Will's blog

purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Python, Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

Tue, 28 Aug 2007

Home improvement projects

Since I got married and since we decided to stay in the current apartment for another year, I've been involved in a bunch of home improvement projects to neaten things up, clean some stuff out, re-organize, and build some furniture to make better use of space. I've finished a set of shelves to replace one of the desks I had. I'm in the process of building a small set of shelves to go above the counter to use some vertical space in the kitchen for storage. I'm thinking about building another set of shelves.

My brother-in-law uses Google Sketchup to do his drafting. I had a look at it a couple of days ago and what he's done with it and it's pretty wild. My problem, however, is that I'm running on Linux and I have a preference towards Free Software and Open Source. Partially because I'd like to share my plans with other people in non-proprietary formats and partially because I stand a better chance of fixing things when they go wrong.

Does anyone know of 3-d modeling/drafting/basic CAD software similar to Sketchup that works in Linux?

As a side note, it turns out I have the same estimation problems with home improvement projects that I have with programming projects. Irritating.

[ category: /content | Permalink | 3 comments ]
Posted by drewp on Wed Aug 29 01:51:21 2007
I'm in the same situation. I tried gSculpt for a while, but I think K-3D might be a better setup. I've used wings3d in the past, but it's extra removed from normal file formats and interfaces.

I'm also looking at irrlicht for a realtime viewer.


Posted by Christian Wyglendowski on Wed Aug 29 07:46:00 2007
As a side note, it turns out I have the same estimation problems with home improvement projects that I have with programming projects. Irritating.

I have this same issue.  Why are we software developers so optimistic?  Shouldn't we have learned by now?


Posted by sean f on Thu Aug 30 15:22:40 2007
Art Of Illusion is a decent 3D modeler, written in Java. It's definitely nothing like Sketchup, but it is a lot more intuitive than something like Blender. Open source, and exports to POV and VRML..

http://www.artofillusion.org/


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