AEC CAD/BIM, SketchUp, Timber Engineering, Web Design and 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..
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..
Apparently today is blog action day. I didn’t know that myself… Oh, well… The official SketchUp blog just published an environmental design feature with examples of green building design using SketchUp. It is always good to learn from how others are using a design tool like SketchUp – particularly in a commercial environment.
Some interesting SketchUp-related posts that just landed on my desk: AIA and Google have assembled classic American architecture in 3D Warehouse and Google Earth and have put a sickeningly fast video of it on YouTube.
Digging through the Ruby script archive for SketchUp is just amazing. There is a great tool at every corner. Here’s one of them: The 6-sided cube panorama exporter. Together with a renderer like Kerkythea (and a stitching program), it is extremely easy to create realistic panoramas right out of SketchUp.
Quickly creating 3D-models and doing sketchy renderings is clearly the strength of SketchUp. Most of its modeling feature set is even available in the free version and with downloadable Extensions, anything is possible. One feature that is missing in SketchUp, though, is photo-realistic rendering. But don’t let that stop you…