Now, I did come up with a nice one that I wanted to share. Google once again is on top of things and has a free 3D graphical package called SketchUp. The mechanics are pretty cool. You can use some basic drawing tools (free pen, rectangle, circle) to make plane shapes, then you use another tool to "pull or push" that surface into a 3d object. This is the basic operation. So you can make a long, thin rectangle and then pull it upwards to make a wall. Then you can draw a rectangle on that wall and push it into and all the way through the wall to make a window or door. All of this is done with pretty intuitive mouse commands (for rotating objects or camera angle, etc) without having to remember a bunch of hotkeys. Another bonus is that there is great online support, as befits Google, in the form of Youtube tutorials. Anyway for an example of the output, I've posted a little thing I threw together below:
I'm pretty impressed with SketchUp althought I'm not sure if it's what I'm looking for. It occurs to me that the tight geometric control might be nice for figures for papers. It can export screencaptures to bitmap, jpeg, tif and png so there are LaTeX packages for using the output.
There is a shareware drawing program ($15 for a version where you can actually make useful diagrams) called winfig. It works allot like xfig, with some improvements. Particularly, I like the pstex export. It takes your file, removes the text, and compiles it in tex, and then makes a mini tex file that reinserts the compiled tex to the correct places in the diagram. This means your diagrams can have subscripts, mathcal fonts, etc, that you'd make with tex. It's not to sophisticated, but it makes nice clean SMALL files (19 options of export) because it doesn't add all the extraneous junk that Adobe, or other programs make. It's not free, but it is allot of bang for your buck.
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that should have been a too, not a to in "to sophisticated"... oops too late now.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the recommendation. I think I might've seen winfig before. Is it any better than Inkscape?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I downloaded Blender which is a pretty sophisticamated 3D rendering program. I think I'd like to make some little animations, maybe of dorky stuff to spice up talks.
I don't think that you can make animations in this software, although I admit I'm a pretty basic user.
ReplyDeleteI've looked at Inkscape now. It looks like this will eventually be a better program, however, it seems a bit unstable for the time being. You may just want to wait until they have the final version together... when it's a bit more stable. It looks like it will turn out to be the superior software, again once they've worked out the bugs.
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Yes, I've found that Inkscape does have some stability issues.
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