro/D but from what i've heard they're pretty much the same with Pro/E being a bi more advanced in some areas. Now if only i could get my Pro/D to work in vista i'd be a happy bunny.
I don't think there are many ways really more intuitive than Sketchup, so long as you can get past the idea of traditional CAD. The moment I stopped trying to treat it as such and then started acting as if it was something more like a digital drafting table, it became a LOT easier to use. Anyways - my suggestion is to watch the video tutorials, and treat it as a drawing program (which is what it really is) vs CAD. If you want a box, then draw a square with the rectangle tool and then use push/pull to give it height. Once you get the hang of it, you can do pretty complex stuff (I'd show you an example, but it's under NDA and I'd rather not get fired for it). The only real caveat, if you ask me, is that it doesn't really want to treat anything as solid - just closed-off hollow.
It appears that Pro/D is no longer supported by PTC; most likely they've integrated all it's features into Pro/E Wildfire. Pro/E isn't a traditional CAD program; but rather a solids modeling package; and is the easiest 3D drawing program I've used.
I know Pro/D isn't supported anymore but i still have a copy of it on a CD from school and it would be nice to get it to work on the good PC that has more ram and another core than my xp lappy. And Pro/E was the big brother of Pro/D, had basically the same method of operation but more extra features. Still, Prod is amazingly powerful once you get your head around some of its idiosyncrasies.
