Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, and 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.
Since we now have the capability to use Google’s 3D Warehouse as an online collaboration tool, it just makes sense to use this functionality for building programming, too.
Reading the latest announcement from the Google SketchUp Blog, I feel that 3D Warehouse has now ascended to a whole new level – namely the realm of collaborative 3D design. So far, 3D Warehouse has been a great addition to Google’s SketchUp software product. Designers can share 3D models, assembly plans and a whole lot […] Read more..
Joining the ranks of already available free rendering engines for SketchUp (like Kerkythea and Indigo) is the free version of IDX Renditioner Express. This is a full featured copy of the main product with the only limitations being a reduced image size (max. 600×480 versus 4096 x 4096 in the full version) and less lighting […] Read more..
Competition is great, isn’t it? This is especially the case when big companies are fighting over a market segment. As I speculated earlier, Microsoft is now following Google’s lead and is releasing Caligari’s TrueSpace 7.6 for free. I am installing TrueSpace right now and will post some examples soon, but for now the capabilities seem […] Read more..
FYI: There is a very interesting conversation on the DesignReForm forum about the Richmond Oval for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Topics are its design and fabrication, differences between Revit and Inventor and why the designer/fabricator StructureCraft Builders of Vancouver settled on the latter. Read on…
Now Autodesk has two green thumbs! In a press release published earlier today, Autodesk has announced that it has acquired ECOTECT. Let’s see how they weave Revit, Green Building Studio and Ecotect together. FYI, here is a description of ECOTECT from the Square 1 website: Ecotect is a comprehensive environmental design tool that covers a […] Read more..