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In the architectural design process there are three stages - schematic, development and documentation.

Prior to the digital revolution, architects spent the preliminary part of the design process using pen or pencil to sketch on paper, translating design concepts from the designer's mind into 2D or 3D images that could be easily understood by the architect himself or by others. Physical or mock-up models also helped.

With computer technology, architects began to develop designs and create construction documents, but the schematic design process was not really computerised.

By the 1960s, however, computer-aided design (CAD) began to take shape as a new line of research that was quickly applied to the architectural practice. By the 1970s, CAD programs began to be commercially produced and sold.

In the 1980s, while personal computers began to develop, Autodesk Co was established, with made-for-PC programs such as AutoCAD Release 1 coming to the market.

Design, both architectural and engineering, began to be computer-aided. However, the early generations of CAD programs remained largely drafting tools on PCs, as they were developed by engineers and researchers who were not designers themselves. They did not have much understanding of the minds and working process of architects. Architects needed not only an aid for architectural drafting, but also for architectural design.

In 1999, a group of researchers, both architects and software developers, began to search for an alternative program that catered better to architects' needs than CAD. A company called @last Software was established and designers' hand-sketching and design processes were studied to develop a sketching/designing program. In August 2000, SketchUp was born.

With full understanding of architects' needs and work methodology, SketchUp is an easy-to-use program that works on quick 2D sketches that can be projected into 3D form very quickly. The award-winning program caught on and now is widely used.

In 2006 it was sold to Google, which turned it into what we now know as Google SketchUp. It is now very easy to design, create forms and exchange information about these forms over the Internet. With free use for the basic-level program, Google SketchUp is commonly used by not just architects and designers.

As it was based on AutoCAD, SketchUp's interface is fairly similar, with the same set of basic functions, command icons, and form-creating, manipulating and rendering commands. These commands are not complex, with just enough options to generate various forms, with many styles of effects. Those already familiar with AutoCAD can easily learn to use SketchUp.

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Hand-Sketch vs Sketchup: tools for helping designers

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The ceramic poppies commemorating the dead of the First World War are being removed from the Tower of London. Each of the 888,246 flowers represented a member of the British or Colonial armed forces killed during the conflict.

With British focus so firmly on the trench warfare for which the war is so rightly remembered, the other conflicts that made this a genuinely world war have received little, if any, attention. How many British school children have been instructed on how the Japanese fought alongside the Royal Navy, or captured German islands in the Pacific?

The war in Africa has also been all but ignored. Just how many of the vast sea of poppies at the Tower represented the contribution of the South African forces who died in the campaign to take the German colony of what is today Namibia? Yet the fighting in what was then German South-West Africa had major repercussions for the entire region.

In August 1914, just days after Britain declared war on Germany, the South African prime minister, Louis Botha, sent a telegram to London offering to assist the war effort. On the face of it this was an extraordinary decision. Botha had only signed his own peace treaty with Britain 12 years earlier, at the end of the Anglo-Boer war the most costly conflict Britain had fought since the fight against Napoleon. Yet here this Boer war general was offering troops to his former imperial enemies.

By the end of August the first shots had been fired along the Orange River, the boundary between South Africa and Namibia. The conflict should have been a push-over. Germany had only 5,308 Schutztruppe or protection forces in the colony. South Africas newly formed Union Defence Force mobilised a force more than ten times this size with over 67,000 men.

But the fighting the vast, desert terrain was intense.

The South Africans managed to lose the first confrontation. At the oasis of Sandfontein they ran into well-organised German forces who managed to force the ignominious surrender of the South African officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Reginald Grant.

Although no more than a setback, the battle for Sandfontein, just north of the Orange River, had major repercussions. Many Afrikaners were already deeply unhappy about supporting the British when the Germans had assisted then during the Boer war. Now they saw their opportunity.

Manie Maritz, in charge of troops in the Northern Cape, was ordered to mobilise his forces. But instead he contacted the Germans across the border and won their support for transforming South Africa into an independent Boer republic.

Other Afrikaner Generals joined the revolt. General Christiaan Beyers the Commandant-General of the Union Defence Force was among the rebels. It is sad that the war is being waged against the barbarism of the Germans, Beyers wrote in September 1914. We have forgiven but not forgotten all the barbarities committed in our own country during the South African War. His reference to the deaths of 26,000 Afrikaner women and children in the British concentration camps during the Boer war resonated with many of his people.

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How many of the vast sea of poppies at the Tower represented the contribution of the South African forces who died in ...

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