Free 3D Graphics Packages for the Mac: Part 1

Have you seen Avatar in 3D?  Pretty cool...and the movie even had a story.  What more could you ask for?

If the movie inspired a desire to create your own 3D graphics, I have two suggestions; one easier, one harder.  Both free.  The first is Sketchup 7 from our good friends at Google.  I'll talk about the second, Blender, in a later post. Sketchup was originally conceived to be an architectural program and Google bought the start-up company to allow people to easily put buildings into Google Earth.  But Sketchup is capable of much more.  And best of all, it has a fairly intuitive interface and skads of support.  You can download Sketchup here. You want the basic version, not Sketchup 7 Pro which costs 500 bucks.

So what can you do?  Check out the pictures below (both from the Google 3D Warehouse).

Both the Eames chair and the Arc de Triomphe were built with Sketchup.  Believe or not, the Arc was probably simpler to make than the chair.  And if you like something you see in the 3D Warehouse, you can download it and modify it with your own copy of Sketchup.   I did the yard plan for our house (below) in Venice with Sketchup.  You can see it will also do dimensions which can be handy.  This also shows that it can be used for two dimensional drawings as well. Think of it as a great tool for planning furniture arrangements.

Want help figuring out how to use Sketchup?  There is a ton of help and tutorials at the Google site.  In addition, just type in Sketchup Tutorial into YouTube and see what you get.  Check out this one for modeling and old-time radio.