Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, and More
I recently needed a medium-size studio setup with gradient background and nice lighting for some SketchUp models that I wanted to render in Kerkythea. Since I couldn’t find anything suitable, I just made one. This is a 16’x16’x16′ studio setup for rendering and presentation. It contains a smooth background and two emitter/reflector faces on the […] Read more..
Oh, yes… you can buy some, too. Autodesk and Turbosquid have partnered to start a market for Revit content (i.e. families). This joins websites with free content like RevitCity and Autodesk’s own Seek service. There is also a contest for “early-vendors”. From their press-release: To encourage users to publish Revit families for sale, TurboSquid is […] Read more..
I just saw on a forum post that SketchUp 7 is out! Although the Google website still only shows SU6 for download, its shop now offers the new version for purchase, too. Until the new (free) version is available on their site, do this: To already download a copy, remember the old SU download link […] Read more..
This video is actually a bit older but it illustrates a great way to visualize data in 3D – using SketchUp. Data is loaded into SketchUp from an Excel file using a Ruby plugin and then plotted in 3D. In this case, geological data is presented for a geothermal drilling operation. Links: More videos at […] Read more..
Ahh… there it is: Casework with family name Countertop Sink Assembly Line Based. Autodesk just updated its large and well presented component library called “Seek” at seek.autodek.com. You can either go there directly and download Revit and DWG CAD files or a PDF 3-part spec or you can access it from within Revit 2009 using […] Read more..
Since SketchUp is a free program, it is easy to share files. Just tell the other party to download the software and let them view your 3D model on their computer. That’s it. But what if you don’t want to share the entire file (and give your work away) or if you just want to […] Read more..
A little while ago, I had a need for calculating centroids for planar shapes in SketchUp. To be more exact, my students had the need since I gave them an assignment that required this. Not knowing of a plugin for SketchUp that would accomplish this feat, they did it in Rhino or AutoCAD instead.
To rid SketchUp of this shortcoming, I decided to re-use some old Pascal code of mine and try my hand at writing a plugin for this. Here is the result.