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 [...]

I frequently get asked how to set up a small-ish CMS-driven (CMS = Content Management System) website for research groups or other entities. Many of these people have learned that maintaining a static website the “old-fashioned way” (e.g. using Dreamweaver) presents a variety of problems – mainly related to inconsistent content or collaborative editing problems. These issues [...]

Now that everyone has had a chance to get to know the new features of SketchUp 8 (like the new solid tools), it is a good time to look at what may be in store for the next release – presumably version #9. Fortunately, as with the last release, a recent survey on Google’s website queried [...]

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 [...]

While many functions in WordPress (the self-hosted kind) work like a charm, this one gave me the run-around a few days ago: The auto-saving post revisions that got added to WordPress a few releases back. On our departmental website (http://eco.umass.edu/) that I created in WordPress (works great for this purpose, it’s the “Just-enough CMS!”) we [...]

Autodesk Ecotect Analysis 2011 System Requirements Let me make this point clear first: I fully understand that professional-grade software packages are complex and extensive. They use high-powered computation and extensive libraries and therefore need resources. But my goodness – does Autodesk ever fill up my hard disk! Now that the spring semester is coming to [...]

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 [...]

I always found Ruby code editing and testing for SketchUp a bit tedious. First I write code in my preferred text editor: PSPad. Then I load it into SketchUp using my plugin loader. And then I run it from the menu. Although there are better ways to handle this (e.g. the SketchUp bridge), I wanted [...]