What's New in SkIndigo 2.2

What IS new in Skindigo 2.2?

• Integrated Indigo Material Database Search
• Sun Position Override Tool
• New Color Picker Interface for Emitter Color
• Custom Light Layer Names
• Save Custom Defaults
• New Interface for Setting Absorption
• Select Camera Response Function
• Network Rendering Settings
• New Material Presets
• New Subdivision Settings
• Support for Surface Color (Absorption Layer Transmittance)
• Support for Preview Thumbnails on Mac
• Support for Back Face Export
• Scene Tab Object Animation Support
• Automatically Check for SkIndigo Updates
• Recalibrated Background Color Gain
• Critical Bug-Fix (Windows)
• Many other bug-fixes and usability improvements
• And a partridge in a pear tree.

And that's a lot of new.

link to [ What's New in SkIndigo 2.2: ]

SketchUp Most Common Mistakes PDF

The Most Common Mistakes Tutorial is a great SketchUp tutorial written by J-m@n - a long-time contributor to SketchUp community.

The tutorial does not teach how to use SketchUp; it teaches good SketchUp techniques by showing you what to avoid. It shows many common mistakes made by new users, and how to avoid them. It talks about creating models that are appropriate for their purpose; for example, a model made for Google Earth will be approached differently than one made for rendering. The ultimate purpose of the tutorial is to improve the quality of your models.

It's a must-read for newbies, and a good review for SketchUp veterans.

Visit J-m@n's page under the Tutorials link to read Most Common Mistakes.

Challenge Your 3D Skills

For 5 years the SketchUp 3D Challenge Blog has been posting challenges, and it's still going strong. The blog posts regular SketchUp modeling challenges which are open to anyone.

These are community challenges, community decides the topic of challenge also community voting will decide winners. Anyone can take part in challenges. The challenging environment of community, sharing of knowledge & winning challenge will improve your skills in Sketchup 3d modeling. Community can learn from each others, understand new tips & tricks. Have fun in creating your models. Showcase your work, learn from mistakes.

[ Challenge yourself ]

Three days left to purchase at 295€ | Indigo Renderer

Three days left to purchase at 295€ | Indigo Renderer: "A reminder - if you want to purchase before the price rises to 595€, you need to purchase Indigo before the 1st of February. Use the buy now button, or contact us for volume licence pricing."

PhotoSculpt: 3D Models from Images

Thought this was kind of cool. It's hard to tell, but it probably generates a little too high-poly models for SketchUp, but that can be fixed.


What is PhotoSculpt Textures ?

PhotoSculpt Textures is a new software due to release in 2010 that creates high definition 3D textures or 3D models from 2 photos of the same subject taken from 2 different viewpoints.

Top Features :

* Very high quality of depth detail
* Very high resolution results
* Very fast : 3d model are displayed on screen within seconds while still processing
* 3d model export (obj, stl)
* texture map export (color, depth, normal, ambient occlusion, specular)
* Tileable texture option

Price: not determined yet




http://www.photosculpt.net

Plugin: City-Up For Sketch-Up

Fast city development; take GIS,
city planning, CGI and game development to a new level!

City-Up features:

Automatically calculate buildings based on their width length.

Create 3D architectural detail using any combination of floors, windows, doors, facia or walls. No more flat textures!

Uses any combination of texture styles (comes with over 20) to create millions of different buildings. Small texture footprint of only 5 MB per city!*

Add your own custom texture styles using our drag & drop technology for even more combinations. No need to restart Sketch-Up.

City-Up For Sketch-Up

Cooperative rendering for Yafaray -- Corefarm.org

"Corefarm is a place where you can either submit your Yafaray rendering job or participate to other users' rendering tasks. Corefarm splits your job in several small pieces and distributes them across the internet, leading to impressive rendering times."

Unfortunately, there is no direct exporter for SketchUp (can use Blender,) but there is no reason there couldn't be one. It might even make a good project for a Google Summer of Code project.

[ Link to Yafaray XML spec. ]

rschenk's Sketchup-Glue-Tab-Plugin

Here's a small update to the Glue Tab SketchUp plug-in. It allows setting of the tab width using the Measurements toolbar.

rschenk's Sketchup-Glue-Tab-Plugin at master - GitHub

Wings 3d Vesion 1.2 Released

For anyone who uses Wings 3D in your work-flow, a new version is out.

Wings 3d

Octane Render- The Interactive Physically Based Render Engine

Octane Render- The Interactive Physically Based Render Engine: "Octane Render is the worlds first GPU based, un-biased, physically based renderer. As opposed to the handfull of processor cores available in CPU's, the GPU typically has hundreds of cores for parallel processing making it the best resource for rendering in your computer. Yet, to date no other software makes use of it in the way that Octane does. With even a single mid-range GPU you can typically expect to see a 1000%-1500% (10X to 15X) speed increase over a typical un-biased, CPU based renderer."

SketchUp Furniture Design Contest

Introducing the CustomMade.com Design Challenge. Using Google® SketchUp (or other 3D modeling software), entrants are invited to submit their design for a piece of furniture that illustrates what they’ve been looking for but have been unable to find in the marketplace. Enjoy the process of designing your own furniture and win the chance to have that very piece custom made.

Design and Win Custom Made Furniture | CustomMade.com Woodworking Blog

Downloading the PDF manuals - SketchUp Help

Just a quick link to the PDF SketchUp Manuals.

Downloading the manuals - SketchUp Help

Plugin: Sketchup Skeletal Animation

I haven't had a chance to try this one out yet, but it sounds like it could become an important plug-in for SketchUp animators.

This module makes it possible to create and animate bones (essentially components) within a skeletal hierarchy. These bones are animated with keyframes that define the local axis and duration of each rotation.

This is released under the Apache License 2.0. All comments and assistance are welcome.

sketchup-skel - Project Hosting on Google Code

How to make a paper model with Sketchup

paperguitar.com has posted this tutorial showing How to make a paper model with Sketchup

Indigo 2.2. Released - 2x Faster

A new version of the Indigo renderer has been released and is claiming a twofold increase in speed over version 2.0. Impressive.

Indigo 2.2 | Indigo Renderer

Crestview Doors on the 3D Warehouse

I ran across these fine models a few weeks ago while browsing the 3D Warehouse.

Dave of Crestview Doors has since been working hard to perfect them and get them online so you can use them in your designs.

Visit Crestview Doors for more information.

More Information on Today's SketchUp Release

Here are the version numbers for all the languages and platforms released today:

Windows:
7.1.6860 English
7.1.6863 German
7.1.6864 Spanish
7.1.6865 French
7.1.6866 Italian
7.1.6867 Japanese

For Mac:
7.1.6859 English
7.1.6871 German
7.1.6872 Spanish
7.1.6873 French
7.1.6874 Italian
7.1.6905 Japanese

Thanks to Andrew of the Google SketchUp team for the information.

SketchUp 7.1 Maintenance Release Available

A new maintenance release for Google SketchUp 7.1 has been released today, and focuses on bug fixes and security.

The Windows version should read: 7.1.6860 when viewing "About Sketchup" from the Help menu.

Official SketchUp Blog

7.1 M2 Release Notes

Download.

SU Animate Version 3.1

SketchUp Animate version 3.1 released. What's new:

• Use Components not just Groups
• Nested Groups allows for rotation and forward movement at the same time
• Animation Preview Controls
• Multiple Camera Targets
• Polyline and circular path tools
• Animation Preview tool
• Toolbar to quickly access SU Animate Functions
• Arrow indicating direction of path

Check out the video demos for 3.1.

[ SUAnimate ]

sam brown

Here's another SketchUp bot by
sam brown

Recent SketchUp Model

A lovely chair model I made last week, rendered.

Article: Google SketchUp and Public History

Just a quick link to an article about SketchUp and Public History in case someone has an interest.

Musings on Public History: Google SketchUp and Public History

cartoonz3D

Some awesome models and images of car caricatures created in SketchUp.

cartoonz3D

New SketchUp Blog from Poland

A new SketchUp blog in the Polish language has made its appearance just this week -

bocian writes:

Hi,

A few days ago I opened a new blog describing the Google SketchUp.
Service is not yet fully operational, but a few days the situation should be changed.

Content are published in Polish, this is the first of its kind blog in my country.

Visit Sketchupownia - Polski blog o Google SketchUP.

DrPetter's homepage - Sculptris

DrPetter's homepage - Sculptris: "This is a work-in-progress sculpting tool that I've been developing since early December 2009. Its main feature is dynamic mesh tesselation that will provide additional detail where necessary, without the user needing to worry about it.

I've released an alpha version that is available for anyone who wants to try it out. Be aware that it's an early build though, and it is known to crash and misbehave occasionally. Save your work often to avoid getting burned."



[ via http://www.sublog.net/ ]

Price raise to 595€ from 1st of February | Indigo Renderer

Price raise to 595€ from 1st of February | Indigo Renderer: "As from February 1st, Indigo 2 will cost 595€ and node licences will cost 195€. This price rise reflects the continued development of Indigo and the new documentation, user interface improvements since Indigos commercial release. If you are keen to lock in Indigo 2 at the current price of 295€, you should purchase from our store prior to midnight, 31st of January (UTC). Educational prices will remain constant. Upgrade pricing will be decided at a later date.

http://store.glaretechnologies.com/"

Podium 1.7.2 Beta

On the heels of Podium Beta 2 comes Podium 1.7.2:

In SU Podium 1.7.2, Render All has been improved or rather "fixed". With this version, Render All works as it was original designed to. That is, when Render All is invoked, all scenes in the model will be rendered. With previous versions, Render All would quit working after a small number of scenes were rendered. Using 1.7.2 and Render All, it is possible to create animations where the camera moves through the model as in a walk-thru or fly-thru animation. There are several steps to creating the final animation but the most important step, Render All, works without having to resort to patching various models and scenes together.

When invoked, Render All renders each scene. To save time, only the first scene's geometry is processed. Each subsequent scene's camera view is then rendered. One draw back to this method is that object animations can not be created with Render All. You are limited to camera animations. Render All saves each rendered scene's JPG image to a designated folder. When it is complete, you can take all the images that were rendered and use Windows or Mac programs like Movie Maker or Quick Time Pro to create a video animation. The idea is that each scene in SketchUp is like a frame in a movie. When each scene is rendered with Render All, each JPG image can be used as a frame. When "stitched" together with Movie Maker or Quick Time, a walk-thru video animation is created. With 1.7.2's improved Render All function, the process is quite simple.

https://www.suplugins.com

Phlatboys Balsa Buddy Preview

I was reading the phlatforum and came across this post from September. It looks like Mark & Trish are working on a new machine which will be named the BalsaBuddy.

The BB looks like a small version of Phlatboys Phlatprinter foam cutter; but is designed for cutting hard materials such as plastic and wood.

In Mark's words:

You will still be able to cut foam but as well we want to be able to cut lite ply, plastics, etc.. :) (Not sure of all the cool materials we will be able to cut with this one yet :D )

The tool on this machine will be interchangeable from the Dremel to the Rotozip direct face mount on the z gantry to allow for larger collet sizes which will open us up to a whole new level of bit selections!

Right now the dimensions are at 18.5" for the Length, 9.5", Depth 13" Height (without handle)

The cutting material width max is 12.5" The height is 0.5" but I am working on moving that up.

All axis will be geared using belt and pulley reduction. The z will use amce geared as well.

These are all target sizes and components for this machine as we start the testing phase there will be changes I'm sure, but its going together nice and compact and really looking strong.

I have left several key features off of the above picture :) I don't want to show too much at this stage and spoil the surprise.

You really can't get an idea of just how small the BalsaBuddy is until you see someone holding it so I am going to try and get Trish to take a pic for us. :)

Thanks guys
Mark

There's no word on when the machine will be available.

I've blogged about the Phlatboys machines in the past because I think they're brilliant. For about $1,000 you can have a dremel-powered, 3-axis cnc router that fits on a table, and best of all, you can cut designs made in SketchUp.

And although the machine was designed originally for cutting out remote-controlled airplanes from foam, the potential applications are endless - just check out the gallery and videos.

ICEVision: Explore Your Model in a 3D Game Environment

From the ICEVision site:

ICEvision Viewer allows you to explore Revit, AutoCAD, SketchUp Pro and ICE 3D models in a Dynamically Rendered 3D window.

Through our patented use of 3D video game technology, you are free to explore your model in a natural manner, simply by walking into your design and taking a look around.


[ www.ice-edge.com ]