When I went to the 2011 Google Geo User Summit United States in Mountain View, CA this July, I had the chance to present two projects that I have worked on in the recent past here at the University of Massachusetts. “Building a 3D World” The first presentation was on our campus modeling project in [...]

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 [...]

This video is a beautiful homage to some architectural classics and is simply amazing if you appreciate the amount of effort that goes into CG rendering – the majority of this film is CG (using 3ds max and VRay and apparently a little bit of SketchUp). Here’s my best advice: Instead of clicking the video [...]

Just when I thought using SketchUp for presentations was a clever idea someone came along and really stepped it up a notch… Dave Righton from the Canadian one-man-band Roche Limit just produced an entire music video using the software. Amazing work and pretty good timing given that SketchUp lacks the timeline editor of some other [...]

This one is just plain amazing! If you’ve ever push-pulled anything in SketchUp, you’ll appreciate the video by Bruce Branit. Enjoy in full-screen mode!

I just saw on a forum post that SketchUp 7 is out! Although the Google website still only shows SU6 for download, its shop now offers the new version for purchase, too. Until the new (free) version is available on their site, do this: To already download a copy, remember the old SU download link [...]

This video is actually a bit older but it illustrates a great way to visualize data in 3D – using SketchUp. Data is loaded into SketchUp from an Excel file using a Ruby plugin and then plotted in 3D. In this case, geological data is presented for a geothermal drilling operation. Links: More videos at [...]

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 [...]

Even beyond the great music, Radiohead’s latest video “House of Cards” is simply amazing. And that for two reasons: 100% data-driven visuals. The entire music video was produced without the use of a camera. Instead, three kinds of (near- and far-range) laser scanners were used to capture the artists and several environments. That’s just great [...]

Okay, okay, this one is a bit geeky, but it’s fun so I had to try it. I don’t remember how I found this, but I saw somewhere that you can easily turn your $10 webcam into an infrared camera. Since I never ventured into the infrared spectrum with my film-based camera, this sounded like [...]