David,
An injury enforced layoff from physical activity gave me an opportunity to look at all sorts of drawing software for the Mac, I think I trialled pretty much everything out there that offered demo versions. I am mainly interested in 3D but also wanted the ability to produce good 2D stuff and in my trawl, I paid no attention to price - at this stage just interested in how things worked.
I also tried a goodly few that were windows programs running in a virtual machine using Parallels.
To cut a long story short, I came back to Sketchup as my primary tool but invested in the Pro version mainly to have Layout for drawings but also the ability to export files to some of the 3D things I had tried. Of the others, the only Mac program that stayed for any length of time on my machine was
ViaCad and its big brother SharkFX
I liked these for their solid modelling capabilities, their auto 2D drawing abilities and the fact that particularly ViaCad is reasonably inexpensive. The learning curve wasn't too bad either.
I was tempted by Vectorworks for a while but the price was more than I was prepared to pay and it had a distinctly dated feel to it.
I assessed support in the various user forums for many programs and came to the conclusion that whilst a large user base was generally a good thing, it wasn't always a reliable indicator of the quality of support.
Although all the Windows progams I tried worked fine under Parallels, I much prefer working in a native Mac environment but I was tempted by
Alibre. It feels like Solidworks which I used in the past for one or two big projects and liked at the time but at a price I could contemplate - unlike Solidworks.
I came back to Sketchup mainly for the following reasons:-
1. It could do anything I needed and a lot more besides (casual users generally don't realise the power under the hood).
2. It is updated regularly and given Google's investment in it, I really don't see it disappearing or falling behind.
3. It has one of the best user support groups.
4. It is easier to be productive in it than any of the other things I tried.
5. It provided a more natural path to rendered scenes than some of the other things through its handling of materials, scenes and lighting.
Finally, either Sketchup or ViaCad can support your desire for details on bowls etc.
