I began my SketchUp journey a few weeks ago in an effort to add some 3D skills to my tool belt. Since I don't have any budget for training classes I started by watching as many online videos as I could while trying stuff out every day.

I also searched for beginner SketchUp books on Amazon.com and eventually came upon SketchUp 8 Hands On: Basic Exercises by Bonnie Roskes. I was able to borrow a copy and burned through the 380 plus pages this past week. Here's a quick run down.

If you review enough 'how to' books you'll find that many include several chapters of rehashed material from the product manual or official documentation - the good stuff usually starts a few chapters in. Knowing this my plan was to swiftly flip through the first hundred or so pages and somewhere, perhaps after the first third of the book, I would get to this 'good stuff.'

What became apparent after the first thirty to forty pages was that I couldn't afford to skip any pages - I learned at least one thing I didn't know on each page. Some of what I learned were features or shortcuts I had missed; others were modeling techniques I picked up by working the examples used to demonstrate the tools.

This book does a lot of things right. It's well written without being wordy, provides clear step by step illustrations and descriptions, uses examples that are simple without being simplistic and demonstrates useful techniques while teaching tool functionality. I found myself having frequent 'ah ha' moments throughout thinking 'I can use that technique to make a [fan, laser gun, etc].'

I have to say I was very impressed by the quality of the writing and the usefulness of the information provided. This is a great book both for individuals seeking to learn on their own or educators teaching in a classroom setting.

The book isn't inexpensive if you measure it against dummy style books but if you plan to use SketchUp professionally, are a serious user or compare the ratio of value to cost the price is reasonable.

I wasn't sure if I should give this book 5 thumbs up or 5 stars -so I decided I'd go with 5 lightning bolts instead (this is stormvisions after all) .

Edit: I contacted the author and she was kind enough to send along some samples pages which you might want to take a look at.

View this book on Amazon.com >>

Visit Bonnie at 3D Vinci >>

Mack Sztaba's SketchUp thread on the ConceptArt.org forum two weeks ago is what got me to finally download and begin learning SketchUp.

Seeing the product used for game concepts and illustration really lit up my neurons - I think I had the sense before that SketchUp was mostly of use for architectural design.

You can check out Mack's home page for more samples of his work.

Unless you have a massive super powered computer, at some point you may find your efforts to build a huge  landscape dotted with structures or some equally large project bogging down your system.

The GhostComp plugin by Fredo, available on this forum post, allows you to easily swap less resource intensive proxies for your more complex components. This way you can rotate and build models while 'ghosting' some of the bigger resource hogs.

You can easily toggle back and forth making this a very appealing tool if you have an old PC like mine.

Sometimes moving a group of edges or faces along an axis can be really tough. This tip shows how you can move them with precision.

The original source for this tip http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=94863

keywords: move edges, move faces, exact, control, axis