DrawMetal Tools

Design Tools

DrawMetal™ provides plugins (extensions) for SketchUp® for drawing a variety of spirals, curves and tapered shapes (tapered extrusions).

Curved tapered shapes are typical in architectural and ornamental scrollwork, and for that application, the plugins also calculate the amount of stock (raw material) required to fabricate the tapers.

The plugins are available free of charge.

Curve Maker

Draws a variety of spirals and curves interactively, from specified dimensions or by specifying values for mathematical parameters.  (No need to know any mathematical formulas.)  The figure below shows a Bernoulli spiral created from the two specified dimensions.

Learn more…and watch a video of interactive curve drawing

Taper Maker

Draws a taper (a tapered extrusion) along a path (line) specified by the user. Taper cross-sections can be round, square, rectangular, hexagonal or octagonal.

Beginning with v1.3.5 2012-04-30, Taper Maker also draws tapered right trapezoid and quadrilateral cross sections between a pair of paths as illustrated below

Learn more…and watch a video on Taper Maker

Stock Maker

Estimates how much stock is required to fabricate a taper.  In the example below, Stock Maker determines that approximately 9 5/16″ of 1″ square stock is sufficient to draw this 30″ taper.

Stock Maker also accumulates requirements across multiple tapers and estimates the total finished weight and stock cost.

Learn more…