Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, and More
A member at the SketchUcation Forum recently asked SketchUp users for their three most popular plugins. While I am of course sad to see that non of mine made it into the list, this may serve as a timely update to an older post on my site. While we are waiting for a better plugin […] Read more..
I frequently get asked how to set up a small-ish CMS-driven (CMS = Content Management System) website for research groups or other entities. Many of these people have learned that maintaining a static website the “old-fashioned way” (e.g. using Dreamweaver) presents a variety of problems – mainly related to inconsistent content or collaborative editing problems. These issues […] Read more..
Now that everyone has had a chance to get to know the new features of SketchUp 8 (like the new solid tools), it is a good time to look at what may be in store for the next release – presumably version #9. Fortunately, as with the last release, a recent survey on Google’s website queried […] Read more..
Just in time for today’s beginning of Google’s Basecamp user meeting (an “unconference” in their words), Google released the eighth iteration of SketchUp, their hugely popular 3D modeling application. This version comes with a few enhancements to satisfy both user bases: Geo-modelers (who create buildings and objects for Google Earth) and planners/designers (who model all […] Read more..
I just posted an update to the SketchUp Ruby Code Editor. It now sports buttons instead of text, which makes it easier to use on a small screen. It also has three new buttons: One to explore the current selection, one to explore attributes of the current selection and a third to display the Ruby […] Read more..
In this section, we’ll start creating scripted geometry in SketchUp. In this and all following posts, I’ll approach SketchUp scripting in a pragmatic way. This means that I don’t think every step in the process should be scripted – after all, I am not writing a plugin. I’ll only script what can’t efficiently be modeled […] Read more..
In this series of posts, I will be exploring how one can create scripted geometry in SketchUp. Traditionally, this has been more the realm of programs like Rhino. And justifiably so. Rhino is NURBS-based and can create and modify curved geometry much better than SketchUp. However, SketchUp is an easy-to-use program for working with polygon-mesh-based […] Read more..