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.
If you liked Demeter, then you’ll like this one. The Department of Energy has just released a plugin for SketchUp (works with both the free and full version) that allows for an EnergyPlus analysis to be run on a SketchUp building model from within the familiar SketchUp interface. The geometry of a building can be […] Read more..
After working a while with SketchUp, every 3D modeler will invariably find out that the best thing about this software is that it can easily be extended using free plugins. If a function is not available in plain (free) SketchUp, then chances are actually quite good that there is a plugin available on the internet […] Read more..
Just a few more days until the updated roster of Autodesk products arrives. In the meantime, I came across this screenshot from our good ol’ CAD application, which apparently now has been renamed “Raptor”. While the name should give it more bite, the user interface comes across featuring a sleek and stylish dashboard. Source: […] Read more..
It seems like this is the year for industry consolidations in the technology field. After Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo and their purchase of Caligari it is now time for Green Building Studio to be acquired by a much larger company, Autodesk in this case. In an announcement that just fluttered into my inbox, GBS acknowledges […] Read more..
After a year of amazing development work, the team behind the freeware rendering engine Kerkythea finally released the 2008 version. It is called “Echo” and features some major improvements. While the most noticeable one will be the redesigned sleek user interface (it now has scrollable material list menus!!!), some under-the-hood improvements are worth mentioning, too. […] Read more..
Now this one ought to be quite interesting. Microsoft just bought out Caligari, maker of the 3D modeling, animating and rendering software TrueSpace. Is this a new, free SketchUp in the making? Microsoft wants to use the software for their Virtual Earth platform – similar to Google using SketchUp for their Google Earth platform. This […] Read more..
Greenbuildingstudio.com, the green-design web-extension for your cad software online service has just announced their third overhaul (i.e. v. 3.0). With more and more architecture and engineering offices embracing parametric building design (catchword: BIM = “Building Information Modeling”), this is a great tool to run a quick industry-standard (DOE-2) energy check on a virtual building and […] Read more..