Anticipated by many and announced last year at 3D Basecamp, SketchUp 2013 is now out and available for download. If you are still using SU 8 (or dare I say even 7 or 6), swing over to their website and download the latest version. The free version is still free and there are upgrade options for the Pro version.
So what's new? Quite a few things. Here's the run-down:
Extension Warehouse
There is finally an official place where you can find the many plugins and extensions that are available for SketchUp (including mine). While all the other sites out there (Ruby Library Depot, SketchUcation, Smustard and even my sketchupplugins.com) did a great job accumulating these, the new warehouse is integrated right into SketchUp (just look for the toolbar button) and it features one-click installation and plugin updating as well as the usual app-store stuff of reviews, popularity stats and hopefully later: ratings.
This might have turned SketchUp into the first CAD application with an App Store!
Toolbar problems...
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....
Have you ever wanted to…
make sure you never miss a blog post by the Trimble SketchUp folks?
stay up-do-date with your favorite SketchUp blogs?
follow what’s going on at SketchUcation?
keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook?
make sure you never miss any of my blog posts?
do all of this while you are working with SketchUp?
Then consider yourself lucky! I just posted a SketchUp News plugin that lets you do all of this – right inside SketchUp.
Even if you don’t usually use SketchUp plugins, this is the one to have!
Get your copy at the link below. Oh, and did I mention it is free?
http://www.alexschreyer.net/projects/sketchup-news-plugin/
Enjoy!...
I finally got around to updating my Ruby Code Editor to version 3.0. There are quite a few upgrades including: better environment stability (editor, scrolling, results, etc.), code completion for SketchUp classes and methods and a variety of other minor updates (including the fact that it now remembers the last file).
The following video gives a brief overview of the current version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGWs9p2WZsg
As always, you can get this editor from my website (and look at the more detailed changelog or leave comments) at:http://www.alexschreyer.net/projects/sketchup-ruby-code-editor/
For more on what you can do with this tool, check out Chapter 6 in my book "Architectural Design with SketchUp"....
As you saw in example 4.6 in the book, unfolding a developable surface in SketchUp is very easy using the Unfold plugin. What do you do then, if you have a doubly-curved shape, such as the one shown above (from chapter 6)? Obviously, you can't just "flatten" it without distorting it (take the Mercator projection of world maps for an example of how unwrapping a sphere can lead to significant distortions). In this case, it might be a good strategy to unfold the surface in strips using the same technique described in example 4.6. This gives you the ability to cut the surface into separate parts that can then be assembled using gluing, welding etc. The image below illustrates how this looks after flattening.
TIP:This can now be done much easier with my Unwrap and Flatten Faces extension.
As you may have noticed, I also added some glue tabs using the Glue Tabs plugin (see chapter 4 for details). In order to...