Advanced Guide to SketchUp: Toolbars

Video: SketchUp Techniques for Woodworking

Dave Richards has posted an excellent video showing his approach to drawing in SketchUp.

In the video, Dave makes fast work of drawing a fern stand using SketchUp's Tools; and is focused on (smart) modeling techniques and work-flow.

The video assumes only basic SketchUp skills, but even expert users might learn something new.



View the article on Fine Woodworking's Design. Click. Build blog.

Merry Christmas!

SketchUp Tutorial

Martin Rinehart has added a few chapters (11 - 14) about SketchUp/Ruby programming to his Edges to Rubies tutorial.

Glue-tab plugin for Unfold

I came across this plugin while looking at github for project hosting.

It is a tool that adds a glue-tab on selected edges:

Download here

Update to Sketchup Sun Position Plugin

Here's an update from Gabriel -

The biggest changes are the following:

1. The settings are now automatically saved.

2. The Sun's altitude and azimuth for the day can be saved to a html file for easy viewing.

3. The north angle in Sketchup can be customized and an option for viewing the north angle has also been added.

To anyone who already has one of the older versions of this plugin installed, this newest one is definitely worth the upgrade!

Thanks!
Gabriel

[ Sketchup Sun Position Plugin ]

Plugin: Simple Springs: FEA Spring-Mass Model

The beginnings of a Finite Element Analysis plugin for SketchUp is being developed by a user named qpik.



The author is seeking input from the community about how best to apply the mathematics in SketchUp. If you think you can help, please join the discussion on sketchucation.

Plugin: Camera Recorder

Chris Fullmer released a new SketchUp plugin to save a walk-through, and export it as a series of images.

This plugin will record your navigation movements and export them as a series of images. You can then put them together into a movie using something like Quicktime Pro.

Camera Recorder is hosted on sketchucation.com

SketchUp Developers Observer Wishlist

Google SketchUp software engineers are asking the developer community to provide feedback about the Sketchup Observer classes.

In order to try to prioritize which Observer to fix first I would love to collect some data on the following topics:

what are the Observers that you would like to see added to SketchUp?

which are the observers that you would like to use but that do not work?

When I have some data I am hoping to push for fixing/adding those.

The discussion can be read here.

Plugin: Colr Explorer

Colr Explorer is a SketchUp plug-in for exploring colors through searches and tags.

It's simple, intuitive windows allows you to search for tagged colors, select the tags, and find similar colors to add to your model.

Selecting the color swatch will add that color to the SketchUp model, and start the Paint tool so you may begin coloring with the selected color immediately.

You will need to be online to use this plug-in.




Download Page

Installation:

Download and unzip the files to your disk drive. Then move the contents into your Plugins folder, and restart SketchUp. The folder should look very similar to the image if installed correctly.



Colr Explorer uses data (with permission) from the www.colr.org website - a free site where you can create color schemes, and tag both individual colors and schemes.

Colr Explorer uses the microajax.js - a tiny and easy AJAX library.

Plugin: Goldilocks

Adam Billyard, developer of LightUp for SketchUp posted this texturing helper plugin:

Goldilocks analyzes your materials and model with respect to the current viewpoint and produces a bar chart showing which textures are about the right resolution (green bars), and which are too high resolution resulting in wasted space/larger filesize, or too low resolution resulting in a blurry look - both shown as red bars.

[ goldilocks.rb is host on SCF ]