While I am semi-comfortably seated on my United Airlines flight and traversing all three North-American time zones on my way back to Massachusetts, it’s time to recap what happened at the 2011 Google Geo User Summit United States over the last two and a half days*. Overall summary: Wow, was that ever great fun!!! If [...]

Please upgrade your browser One of the greatest benefits of having a 3D modeler like SketchUp is that creating and sharing explorable representations of real-world objects is extremely easy. It was therefore just a matter of time before Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad appeared on Google Earth. So before the real building gets taken [...]

Please upgrade your browser SketchUp QR from Alexander Schreyer on Vimeo. As you may have noticed, I have been experimenting with QR codes lately. There’s just so much fun you can have with these little black-and-white icons. For your Friday enjoyment, here is a list of where I have used them so far: 3D QR [...]

Interior perspective by senorjerome, on Flickr (CC) I meant to create a concise visual comparison of all available rendering software for SketchUp for quite a while now. To keep things organized I only added one video per software as well as links to the manufacturer’s websites and the current (February 2011) published cost. All prices are [...]

Now that the year is almost over, it’s time to step back and look at what we all built over the past weeks… Wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, enjoy your holidays and some relaxing time with your families. I wish you all the best for the new year! Cheers, Alex P.S.: Yes, it’s [...]

Apparently Autodesk has been busy lately amalgamating its acquisitions into something useful. As announced a few days ago on their blog, Project Vasari is their newest tool/toy for creating early-design massing and energy studies of parametric building models. Here’s a video that gives an overview: From what I can see so far, Autodesk reduced the [...]

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 [...]

SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization: Beginner’s Guide (Book or eBook) The  first of these books is about architectural visualization (or rendering), a topic I have mentioned before on this site. For a few months now, this book has been available and I was fortunate to have been given a review copy by the publisher. My [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]