Making CAD output personal

So you have finished the CAD model of your latest project and now is presentation time. Depending on your CAD software, you may have some options. For example, if you used SketchUp, then you can easily apply a style to make things look sketchy. Or make the output look like it was drawn on heavy […] Read more..

Playing with birds in the cloud

This is a bit off topic but I just discovered aviary.com. If you haven’t checked out their image editing tools, give them a try. They are (for the most part) free, online and surprisingly powerful (for an online-only application). There is even an online community for sharing and discussing the final creations. So what will […] Read more..

Wood CAD Chips #1: SketchUp for Woodworking

Since my main interests at the moment are CAD/BIM on one side and structural wood design on the other, it might make sense to talk a bit more on this site about the combination of these two. To start this off, here’s a quick intro on using SketchUp for woodworking. Designing larger objects (i.e. structures) […] Read more..

Face Centroid and Area Properties Extension for SketchUp

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.

A Postcard for the Wood Structures Symposium 2008

Given all the web work I have been doing in the recent past, it feels good every once in a while to create something that gets printed. So here’s my latest project – an announcement postcard for the 2008 Wood Structures Symposium to be held at UMass in Amherst, MA. Above is the front and […] Read more..

Everything is Data

Even beyond the great music, Radiohead’s latest video “House of Cards” is simply amazing. And that for two reasons: 100% data-driven visuals. The entire music video was produced without the use of a camera. Instead, three kinds of (near- and far-range) laser scanners were used to capture the artists and several environments. That’s just great […] Read more..