In this tutorial I show my basic approach for making SketchUp objects (like the revolved vase from my last tutorial) 3D printable. This video just covers only some of the techniques - I explain the process in much more detail in Chapter 6 of my book "Architectural Design with SketchUp."
https://youtu.be/UXFUrHTZ-k8
In the video I mention these extensions:
ThomThom's Solid Inspector
I hope you find this useful and create some cool items. Feel free to post those in the discussion area below.
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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 from two portraits.
https://youtu.be/d5y5f965YAs
Keen readers of this blog may know that I covered this technique in one of my earliest posts. I had never done a video tutorial on this technique, however, which is now remedied.
While the basic technique uses only SketchUp's built-in tools, I also demonstrate some of Fredo6's extensions here:
Joint PushPull
FredoSpline
Curviloft
I hope you find this useful and create some cool items. Feel free to post those in the discussion area below.
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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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI6FvENlIno
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 needs to...
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...
As I discuss in Chapter 6, you can create a mobile in SketchUp and design it in the software so that - when 3D printed or otherwise fabricated - this mobile hangs perfectly in the balance. This process works for all planar designs, independent of how many levels such a mobile may have.
Example mobile with highlighted free-body diagram levels
Step 1: Break the mobile down into individual Free-Body Diagrams (FBDs)
The previous image shows one of my recent students' mobiles. It has a great theme and while it doesn't push this method enough (it is very symmetrical), it helps me explain this step.
From a structural perspective, you need to break down the entire mobile into its sub-structures and their respective free-body diagrams (FBDs). You basically need to separate each of its individual levels in this step. The image shows how this looks for my student's mobile.
Once broken down this way, you would analyze this mobile from the bottom to the top, following...
