SketchUp 3D Basecamp (and Trimble Dimensions) 2024 – Recap

SketchUp 3D Basecamp (and Trimble Dimensions) 2024 – Recap

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
SketchUp's party was in the not-quite-rectilinear Frank Gehry-designed "Keep Memory Alive" event center 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 3D Basecamp used that location, too. Overall, the venue was great (as can be expected in Vegas)! Basecamp had its own space on the third floor of the Venetian's conference center, complete with a Knowledge Hub, Art Gallery & Lounge, an AR Exhibit Space, and a SketchUp Labs zone that allowed everyone to test unreleased features and provide feedback on SketchUp directly to the developers. But most importantly: This event is always a great time to check in with old friends and fellow SketchUp-pers and see which cool projects everyone is working on. Equipment at...
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Never miss SketchUp News, Videos, and Articles with this Extension and (New!) Web App

Never miss SketchUp News, Videos, and Articles with this Extension and (New!) Web App

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
I recently refreshed my SketchUp News extension. You can now stay on top of SketchUp News (from blogs, videos, forum discussions, and social media) in three ways: As before, with the SketchUp extension (download from the Extension Warehouse or here). On this website on the SketchUp News Viewer page. As an installed (Progressive) Web App. You can install it on your computer or phone/tablet with the instructions on the bottom of the SketchUp News Viewer page. This news dashboard updates every hour and features many of the sources that you are all following already - albeit in a convenient format and in a single place. Video https://youtu.be/Lwri-QGoRMw...
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Adding AI Vision to SketchUp with OpenAI’s gpt-4o Model (Ruby Snippet)

Adding AI Vision to SketchUp with OpenAI’s gpt-4o Model (Ruby Snippet)

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
Response to the prompt: "Is there anything wrong with this building?" Earlier this week, OpenAI released its new gpt-4o model. This model not only improves and updates its current AI models, but it also adds vision ability. As a result, a user can upload images and then the AI can identify things in the image based on a user prompt. There are some great examples of the new capability on OpenAI's website. Since I previously implemented the OpenAI connection with SketchUp using both plain Ruby code and a handy extension, I had to try out whether we can connect the two using these new capabilities, too. One use case for this could then be the ability to ask questions like "What may be missing in my model?" or "Is there a cat in the model?" (Not sure why you would ask the latter but it leads to a correct answer!) As it turns out, giving SketchUp this AI capability is not too hard...
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SketchUp 2024 is Out!

SketchUp 2024 is Out!

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
A New Graphics Engine, Ambient Occlusion, Improved Trimble Connect Integration, Modeling and File Format Improvements, and Better Error Handling What's New in SketchUp? Introducing a cleaner UI, and Teddy! As of yesterday, the latest version of SketchUp (2024) is available. And as it turns out, this one has several nice & visible new features and others that are more "under the hood". On the first impression side (see image above) there is a cleaner UI: Look at the panels in the default tray and their headings and you can see how the flat graphics now look much cleaner and modern (and more consistent with the web and iPad versions). Now if we could only also have dark mode... There is also a new scale figure, Teddy! Hi There! New Graphics Engine & Ambient Occlusion SketchUp's new graphics engine The new graphics engine is one of these features that - I am guessing - takes a lot of work to implement and then when everything goes right, things...
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The Cube – A Fun SketchUp Diffusion AI Experiment

The Cube – A Fun SketchUp Diffusion AI Experiment

by Alex SchreyerNo Comments
In this video I am having a bit of fun with the new SketchUp Diffusion tool… Give this a try: Add only a single cube to your modeling space and then try to create an interesting visualization from that using only the prompts and the styles in SketchUp Diffusion. This is actually a great way to explore prompt engineering. It is interesting how the AI is able to capture the general orientation of the scene from just the cube and the horizon line behind it. You can find my original forum post about this on the SketchUp forums here. And admittedly I based this on a competition that the Blender community has been doing for a while. Check those out, too. For more on what you can do with SketchUp and Diffusion, take a look at my initial post about this topic. Video https://youtu.be/dQmV58Jlq4c Examples Here are some of my own examples: Prompt: "A treasure in a luxurious space." Prompt: “A floating, death star spacecraft over a...
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