Dear friends and colleagues,
I wish you and your loved ones a peaceful and joyous holiday season, a Merry Christmas, and a healthy, happy, and successful new year 2021! After the current year turned out a bit different than everyone expected, there is certainly much hope and some certainty that next year will be better on several fronts.
Cheers,Alex
P.S.: The inspiration for this year's holiday image took me back to a visit to Quebec's Ice Hotel from several years ago. As always, everything is modeled in SketchUp and then (for the first time) rendered in Enscape. The tree punch out on the back wall was done using an image and my Scale By Tools extension.
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I just published two new SketchUp extensions that were both based on Ruby code that was either previously posted on this site or in my book, Architectural Design with SketchUp".
Random Tools
Ever wanted to place large swaths of randomly-arranged grass in SketchUp as shown in the image above? Have you been frustrated by textures that repeat a bit too much on copied wood boards? Do I have an extension for you...
Read the announcement
Scale By Tools
Using the provided tools, you can scale, move or rotate objects based on an image or a mathematical equation. For the equation, you can choose between a trigonometric function or a power function. It is also possible to use image data to push/pull faces or move vertices, which can be useful to create ripples on water or a heightfield topography.
Read the announcement...
I now have a dedicated Twitter handle for anything related to my sketchupfordesign.com site, which contains tutorials, videos, news, and companion materials for my book, "Architectural Design with SketchUp". If you are interested, follow:
@sketchup4design...
Scan Explorer in SketchUp
A few days ago, the Trimble folks announced the release of a new point cloud extension for SketchUp, Trimble Scan Essentials For SketchUp. This came on the heels of their release of version 2020.1 of SketchUp Pro. And if you asked me, being able to easily work with point clouds in SketchUp is absolutely the most exciting feature of this year's release cycle!
Never heard of point clouds? Check out this Wikipedia article as a primer.
Up until recently, Trimble produced the Scan Explorer extension for SketchUp that allowed you to load a point cloud and extract construction points, planes, etc. into the 3D model. The workflow was a bit clunky in that the cloud would never load into the modeling environment but remained in the viewer dialog. This is now much improved in this new extension.
I should mention at this point that there are also other LIDAR and point cloud extensions for SketchUp, most notably Undet, which you...
Dear friends and colleagues,
I wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas, a peaceful and joyous holiday season and a healthy, happy, and successful new year 2020!
Cheers,
Alex
P.S. Once again my card is a SketchUp model, this time with a wood-block print theme. Rendering was again accomplished in Sketchfab. In case you want to play with the original model, here it is:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/xmas2019-5385a758e8ab447bad301f7236c68ce5
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