A User Study Comparing 3D Modeling with Silhouettes and Google SketchUp

We recently introduced 3D Modeling with Silhouettes [1], a new sketch-based modeling approach in which models are interactively designed by drawing their 2D silhouettes from different views. The core idea behind our approach is to limit the input to 2D silhouettes, removing the need to explicitly create or position 3D elements. Arbitrarily complex models can be constructed by assembling them out of parts defined by their silhouettes, which can be combined using CSG operations. In this technical report, we describe a user study comparing 3D Modeling with Silhouettes and Google SkechUp [2]. We chose to compare to SketchUp as it is also intended for novice users, and also aimed at the creation of man-made objects.