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 kinds [...]

Now that the world cup is getting closer by the day, it was time for me to get my gear ready. After all, I have to support Germany in this one. As it turned out, this was also a good opportunity to create some graphics with SketchUp and try out printing them on fabric with [...]

I just posted an update to the SketchUp Ruby Code Editor. It now sports buttons instead of text, which makes it easier to use on a small screen. It also has three new buttons: One to explore the current selection, one to explore attributes of the current selection and a third to display the Ruby [...]

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 [...]

In this series of posts, I will be exploring how one can create scripted geometry in SketchUp. Traditionally, this has been more the realm of programs like Rhino. And justifiably so. Rhino is NURBS-based and can create and modify curved geometry much better than SketchUp. However, SketchUp is an easy-to-use program for working with polygon-mesh-based [...]