Having Some Fun with AI: The Snarky Architecture Critic

Having Some Fun with AI: The Snarky Architecture Critic

In case you are in need of an opinionated architectural critique, look no further. You can now employ AI for that! With the recently introduced vision capabilities in OpenAI's services and therefore my OpenAI Explorer SketchUp extension, you can now ask questions about what is in your SketchUp model. But that's not all: For a little bit more bite in that critique, you can even give the AI response a specific personality, e.g. the snarky critic in my video below. You can do that via the System Message option in its settings. Just add a line like the one shown in the image below and then that instruction will apply to the entire conversation between you and the AI. As you likely know by now, you can download the OpenAI Explorer SketchUp extension and learn more about how it works here. Got any other fun and/or useful ways to employ this new tool in SketchUp? Let me know in the comments below. Video https://youtu.be/Nv4jzMoY7y4...
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Compound (Boolean) Geometry in SketchUp with Solid Tools

Compound (Boolean) Geometry in SketchUp with Solid Tools

When you need to create complex geometry in SketchUp, it is often better to break an item into positive (solid) parts and negative (void) parts that you can then subtract from each other with SketchUp's Pro's Solid Tools. In this example, I am showing this process for a cast steel structural connector, but the principle applies to many other shapes as well. Because this process uses solid geometry from beginning to end, the result is also a solid and therefore easily 3D printable. Side view My model doesn't replicate the geometry of this piece exactly, but this is an example of such geometry Tutorial Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrhfJjT8YBQ Links Some of the tools I used here are: SketchUp's built-in tools: Solid Tools (specifically the Subtract tool) Parallel-projection camera view Hide / show FredoCorner Extension - One of Fredo6's excellent extensions that allows you to round corners...
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Turn yourself (or a loved one) into a vase (Video)

Turn yourself (or a loved one) into a vase (Video)

In this video tutorial I show how you can take a portrait of a loved one (or yourself) and - using SketchUp - turn it into a revolved object that you can then use as a vase, cup, candle holder etc. This technique is simple and makes for a great gift (e.g. by 3D printing). As a bonus, I show how you can create a face-morphing shape with two portraits. Keen readers of this blog may know that I covered this technique in a step-by-step tutorial in one of my earliest posts. I had never done a video tutorial on this technique, however, which is hereby remedied. Tutorial Video https://youtu.be/d5y5f965YAs Links While the basic technique uses only SketchUp's built-in tools, I also demonstrate some of Fredo6's extensions here: Joint PushPull - An extension that lets you thicken any surface. FredoSpline - This is useful for creating smooth curves and converting between different curve types. Curviloft - This lets you "morph" between two outlines. I hope you find this useful...
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Make your life easy: Load SketchUp extensions from a cloud folder with a small Ruby script

Make your life easy: Load SketchUp extensions from a cloud folder with a small Ruby script

Are you using SketchUp Pro on multiple computers? As I mention in Chapter 2, it may make sense to leverage one of the many cloud storage services (that you may already be using) like Dropbox, OneDrive, GDrive, etc. to make your life easier by synchronizing those. In essence, using the approach presented here, you can off-load extensions that you want to have available on both machines onto a shared drive, and then you load them back from the respective computers using the script shown below. Tutorial Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI6FvENlIno Tutorial Steps Step 1: Designate a folder on your cloud drive First, designate a folder on your cloud-synchronized drive as the Plugins folder. As you can see in my example below, I am using OneDrive (at C:/Users/<username>/OneDrive/SketchUp/Plugins), but you can use any other service, too (e.g. for Dropbox on Windows it would likely be C:/Users/<username>/Dropbox/). Of course, for this to work you need to have a cloud-synchronized local folder, not just an online folder. And that folder...
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GPT-3.5-Turbo vs. GPT-4 with the SketchUp OpenAI Explorer extension

GPT-3.5-Turbo vs. GPT-4 with the SketchUp OpenAI Explorer extension

Now that version 2.1 of the SketchUp OpenAI Explorer extension is available, it is easier to test the AI's capabilities when using the most recent GPT-4 model. In this post, I will be comparing side-by-side the gpt-3.5-turbo and the gpt-4 models with a few common examples. If you want to give this a try, too, make sure you have access to the gpt-4 model and then simply replace the model name in my SketchUp extension's settings dialog. The extension page on my other website features a longer list of successful prompts than what I am able to cover here. Feel free to give those a try, too. Example1: Draw a Box For this example, I asked the AI to draw a 2' (i.e. "two foot") box. I wanted to test not only whether the box would get drawn correctly, but also if the foot tick mark would be interpreted correctly as the foot unit. The images below show what I got with that...
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