New SketchUp E-Books: Visualization, Woodworking and Programming

SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization: Beginner’s Guide (Book or eBook) The  first of these books is about architectural visualization (or rendering), a topic I have mentioned before on this site. For a few months now, this book has been available and I was fortunate to have been given a review copy by the publisher. My […] Read more..

SketchUp 8 is out

Just in time for today’s beginning of Google’s Basecamp user meeting (an “unconference” in their words), Google released the eighth iteration of SketchUp, their hugely popular 3D modeling application. This version comes with a few enhancements to satisfy both user bases: Geo-modelers (who create buildings and objects for Google Earth) and planners/designers (who model all […] Read more..

SketchUp script clips #2: Creating geometry

In this section, we’ll start creating scripted geometry in SketchUp. In this and all following posts, I’ll approach SketchUp scripting in a pragmatic way. This means that I don’t think every step in the process should be scripted – after all, I am not writing a plugin. I’ll only script what can’t efficiently be modeled […] Read more..

My Newest Plugin: A Shiny Ruby Code Editor for SketchUp

I always found Ruby code editing and testing for SketchUp a bit tedious. First I write code in my preferred text editor: PSPad. Then I load it into SketchUp using my plugin loader. And then I run it from the menu. Although there are better ways to handle this (e.g. the SketchUp bridge), I wanted […] Read more..

The Third & the Seventh

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..

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2010

Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, enjoy your holidays and some relaxing time with your families. I wish you all the best for the new year! Cheers, Alex (FYI: The image was rendered with the fantastic SketchUp rendering software Twilight)

Web-Based Application trials from Autodesk – A Great Idea!

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..