RevMen
The Reverend Menacer
I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're overemphasizing the similarity between outright building design and tuning of a room. The tolerances for this process are on the order of several inches. Also, I think we have different understandings of the problem statement.I may be slightly underselling Sketchup, but on the same token I think you're downplaying the realities of engineering analysis.
This is the original request:
While you may have taken that to mean "can someone plug my AutoCAD model into acoustic modeling software," I took it to mean "can someone use the information in this model to do calculation that will help my room."If so, can you highly trained sound engineers calculate where I should sit to avoid all of the nodes and voids and where to place my speakers and how to set my EQ?
This is why I suggested modeling his room in Sketchup, because a Sketchup model would transmit the same information to us in a format that would be useful to any of us, not just those of us with AutoCAD. I'm not suggesting that he re-model his room, btw. In his first post he said that he could model it in AutoCAD, not that he had.
The motivation for touting the use of Sketchup for us in this forum to communicate our rooms to one another comes from experience. I do acoustical engineering analysis on a daily basis and I've found Sketchup to be more useful than AutoCAD for many tasks. Of course we have AutoCAD at our firm, but I actually don't use it very often (only to read client drawings).
When we make recommendations for acoustical treatment or mitigation, the important parts of what we're telling a client, what to do and why to do it, can easily get lost in an AutoCAD drawing. In Sketchup I can de-emphasize absolute dimensions and emphasize the principals at work. I don't actually send Sketchup models to clients, but I sometimes take snapshots from inside a model to insert as figures into a report, and they usually do a great job of getting the point across.
I'm really not the first to think of this use for Sketchup, not by a long shot. If you want an example of how Sketchup can be useful for a forum like ours, spend a little time checking out the models people have built at the John Sayers forum. They've been using it for years there to help one another do great acoustics.