Autodesk Labs software trials

And the good ideas keep on coming! As just announced by Autodesk Labs in their post Project Twitch Range Expanded: can YOU connect?, Autodesk extended the range of their application tryout platform “Twitch” beyond the originally stated 1000 mile radius. Now user connection capability is just limited by a network latency cutoff. And as I just found out, this means that I am able to connect – from Massachusetts. AutoCAD even loaded faster than on my local machine!

I very much like the idea of web-based software tryouts. Typically when I try software on my (admittedly aging) machine, it leaves some garbage behind that even my Revo Uninstaller can’t safely get rid of. Autodesk’s “twitchy” little app would get rid of that problem by running the application itself on a remote server and letting users download a small viewer that remotely connects to its user interface.

Of course, this doesn’t allow to test application performance on the local machine and how well it works with the given hardware and graphics configuration. But it is a great first step in the testing cycle.

It gives me now hope that more software vendors will go this route and offer free web-based “live” previews of their programs. This might even be an idea for Google or Amazon to run in their data centers.

P.S.: Apparently the developers are quite taken with their own product. One of the DLLs installed by this service is called “awesomium.dll”.

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SketchUp Ruby API and plugins cheatsheet

I like working with cheatsheets when I do coding. Although the online API reference is very extensive and has great examples and the downloadable version is a good solution when you’re offline, this one may be useful as a reference once you mastered the basic concepts. It contains the full API reference in a condensed form. It also has a plugin template and some code snippets. Feel free to suggest improvements and additions for future versions.

You can download the PDF file here:

SketchUp Ruby API and Plugins Cheatsheet v.2.1 [SU v.7.1] (63.05 KB, downloaded 381 times) -

Other useful Ruby cheatsheets and helpers are:

• SketchUcation – Ruby forum (look for the sticky posts for general helpers)
• Notepad++ autocomplete files – also from SCF
• Jim’s WebConsole – a coding helper in SketchUp
• Ruby cheatsheets: here, here, here

Below is an older version of the cheatsheet. It lists only the API classes and methods line-by-line and prints on five pages.

SketchUp Ruby API Cheatsheet

SketchUp Ruby API listing v.1 [SU v.7] (28.16 KB, downloaded 233 times) -

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Yayyy!!! A new version!

Software updates are always exciting… New features are to be explored, new capabilities exploited for as-yet unknown projects. Contrary to Autodesk’s religious update schedule, Google has been only somewhat regular in providing updates. But alas, announced by today’s blog post by John Bacus, SketchUp’s project manager, the new version of SketchUp is here. And it’s a free upgrade to every Pro 7 user! (This also means that my Boulder-visit-induced gag-order has been lifted)

So what’s new in SketchUp? Let’s summarize what’s on this page.

• A new rendering engine
  This is a major improvement to the way we can work with SketchUp. Apparently the developers replaced SketchUp’s display system with something much more efficient. Large models now handle better and if too much is being moved around visually, the view degrades and usability is preserved. This is happening concurrent to Google Earth’s rendering upgrades, making both applications much more responsive.
  My only (remaining) problem is that selecting lots of elements still slows down everything.

  
  

  

  10,000 Barrels

• More reliable UI
  There is now a “reset workspace” button that cleans tool window placement up (for people with large monitors). Ahhh… peace! Update: My toolbars still get messed up every once in a while. Argghh…
• Addition of COLLADA im-/export (DAE, KMZ). Removal of DWG/DXF im-/exporter (in the free version)
  While the added COLLADA exchange option is a good addition to SketchUp’s im-/export capabilities, removing the DWG/DXF exchange from the free version will cause (and has already caused) a bit of a pickle for some users. I’ll post some workarounds in a bit but this shouldn’t be too much of an issue in most cases since so many 3D converter apps are available out there. And someone (not me!) could still write a DXF import/export plugin…
• Get Photo Texture
  This is a neat addition to the 3D texturing toolset. As you can see in the video above, facades can be identified from StreetView imagery and then applied as images to buildings.
  The main drawback of this tool is that in many cases, only portions of a building are clearly visible in StreetView (Amherst has 1 street in StreetView). However, the selection box placement tool is very sleek in the dialog – and much easier to use for novices than the classic “position texture” tool.

  
  

  

  Photo texture window

• Upload Component
  It is now possible to upload a single component rather than having to upload the entire model. This basically removes the steps of exporting portions of a file into a clean file and then uploading that file. Easier is better!
• Nearby Models
  When modeling a city or a neighborhood, the user can now search for existing models in the 3D warehouse that are within a certain radius of the current position. This is useful for loading context models or for seeing what people have already modeled (to avoid duplicates).
  Apparently this tool uses the following undocumented 3D Warehouse search (sample shown – with 300 in meters):
  “near:42.391346,-72.524920 within:300“
• write_image() method in the Web Dialog class in Ruby
  This extension to the Ruby scripting toolset has the potential to be very useful. It basically allows to acquire the current WebDialog view as an image. This method is used currently for the “Get Photo Texture” window. How about a texture imported for common texture websites? Any takers…
  You can find an example for using this method in the file “webtextures_loader.rb” in the Tools sub-directory (starting at line 519).
• Disable Update Service
  This will be very helpful for our lab installations. There’s nothing more annoying than having to click away the update notifier for at least 1/2 year.

The changes in LayOut are:

• Dimensions!
  You can now use dimensions on your sheets (rather than only within the SketchUp model). To enable this, you can now also snap to the SketchUp model’s elements – quite simiar to how associative dimensions work in AutoCAD. With this final addition, SketchUp Pro is now at par for many users with much bigger and more expensive 3D modeling / 2D annotating software.
• Improved freehand tool
  You can now draw freely and get smooth lines. Where’s my Wacom when I want to try this…
• Improvements to lists, grid display and copy/paste
• More on LayOut here
  

Overall these are a lot of great new features that should help not only the 3D building modeler, but also the professional user of SketchUp. I also very much appreciate the new Product Ideas feedback system – something that was called for multiple times.

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Faces with vertices numbered

As it turns out, I need to revisit my centroid plugin for SketchUp. While it accurately calculates area properties for a face that does not contain internal (and fully enclosed) openings, it apparently gets it wrong as soon as an enclosed opening is present (like the face in the top-right corner of the image above).

To diagnose the issue, I made a little script to number vertices for a face. It adds the vertex numbers as well as the face normal vector to a group and displays them. Just in case anyone else finds this useful, here is the download. Install the file like any other SketchUp plugin (i.e. drop it into the “Plugins” folder in the SketchUp installation).

The script adds a menu option under the “Tools” menu. You can also change in the source which vertices should be displayed (all or “outer loop” only).

Number Vertices in SketchUp v.1.1 (1.19 KB, downloaded 55 times) - Little script to number face vertices in SketchUp. PLEASE NOTE: Open the ZIP archive. Then drop it into the SketchUp plugin directory (usually at C:\Program Files\Google\SketchUp\Plugins\ in Windows). Then re-start SketchUp and look for the new menu item in the Tools menu.

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Trip leftovers (I can recommend all of the hotels)

Summer is officially over in a few days and the semester has been on its way again for two weeks now. This means I can finally catch a breath and get back to posting on my own blog. But before I get back to CAD and wood topics, one trip should be mentioned:

Among the list of (professionally oriented) things I did this summer, one trip stands out. It was a visit to Google’s office in Boulder, Colorado (hence the Marriott card). That, of course, is where SketchUp (and as I learned much more) comes from. I had the chance to meet an amazing group of people that work there, get to know their office (which sports a climbing wall!!!) and even get to sample their delicious food (they apparently tweeted my breakfast plate and our barbecue during the conference).

Google had invited the illustrious group you see below to the first Supermodelers conference, which was held right in their office. Attendees came from all around the world and countries of origin included Canada, US, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, UK, Holland and Germany. You can read more about the conference on their blog.

It was great fun. I got to meet a lot of very interesting people and saw what amazing 3D models they had produced of their hometown, place of work or just place of interest. I also got to see what is behind Google’s operation that gets SketchUp, 3D Warehouse and Google Earth to work. It gave me an even greater appreciation of these fantastic (and above all free!) products.

The supermodelers

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Now that’s a very interesting surprise! After releasing a rather useless “Fluid” application (actually a technology preview) on the iPhone a while ago, Autodesk this time released a winner. SketchBook mobile is a nice sketching application. Other than most similarly-minded iPhone software, it has nice brushes and even boasts a layer system. Here is a more detailed list of features:

• Multitouch Navigation
• Double-Tap Corner capability
• Over 20 Brushes
• Synthetic Pressure Sensitivity
• Dynamic Resizing
• Customizable Brushes
• Gallery
• Save Work-in-Progress
• Directly Email Pictures
• Import Images from Library or Camera
• Full Palette of Colors
• Interactive Color Wheel
• Store Custom Colors
• On Canvas Color Picker
• Landscape and Portrait Symmetry
• Layers with Reordering and Merging capabilities

Autodesk's mobile Sketchbook app

Background images can come from either the photo library or (for iPhone users) can be taken with the internal camera. This should be a great feature if you want to take a picture of a plan and start sketching over it right away. It would be nice if the user could email an image that preserves all layers, though – I haven’t seen that feature yet.

P.S. On a more frustrating note: I recently updated my iPod Touch (1st generation) to the 3.1 operating system. That move apparently removed my capability to attach an external microphone. Very annoying indeed! It is not good practice if a company removes a feature that I paid for. I’ll likely downgrade back to 3.0 after this (and I’ll put Apple into the same category as Microsoft from now on).

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For this project I took a lot of thermography images (using a colleague’s FLIR thermography camera) of a single-family house. To visualize the temperature distribution on the outside surface of the house I correctly scaled and sized them and added them to the exterior of a previously made 3D CAD model. The end result is a great looking, interactive thermal snapshot.

You can read more about the technique and preview the paper I’ll be presenting at the Inframation 2009 conference on this page.

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House solar radiation study

Expanding on yesterday’s post, I wanted to try out how I could take a building shell model that I originally created in SketchUp, take it into Revit 2010 and run a solar analysis on it using Autodesk’s new Solar Radiation Technology Preview for Revit Architecture and Revit MEP (download it from Autodesk Labs). And guess what… it worked pretty seamlessly. Here are my steps:

Revit has had a problem for a while loading the latest SketchUp file format. This isn’t different in 2010, so first the SketchUp model has to be saved to version 6 format. It is also a good idea to delete all unused geometry and simplify geometry as much as possible. Less faces means less calculations. It might also help to align the project correctly already in SketchUp. This way, you can use Google Earth to do that and you don’t have to work with Project North in Revit (although that has become much easier to use in the release, too).

The process of getting a SketchUp model into Revit is the same as always (however, with 2010 it still seems to take a bit longer until I finally find the menu button I was looking for). First you have to go to the massing tab and create a new in-place mass. Then, in the family editor, go to the insert tab and insert a CAD file (the SketchUp file). That’s it! Almost…

House and shading objects separated

To speed calculations, it is a good idea to remove “shading-only” objects (like the trees and the neighboring houses) from the calculation. You do that by entering “shade” into the comments section of any object just before you export to the technology preview. In my case, I copied the mass over itself and then removed the house from one mass and the shading objects from the other mass. This way, I could easily enter the comment on one of them (see image below). What is really handy in this release of Revit is that a partial explode of the imported SketchUp data actually explodes it to the SketchUp component level.

Preselecting shading elements using the word "shade"

Once the model is prepared, just go to the Add-on tab in Revit and start the add-on. It comes with a nice help file that explains everything well. For my calculations, I also maximized the mesh for greater accuracy. Here are a few results:

Solar distribution over the roof areas

Averaged values

The only odd behavior that I noticed was that the calculation result shading appeared to change with the view angle (compare both images above). This is not very helpful when colors are to be matched against values. However, overall this is a very useful tool.

By the way: Here is an example of the “classic” solar study in Revit:

“Classic” Revit solar study – spring equinox from Alexander Schreyer on Vimeo.

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Solar analysis add-on for Revit

Turns out Autodesk’s purchase of Ecotect does not limit their offerings to one additional piece of software. It even sprouts some very useful off-shoots. A first glimpse at new energy-integrated planning tools offers the recently released Solar Radiation Technology Preview for Revit Architecture and Revit MEP.

This software, which has been published on the Autodesk Labs site, runs as an add-on in Revit Architecture or MEP. It is actually a (by Autodesk’s standards) rather small software package at under 5 MB. But then again, Ecotect is also (still) comparatively small (34 MB vs. Revit’s 1.5 GB).

Featuring an easy to use dialog that is not much more complicated than the rendering dialog in Revit, this technology preview can perform fast solar radiation calculations on conceptual massing models. Although the image above shows an analysis of the full model (all five buildings), it is possible to assign “shading-only” status to surfaces or entire objects. This cuts down on calculations and simplifies presentation.

While taking the classic shading analysis in Revit one step further, this tool can help in shaping buildings as well as siting solar panels. And if a more detailed exploration of the results is desired, then Ecotect simply waits in the wings.

The video below nicely illustrates the workflow:

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Just when I thought using SketchUp for presentations was a clever idea someone came along and really stepped it up a notch…

Dave Righton from the Canadian one-man-band Roche Limit just produced an entire music video using the software. Amazing work and pretty good timing given that SketchUp lacks the timeline editor of some other modeling/animation programs*. The reported cost is CA-$ 12.

* (Wasn’t there a question on one of Google’s latest surveys that included this as an option?)

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