Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, and More
Digital design, CAD and BIM-related tips, news and comments with a tendency towards architectural and engineering uses.
Extending their lineup of beta-version web-editors, Autodesk just released Project Butterfly. After Project Draw (drawing and diagramming), Project Dragonfly (space planning in isometric 3D), Project Showroom (rendered previews of interior design selections), their latest addition to the labs (the Butterfly) is an online DWG-editor. Made by an acquired company (Visual Tao) and Autodesk, this web […] Read more..
This video is a beautiful homage to some architectural classics and is simply amazing if you appreciate the amount of effort that goes into CG rendering – the majority of this film is CG (using 3ds max and VRay and apparently a little bit of SketchUp). Here’s my best advice: Instead of clicking the video […] Read more..
Chirp, chirp… While I was figuring out how to make best use of all things Web 2.0, I found that Twitter is a great way for me to broadcast quick news items related to my blog’s topics (AEC-CAD, timber engineering, design and web stuff). So whenever something is too short for a blog post but […] Read more..
And the good ideas keep on coming! As just announced by Autodesk Labs in their post Project Twitch Range Expanded: can YOU connect?, Autodesk extended the range of their application tryout platform “Twitch” beyond the originally stated 1000 mile radius. Now user connection capability is just limited by a network latency cutoff. And as I […] Read more..
I like working with cheatsheets when I do coding. Although the online API reference is very extensive and has great examples and the downloadable version is a good solution when you’re offline, this one may be useful as a reference once you mastered the basic concepts. It contains the full API reference in a condensed […] Read more..
Yayyy!!! A new version! Software updates are always exciting… New features are to be explored, new capabilities exploited for as-yet unknown projects. Contrary to Autodesk’s religious update schedule, Google has been only somewhat regular in providing updates. But alas, announced by today’s blog post by John Bacus, SketchUp’s project manager, the new version of SketchUp […] Read more..
As it turns out, I need to revisit my centroid plugin for SketchUp. While it accurately calculates area properties for a face that does not contain internal (and fully enclosed) openings, it apparently gets it wrong as soon as an enclosed opening is present (like the face in the top-right corner of the image above). […] Read more..