Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, 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.
When it comes to architectural or structural design of wood buildings, there are only a few software packages available in North America (compared to what is out there for steel or concrete design). While these (e.g. cadwork, Dietrich’s, IES VisualDesign and more here and here) have great tools to design and size anything from a […] 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..
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..
Just a few more days until the updated roster of Autodesk products arrives. In the meantime, I came across this screenshot from our good ol’ CAD application, which apparently now has been renamed “Raptor”. While the name should give it more bite, the user interface comes across featuring a sleek and stylish dashboard. Source: […] Read more..
It seems like this is the year for industry consolidations in the technology field. After Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo and their purchase of Caligari it is now time for Green Building Studio to be acquired by a much larger company, Autodesk in this case. In an announcement that just fluttered into my inbox, GBS acknowledges […] Read more..
After a year of amazing development work, the team behind the freeware rendering engine Kerkythea finally released the 2008 version. It is called “Echo” and features some major improvements. While the most noticeable one will be the redesigned sleek user interface (it now has scrollable material list menus!!!), some under-the-hood improvements are worth mentioning, too. […] Read more..