Update now to SketchUp 8 Maintenance Release 3

The SketchUp folks yesterday released a maintenance update for SketchUp: Official Google SketchUp Blog: Announcing SketchUp 8 M3. Get it now to keep your favorite 3D modeling software running smoothly. A list of updates  is here: The following issues have been fixed SketchUp can crash when using Ruby plugins that call Ruby observers. In this release […] Read more..

“Favorite Places” presented at NEARC Spring Conference 2012

Together with a colleague of mine (Sasha Stepanov from Campus Planning), I just presented the “My Favorite Places” website (and the UMass “Likes/Dislikes” site) at the 2012 Spring Conference of NEARC, an ArcGIS user group here in the Northeast. All in all, this was a great event (held at beautiful Smith College) that allowed me […] Read more..

Google SketchUp sold to Trimble

As announced today, Google has sold their widely popular 3D modeling application, SketchUp, to Trimble, a company that focuses on GPS- and heavy-construction hardware and software (for example, the steel and concrete BIM software Tekla belongs to Trimble). This is a very interesting and at least on the surface quite appropriate move. After all, SketchUp […] Read more..

What’s new in Autodesk Revit 2013?

As always, one of the best resources for new Revit product descriptions in David Light’s blog. Here is the link to his post on Revit 2013: Revit: What’s new in Autodesk Revit 2013? I am mostly looking forward to: A single Revit installation (should make teaching much easier) Better IFC support (every CAD/BIM software needs […] Read more..

Project #22 in the Daddy Handbook: A Catapult

Because she saw one at her school’s science fair, last week our youngest daughter asked me to help her build a catapult. Feeling intrigued by the idea of putting together something that shoots something else but not wanting to go overboard (you never know what kids do with these), I came up with this design. As […] Read more..

What’s Your Favorite Place at UMass?

I finally got around to writing something about an exciting project that I completed last year at UMass (and which I presented at the Google Geo User Summit 2011 in the meantime). This is the crowdsourcing website application where students, faculty, alumni, employees and visitors to UMass can submit their favorite places on our campus. […] Read more..

My Students Model Amherst College in 3D

BCT Students in my BCT 420 and ECO 697SB classes just finished modeling 30+ buildings at Amherst College in 3D. Once approved by Google, those will appear in the official “3D Buildings” layer in Google Earth. Follow the link below to watch a video or download the KMZ file for Google Earth: http://blogs.umass.edu/bct420-schreyer/student-work/amherst-college-in-3d