Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, and More
Reading the latest announcement from the Google SketchUp Blog, I feel that 3D Warehouse has now ascended to a whole new level – namely the realm of collaborative 3D design. So far, 3D Warehouse has been a great addition to Google’s SketchUp software product. Designers can share 3D models, assembly plans and a whole lot […] Read more..
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..
Competition is great, isn’t it? This is especially the case when big companies are fighting over a market segment. As I speculated earlier, Microsoft is now following Google’s lead and is releasing Caligari’s TrueSpace 7.6 for free. I am installing TrueSpace right now and will post some examples soon, but for now the capabilities seem […] Read more..
Every movement, orbit, walk, zoom etc. in the movie above is controlled with the wiimote instead of the mouse. This way, one is not bound to the computer while navigating in SketchUp – perfect for presentations. I have been amazed for a while by Johnny Chung Lee‘s experiments with the Wiimote and particularly the […] Read more..
A comment on one of my SketchUp posts prompted me to provide clarification in the form of a new post rather than just a quick reply. The issue was that exported images from CAD files (SU in this case) can be quite grainy. To export an image of the current view in SketchUp, go to […] Read more..
So far I have used SketchUp for a lot of things, but a 50-minute presentation wasn’t among those. Besides, one of the big no-no’s for “classic” Powerpoint presentations is having too much happen on-screen (flying-in arrows and the like). Given the dynamic 3D interface of SketchUp I was curious if flying around inside its space […] Read more..
If you liked Demeter, then you’ll like this one. The Department of Energy has just released a plugin for SketchUp (works with both the free and full version) that allows for an EnergyPlus analysis to be run on a SketchUp building model from within the familiar SketchUp interface. The geometry of a building can be […] Read more..