Official - Save $100 on Google SketchUp Pro

Helen put together a promo code that knocks $100 US off the price of a new single-user Pro license (it's normally $495). European and UK customers save 20%, which works out to about the same thing.

Good until June 19th.

via Official Google SketchUp Blog

SketchUp to Blender Armature Creator

But I had a brilliant idea the other day:

Make it easier to add the armature to Blender and to assign groups to bones in the armature.

[WIP/Experiment] X's - SketchUp to Blender Armature Creator

LightUp v1.5 available

Some hilights are:
- Color & UV animation
- Metal shader mode
- GUI improvements
- Better Proxy support
- Cubic image generation
- IES improvements

via LightUp

The House That Jeff Built

Jeff Lummis recently finished a great little Lego house (set #4956) with his daughter - he sent pictures.

He thought some readers might like to build it, and I thought that was a cool idea too. So, trying out my plugin, I was able to load SketchUp with all the parts needed to build this set (except this one part.) The plugin fetches the Peeron page for the set, parses out the part #, quantity and color, and then populates the model with Components.

The plugin needs a SketchUp library of components whose names match the part number in the inventory. I have about 100 parts of the library finished, and will be making it available with the plugin.

This is a publicly-editable model, so download it, work on it, and upload your changes. (I reserved the right to approve changes.)

When it's finished, I would like to test another part of the Lego plugin - creating build instructions from the model. At first I thought printed instructions were what I wanted, but why not just use SketchUp - the SketchUp model IS the instructions.

By using Scenes, you can step through each step of the build. In a model like this (bottom-up), the steps can be mostly automated because each vertical layer of bricks can be assumed to be a step. And that is exactly how this image was created.

Deck

Image of a deck I drew up some time ago now.

New Cadyou.com Model & Texture Search

Tom of cadyou.com has created a new 3d model and texture search application that searches 13 sites for models and textures.

The search returns thumbnail links of the models and textures, and has some great sorting and filtering options.

Give it a try - it works well, looks nice, and is a real time-saver if your searching assets.

Modelur - a SketchUp tool for parametric urban design

Besides being available for Microsoft Windows, the updated version now installs on Apple Mac OS X also and can be downloaded as a part of our Pre-beta Partner Program free of charge. Due to a great response to our initial release and thanks to help of our prebeta-testers, we can now provide three additional (Portuguese, German and French) translations of the Modelur user interface.

http://www.modelur.com/