UPDATE:Unfortunately this service is no longer available.
One of the hardest tasks with 3D printing with SketchUp is often making something that has not been modeled properly 3D printable. This means that whatever geometry you are given needs to be turned into a "watertight" or "manifold" solid. In SketchUp there are a bunch of extensions that help with this task (namely Solid Inspector and Solid Solver). But even they can't automatically fix a model like the one shown in the 3D viewer and images below. Fortunately for us, SketchUp and iMaterialize just announced a solution that is baked into 3D Warehouse.
An Example
As you can see, this model is an intersection of three shapes (made without using SketchUp's Intersect tool), where I removed two faces and introduced a small triangular hole in one of the faces.
I then uploaded this model to the 3D Warehouse the usual way (File > 3D Warehouse > Share Model...) and made sure the checkbox at the bottom was checked.
After a...
As every year, let's celebrate the season with a bit of digital "bling"! This time, it's just a simple SketchUp model of a fractal tree that I enhanced a bit in Sketchfab's editor. Yes, it is WebGL and you are allowed to play with it. Have fun!
To you and your loved ones a peaceful and joyful holiday season and a happy and successful new year 2015.
Cheers,
Alex...
This is What's New...
Depending on who you ask and how those people use SketchUp, it is quite likely that they will hone in on different favorite elements in the 2015 release of SketchUp, which came out just this week and parallel to Trimble's Dimensions user conference in Las Vegas (which I attended, hence the late post). High on many people's wishlist was 64 Bit support, so that is likely what will get mentioned most. Others will find the new IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) importer extremely useful. Here is my perspective on the new features:
The performance improvements from 64 Bit support, face-finder improvements, and the "fast styles" labels are significant. Even with a thorough, component-based workflow (as I described in Chapter 3 and in my Basecamp presentation) especially large models could in the past bog SketchUp down quite a bit. Things should now get much smoother, especially on powerful machines.
The now built-in IFC importer is a tremendous addition! This allows SketchUp to at least...
It's time for me to start working on an update to the "Architectural Design with SketchUp" book. While I already have several ideas for changes, I would love to hear from my current readers what they think should be changed, which new content should be added etc. Feel free to reply in the comments below this post....
Now that the semester is winding down, I can finally look back and post about the great SketchUp 3D Basecamp conference that happened 4/14-4/16 this year in Vail, Colorado.
As in years past, this was a meeting of SketchUp users, plugin authors, technology vendors, and, of course, all the makers of SketchUp. What was especially good this year was that the conference was held in the same place where everyone stayed, making things very convenient. Once we all arrived there - which was not all that easy due to a late-season snowstorm - we got to enjoy the beauty of Vail and the hospitality of the Vail Cascade hotel.
As part of days one and two I gave a presentation on "Components are our friends: How component-based modeling can improve your life" and a workshop (together with Daniel Tal) on "Plugins and Scripting for Architects". There were actually too many great presentations for anyone to attend, so the best way to catch up is actually to watch them...
