SketchUp for Design
Tutorials, News, Book Companion Materials
Tutorials and News
Latest Posts
SketchUp 3D Basecamp (and Trimble Dimensions) 2024 – Recap
After the 2022 3D Basecamp in Vancouver, Canada, it was time again this year for Trimble’s bi-annual conference that covers everything relating to SketchUp. This year marked the first time that SketchUp’s conference was co-located with Trimble’s big (now annual) event, Dimensions. And since Dimensions had been in Las Vegas for many years, this year’s […]
Point Cloud Modeling in SketchUp with Scan Essentials – a Thorough Introduction
Although I had recorded some introductory videos about point cloud modeling with Scan Essentials in SketchUp that are included at the end of this playlist, those didn’t go into sufficient detail on a bunch of the features. Based on my presentation “From Points to Polygons” at the recent 2024 3D Basecamp, I decided to rectify […]
Having Some Fun with AI: The Snarky Architecture Critic
In case you are in need of an opinionated architectural critique, look no further. You can now employ AI for that! With the recently introduced vision capabilities in OpenAI’s services and therefore my OpenAI Explorer SketchUp extension, you can now ask questions about what is in your SketchUp model. But that’s not all: For a […]
Random Tutorial Selection
Making SketchUp Objects 3D Printable
In this tutorial I show my basic approach for making SketchUp objects (like the revolved vase from my last tutorial) 3D printable. This video just covers some of the techniques – I explain the process in much more detail in Chapter 6 of my book.
Creating Variation in Textures for Rendering (Ruby Snippet)
This post follows a theme that I explored in several other of my script examples as well: Copied objects in SketchUp don’t appear overly realistic if they represent natural items; their geometry is simply too perfect. This is true for landscape items (trees, shrubs) but also for things like wooden boards (see left side in the image above): On a collection of real boards, the knots would be distributed somewhat randomly, not as shown here.
Intro to Coding in SketchUp with the Ruby Code Editor
This video provides an introduction to Ruby scripting with the Ruby Code Editor extension in SketchUp. Scripting in SketchUp is also a good “intro to coding” exercise because you not only learn a usable scripting language (Ruby), you can even use it to create 3D models that you can manufacture (e.g. 3D print) afterwards.