As you may have noticed, I have (at least for now) disabled the registration feature on this site. This is mainly due to too many spam registrations.
What is in place (and you can see the buttons on the login form already) is a social register/login feature. This allows you to log in using your existing Facebook, Twitter, Google or Disqus account. Important to know: Everyone who registered on this site before can still log in using their existing login and password but all new registrations must go through one of these services.
I hope this will cut down on the spam registrations and at the same time allow everyone to register. As a nice side benefit, this method doesn't force you to remember any more passwords than you already have....
Anticipated by many and announced last year at 3D Basecamp, SketchUp 2013 is now out and available for download. If you are still using SU 8 (or dare I say even 7 or 6), swing over to their website and download the latest version. The free version is still free and there are upgrade options for the Pro version.
So what's new? Quite a few things. Here's the run-down:
Extension Warehouse
There is finally an official place where you can find the many plugins and extensions that are available for SketchUp (including mine). While all the other sites out there (Ruby Library Depot, SketchUcation, Smustard and even my sketchupplugins.com) did a great job accumulating these, the new warehouse is integrated right into SketchUp (just look for the toolbar button) and it features one-click installation and plugin updating as well as the usual app-store stuff of reviews, popularity stats and hopefully later: ratings.
This might have turned SketchUp into the first CAD application with an App Store!
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Have you ever wanted to…
make sure you never miss a blog post by the Trimble SketchUp folks?
stay up-do-date with your favorite SketchUp blogs?
follow what’s going on at SketchUcation?
keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook?
make sure you never miss any of my blog posts?
do all of this while you are working with SketchUp?
Then consider yourself lucky! I just posted a SketchUp News plugin that lets you do all of this – right inside SketchUp.
Even if you don’t usually use SketchUp plugins, this is the one to have!
Get your copy at the link below. Oh, and did I mention it is free?
http://www.alexschreyer.net/projects/sketchup-news-plugin/
Enjoy!...
I finally got around to updating my Ruby Code Editor to version 3.0. There are quite a few upgrades including: better environment stability (editor, scrolling, results, etc.), code completion for SketchUp classes and methods and a variety of other minor updates (including the fact that it now remembers the last file).
The following video gives a brief overview of the current version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGWs9p2WZsg
As always, you can get this editor from my website (and look at the more detailed changelog or leave comments) at:http://www.alexschreyer.net/projects/sketchup-ruby-code-editor/
For more on what you can do with this tool, check out Chapter 6 in my book "Architectural Design with SketchUp".
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I just published a page (under the book companion pages) called "Freebies" where I am giving stuff away!
At this point, this page features texture images and spherical environments, which you can use for your SketchUp renderings. All of them are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Therefore, feel free to use any of them in your (personal and commercial) projects.
Although the environments are only LDR (not HDR) and most textures don't tile, they can be very useful as the rendering above this text shows.
Keep checking the Freebies page (or my Flickr sets) often as I will be adding material regularly....
