Alex' collection of SketchUp tutorials and news posts that talk about all SketchUp topics: modeling, rendering, scripting, extensions, fabrication, etc. The five most recent tutorials and news posts are listed below. You can find everything else in the topic category archives:
News Blog,
SketchUp Tutorials,
3D Modeling,
Extensions,
Making,
Rendering,
Scripting,
SketchUp Basics
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 only some of the techniques - I explain the process in much more detail in Chapter 6 of my book "Architectural Design with SketchUp."
https://youtu.be/UXFUrHTZ-k8
In the video I mention these extensions:
ThomThom's Solid Inspector
I hope you find this useful and create some cool items. Feel free to post those in the discussion area below.
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In this video tutorial I show how you can take a portrait of a loved one (or yourself) and - using SketchUp - turn it into a revolved object that you can then use as a vase, cup, candle holder etc. This technique is simple and makes for a great gift (e.g. by 3D printing). As a bonus, I show how you can create a face-morphing shape from two portraits.
https://youtu.be/d5y5f965YAs
Keen readers of this blog may know that I covered this technique in one of my earliest posts. I had never done a video tutorial on this technique, however, which is now remedied.
While the basic technique uses only SketchUp's built-in tools, I also demonstrate some of Fredo6's extensions here:
Joint PushPull
FredoSpline
Curviloft
I hope you find this useful and create some cool items. Feel free to post those in the discussion area below.
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Are you using SketchUp Pro on multiple computers? As I mention in Chapter 2, it may make sense to leverage one of the many cloud storage services (that you may already be using) like Dropbox, OneDrive, GDrive, etc. to make your life easier by synchronizing those. In essence, using the approach presented here, you can off-load extensions that you want to have available on both machines onto a shared drive, and then you load them back from the respective computers using the script shown below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI6FvENlIno
Step 1: Designate a folder on your cloud drive
First, designate a folder on your cloud-synchronized drive as the Plugins folder. As you can see in my example below, I am using OneDrive (at C:/Users/<username>/OneDrive/SketchUp/Plugins), but you can use any other service, too (e.g. for Dropbox on Windows it would likely be C:/Users/<username>/Dropbox/). Of course, for this to work you need to have a cloud-synchronized local folder, not just an online folder. And that folder needs to...
This post is adapted from an exercise that appeared in the first edition of Architectural Design with SketchUp (Chapter 5) but that I have since removed from the book. I hope you find it useful.
For this (clearly non-architectural) example, let's assume you want to preview a T-shirt design that you created in SketchUp using an image of a T-shirt model. This example uses SketchUp's styles and especially the watermarking feature and can be adapted for many other (non-clothing) uses, too. It even works with the web version of the program. So, without further ado, here are the steps you can take to create and preview a T-shirt design in SketchUp:
Let’s start with a simple SketchUp model—a sphere within a rectangular box. Of course, you may pick whatever design you like. Let’s just assume that we wanted to make a sketchy-looking T-shirt with this design, and that we needed to preview how it will look.
The original design idea
Open the Styles panel...
Now that version 2.1 of the SketchUp OpenAI Explorer extension is available, it is easier to test the AI's capabilities when using the most recent GPT-4 model. In this post, I will be comparing side-by-side the gpt-3.5-turbo and the gpt-4 models with a few common examples. If you want to give this a try, too, make sure you have access to the gpt-4 model and then simply replace the model name in my SketchUp extension's settings dialog.
The extension page on my other website features a longer list of successful prompts than what I am able to cover here. Feel free to give those a try, too.
Example1: Draw a Box
For this example, I asked the AI to draw a 2' (i.e. "two foot") box. I wanted to test not only whether the box would get drawn correctly, but also if the foot tick mark would be interpreted correctly as the foot unit. The images below show what I got with that...
