Wood Design Awards Books Available Free

I like freebies. Here are two great ones for anyone interested in timber design. The 2002 and 2003 Wood Design Awards Books are now available as free PDF downloads from cwc.ca: Wood Design Awards Books Not to be too much of a freeloader, I’ll immediately order the just published 2006 edition. Promised!

Panoramissimo!!!

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.

Rendering SketchUp models with Kerkythea

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…

Structural Evaluation and Presentation of Refurbishment Options for the Usher Mill in Erving, MA

This project, which was completed in the summer of 2003, was aimed at evaluating the structure of a 1918 Western Massachusetts paper mill, which sat empty and had been deteriorating for 13 years. Ultimately, the feasibility of any redevelopment on the site was to be investigated.