3D Warehouse Grows up: Collaborative Design with SketchUp

Reading the latest announcement from the Google SketchUp Blog, I feel that 3D Warehouse has now ascended to a whole new level – namely the realm of collaborative 3D design. So far, 3D Warehouse has been a great addition to Google’s SketchUp software product. Designers can share 3D models, assembly plans and a whole lot […] Read more..

Another SketchUp Renderer Available for Free: IDX Renditioner

Joining the ranks of already available free rendering engines for SketchUp (like Kerkythea and Indigo) is the free version of IDX Renditioner Express. This is a full featured copy of the main product with the only limitations being a reduced image size (max. 600×480 versus 4096 x 4096 in the full version) and less lighting […] Read more..

And there is SketchUp #2: The Free TrueSpace by Caligari

Competition is great, isn’t it? This is especially the case when big companies are fighting over a market segment. As I speculated earlier, Microsoft is now following Google’s lead and is releasing Caligari’s TrueSpace 7.6 for free. I am installing TrueSpace right now and will post some examples soon, but for now the capabilities seem […] Read more..

Richmond Olympic Oval Design

FYI: There is a very interesting conversation on the DesignReForm forum about the Richmond Oval for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Topics are its design and fabrication, differences between Revit and Inventor and why the designer/fabricator StructureCraft Builders of Vancouver settled on the latter. Read on…

Gone Shoppin’…

Now Autodesk has two green thumbs! In a press release published earlier today, Autodesk has announced that it has acquired ECOTECT. Let’s see how they weave Revit, Green Building Studio and Ecotect together. FYI, here is a description of ECOTECT from the Square 1 website: Ecotect is a comprehensive environmental design tool that covers a […] Read more..

When Wii Met SketchUp

  Every movement, orbit, walk, zoom etc. in the movie above is controlled with the wiimote instead of the mouse. This way, one is not bound to the computer while navigating in SketchUp – perfect for presentations. I have been amazed for a while by Johnny Chung Lee‘s experiments with the Wiimote and particularly the […] Read more..