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...
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...
This Sunday, I will be heading to Trimble's SketchUp 3D Basecamp in Boulder, Colorado.
This year's iteration of the Basecamp is promising to be a great event. There will be lots of presentations showing what can be done with SketchUp once one masters the basics. For example, rendering in SketchUp has a solid block on Tuesday's agenda. And then there will be a keynote by Makerbot's Bre Pettis. Wednesday offers a full-day Ruby scripting workshop for those interested.
For my part, I will on Tuesday morning show off how one can use Ruby scripting for design. This is an exciting topic, yet many people don't even know that what others do in Rhino and Revit can actually be done in SketchUp, too. See the image on the right as an example. So if you are interested in this, don't forget on Monday to vote for my talk and drop by on Tuesday morning.
Finally, this weekend will also mark the release of the companion website for my forthcoming book "Architectural Design with...