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!

A recent post by Smashing Magazine on free fonts made me look again at the list of fonts installed on my (Windows) machine. In particular, I was looking for fonts that would work well for CAD annotation. After all, AutoCAD’s TXT-font, Revit’s Arial and SketchUp’s Verdana can appear a bit “default” for good-looking plans. And [...]

So you have finished the CAD model of your latest project and now is presentation time. Depending on your CAD software, you may have some options. For example, if you used SketchUp, then you can easily apply a style to make things look sketchy. Or make the output look like it was drawn on heavy [...]

This is a bit off topic but I just discovered aviary.com. If you haven’t checked out their image editing tools, give them a try. They are (for the most part) free, online and surprisingly powerful (for an online-only application). There is even an online community for sharing and discussing the final creations. So what will [...]

This looks like a great idea. I was wondering how to work easily in SketchUp on a Tablet PC. The main drawback was always the lack of a wheel-mouse. This might be great for community charrettes where the actual model gets modified during discussions. Get the how-to on this forum page: Sketchup & tablet pc: [...]

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 [...]

Since SketchUp is a free program, it is easy to share files. Just tell the other party to download the software and let them view your 3D model on their computer. That’s it. But what if you don’t want to share the entire file (and give your work away) or if you just want to [...]

Given all the web work I have been doing in the recent past, it feels good every once in a while to create something that gets printed. So here’s my latest project – an announcement postcard for the 2008 Wood Structures Symposium to be held at UMass in Amherst, MA. Above is the front and [...]

Using a Wiimote with SketchUp from Alexander Schreyer on Vimeo. 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 [...]

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 [...]