Nixta Sinks

Our house! In the middle of our sky!

When I came back to New York last year after the massive effort to get the latest release of the London project out the door (analogies and metaphors involving constipation are probably appropriate, though analogies more so because they include the word "anal"), I unwound by contemplating the design of a custom desk to replace the current old and shoddy and ugly desk/TV table combo we've had here for a few years (since back in the day when I still relied on inherited furniture). We also have a shitload of artwork to hang, and the DMC and I were keen to try to figure out what might go where (once we'd worked out how to drill into the steel walls).

Miss Circa Now's man, the Harrison Ford of the East Village, was going to help us with both tasks, but to help me work stuff out, Sketchup seemed like a good idea. It's the only software I've spent any time reading documentation on since I tried DTP on a C64 in the 80s, and boy was it time well spent. Sketchup is intuitive and slick and stable, but more to the point it does pretty much everything you want it to. For free. It's rare you find a piece of software so immediately comforting.

SKP Download (1576Kb)

So I took photos of artwork, generated a tile image of the floor (thx DMC for help with all that) and measured the apartment out to the nearest half inch, generating the resultant Sketchup file. Feel free to download it and play around. The new version of Sketchup is even better than before. I've even used Sketchup 6 to place the apartment in New York in a Google Earth kmz file, but it doesn't yet integrate well with the actual 3D building data so I'm not so happy with that at the moment.

Incidentally, it was the perfect excuse to create my own YouTube video which shows up the shoddy quality reduction (download the original 1.2Mb zipped AVI here) and the usefulness of the eye's indifference to detail over context for the progression of mass distribution of dross. God made us the perfect mindless consumers, perhaps we've peaked.

Anyway. Enough apocalyptic daydreams. On a parting note, dear reader. If you want to learn to play with Sketchup (and I recommend that you do), please invest 30 minutes in learning the concepts and trying a couple of basic tutorials. Invest!

Labels: google, sketchup, youtube