Turn Yourself into a Vase with SketchUp! (Making Rotational Portrait Sculptures from Silhouettes for 3D Printing)

Turn Yourself into a Vase with SketchUp! (Making Rotational Portrait Sculptures from Silhouettes for 3D Printing)

You likely have seen the effect before: An image like the one above shows some shapes that look like vases. After a little while, however, you notice that the curved shapes that define the vases are actually faces - or more specific: the negative silhouette of the faces. As it turns out, this can easily be accomplished in SketchUp. Turning these shapes into real objects is also pretty simple these days as long as you have access to a 3D printer, a CNC lathe or can browse the web, where you can order 3D printed objects from any of the vendors that I list on this page. Follow these steps to turn yourself into a vase: 1. Take a good silhouette picture. Then import it into SketchUp. For this first step, we will be using a technique similar to the one that I employed for the tree cutout component in Chapter 5. 2. On the exploded picture, trace the outline of the silhouette....
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Analyze This! Creating Geometry for Structural Analysis in SketchUp

Analyze This! Creating Geometry for Structural Analysis in SketchUp

SketchUp is a great software for creating 3D or 2D geometry that can then be imported into analysis software (or used for analysis right in SketchUp). You already saw a few examples for this in my book: One is the building energy analysis setup with the OpenStudio plugin that I describe in chapter 4 in the book. Another one is the lighting analysis that you can do with some rendering software (LightUp is shown as one example in Chapter 5). What I want to go over here is how you can create a structural geometry model in SketchUp that you can then export to a structural analysis application. In my case, I am using VisualAnalysis because I use it for my teaching as well. This software is available for students as a free version and allows for importing DXF models. Of course, you can use the same method with other analysis software packages as well, just make sure you are able...
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