AEC CAD/BIM, SketchUp, Timber Engineering, Web Design 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.
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..
Inspired by one of David Fano’s recent blog posts, I decided to give Rhino’s Grasshopper plugin (formerly called Explicit History) a try. It is pretty amazing what can be done with it and how easy it is to use. I haven’t venture too far at this point – there’ll be more to come when I […] Read more..
After working a while with SketchUp, every 3D modeler will invariably find out that the best thing about this software is that it can easily be extended using free plugins. If a function is not available in plain (free) SketchUp, then chances are actually quite good that there is a plugin available on the internet […] 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.
(Or: Customizing AutoCAD in a computer lab with restrictive user permissions) I am teaching several CAD classes and our computer labs are all set up with very restrictive (currently Windows XP) user rights. And that makes sense. After all, I don’t want to find out at the beginning of class that half of the computers […] Read more..