By now you most probably have heard that SketchUp 2014 has been released. There are quite a few great new-feature overviews and reviews out there and I'll suggest you look at the ones linked at the end of this post to get up to speed. For now, I just wanted to show you why the Ruby update in SketchUp 2014 is pretty amazing. Look at this image:
We can now use web requests in our Ruby code!
What is so interesting about the image above? Well - those are images that were loaded from Flickr directly into SketchUp using the now included "net/http" library. Since SU 2014 not only updated Ruby to 2.0 but also included all of the standard libraries, stuff like this is now possible. You can integrate Net functionality much more and create all kinds of interesting mash-ups. To replicate what I did above, copy the following code snippet and either paste it into the Ruby Console (it now accepts...
As you just saw in the CLT example, having a good texture makes all the difference when you create renderings in SketchUp. I also discussed this in some length in the book (especially in the rendering chapter). To expand on this topic, here are some tips for two cases:
Making a Seamless Texture
Obviously a seamlessly repeating (a "tiling") texture is the most efficient way to go when you use textures. This allows you to use a small image to fill a large space. And if you use a good texture, you won't even see any seams or repeating patterns. As I described in the book, there are many places where you can get good quality tiling textures.
Steps
What do you do when you need to make your own? First of all, start with a good image! This typically requires a few simple but important steps:
Find the texture you are looking for (a brick wall, grass etc.). Be careful with the sun's position....
Rendering of the newly-textured CLTs
With Cross-Laminated Timber (often abbreviated to CLT) available now as a new and exciting building material, I am sure some of you will need to include these in your SketchUp models, too. To help you out a bit, I am making SketchUp components of 3-ply and 5-ply CLT panels available. You can download them from my 3D Warehouse account (you can just search for "CLT" in the Components window in SketchUp).
Models and Textures
Click on the links below to preview and access them. I am making these available under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
If you need the raw textures for your own creations, you can download these images from my Flickr account here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexschreyer/8892850629/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexschreyer/8892850691
These are from my textures set.
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So now that you have upgraded to SketchUp 2013 you should be facing the question: What to do with SketchUp's plugins in this release. After all, when you started the new software for the first time, it likely only had the default plugins installed that Trimble released with it. But there was also a new toolbar button for the Extension Warehouse! At this time, you have a few options. Let's look at them:
A) You are upgrading and you had plugins installed in the earlier version
With the new Extension Warehouse and the SketchUcation Plugin Store now available, which both include one-click install and easy updating, it makes most sense to get plugins that are hosted in these places through the respective installers. So even if you had installed specific plugins in a previous version of SketchUp, I would recommend to go to these tools first to find them (instead of simply copying the Plugins folder). So here's my suggested order of...
The folks over at SketchUcation recently released a plugin that allows you to a) browse their extensive collection of plugins and b) directly install them. Very nifty! The image above shows the search function (you can also browse by author or category) and the image below shows the install button.
Go ahead and try it out here.
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