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!

SketchUp Ruby Code Editor

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:

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 my book “Architectural Design with SketchUp” (especially chapter 6):

http://sketchupfordesign.com/

For the eco-conscious and all the wood-aficionados out there, here are the winners of the 2013 US Wood Design Awards. Amazing buildings in wood…

Source:

• 2013 Award Winners
• Thanks for the reminder: Go Wood

Canadian researchers recently put Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), a somewhat new building product, to the test to determine fire-resistance properties. Their findings were:

The tests demonstrated that CLT assemblies can achieve significant fire resistance that is close to three hours in some cases with even unprotected CLT under full loading conditions. The failure modes were a mix of integrity and structural failures.

The (abbreviated) table below shows some of the results:

Links:

• Source: http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/ci-ic/article/v17n4-4
• Papers on general topic:
  • FIRE-EXPOSED CROSS-LAMINATED TIMBER – MODELLING AND TESTS
  • Experimental analysis of cross-laminated timber panels in fire

As I mentioned before on this site, Sketchfab is a great way to share your 3D models – for example using my SketchUp uploader plugin. One thing that was happening with SketchUp models in particular, however, was that they usually looked very “flat” on the Sketchfab website. Materials typically have a rather dull appearance and transparent materials have no reflections. That prompted me in the past to hack the COLLADA files before upload to change material properties. Well… that is no longer necessary. As of yesterday, the Sketchfab website sports a shiny new material editor. Right after uploading a model, you can get to work adjusting all of its’ material properties. The image above shows the basic interface on a simple cube model.

But that’s not all: While this material editor is great for adjusting material properties in Sketchfab, it also works extremely well for interactively learning and exploring material components such as “diffuse color/texture”, “lightmap”, “specular color/texture” etc. Understanding these parameters is crucial if you want to learn about rendering software (for example if you make your way through the rendering chapter in my book). You will, for example, find many of these terms used in the material editors of rendering packages like Twilight or VRay (and many others).

Let’s see how we can modify this default cube to add some effects:

The image above shows how you can turn the cube’s material into a perfect mirror. This is done by reducing the “diffuse color” to zero and increasing the “reflection” to one.

If you want the material to be a translucent and partially reflective glass, then the settings in the image above might be appropriate. Feel free to play with the sliders a bit to understand how they work and to get things just right.

If you want to have a colored, partially reflective surface, then the settings above might be most appropriate.

A great additional feature is that you can click on any of the image swatches and not only adjust the color but also upload custom textures. This makes it easy to adjust and switch textures. I just wish the Sketchfab folks had added a scaling slider for textures. It is impossible to control texture scaling beyond what was imported in the original file.

To try this out on one of my older SketchUp models (have you seen this house anywhere before?), I opened my “Solar House”:

After I went through all of the materials in the file, added reflections here and there and the occasional normal map, the model looks like this:

Here is the interactive model on Sketchfab:

As you can see, having an environment map brings out reflections quite nicely. All I need now is the ability to turn shadows on and off in the Sketchfab WebGL model. For now, that goes right on my pile of feature requests. But other than that: Well done on the material editor!

I sincerely hope this post finds you all happy and healthy. Enjoy your holidays (whatever you celebrate and wherever you are) and any time off that you can spend with your family. I wish you all a successful new year and all the best for your future endeavors.

It remains to be seen whether politicians in the new year can finally put the goal of peace and public safety before any petty interests – I truly hope this will be the case! My thoughts are with the families in Newtown, Connecticut that lost loved ones. Enough is enough!

Cheers,
Alex

P.S.: “Why the water in the image?” you may ask. Well – it looks great and it renders fast. There are really no religious connotations here whatsoever. If you want to know how the image was made, check out this tutorial on SketchUcation for a how-to article.

I just updated the Sketchfab uploader plugin for SketchUp to v.1.4. You can now set your model on upload as private and assign a password (as long as you at least have a PRO account). It also sports a shiny new image. The full list of changes is:

• Support for updated API (incl. private/password functionailty)
• Included SketchUp source tag in JSON
• Exports edges by default now
• Removed thumbnail upload (not supported anymore by API)
• Better string cleaning on upload

Download it here:

http://www.alexschreyer.net/projects/sketchfab-uploader-plugin-for-sketchup/

This is an exciting week! My book “Architectural Design with SketchUp” is now available from all of the online booksellers and should be in stores soon, too.

After a year of writing and a few months editing and finalizing, it feels really good to see the final product now on store shelves and on Amazon’s website. Wiley did an amazing job putting the book together and I am really happy how it looks.

If you want to find out what this book is all about, check out this page on my companion site or view sample pages on Amazon.com or Google Books. You can buy this book from any of the following locations. Kindle and E-Book versions are also available.

• Amazon.com
• Wiley.com
• Barnes & Noble
• or Google Books

I hope you all enjoy the book and that it helps you create the great designs you are dreaming of!

Please remember that the book companion site is always available for comments, questions, discussions and show-and-tell for your work. You can find out more about what is possible on its About page. Also, I will be posting more videos and other freebies there in the near future, so check back often.

Still need a good present idea and have a MakerBot laying around? Using SketchUp, you can easily turn your or a loved one’s silhouette into a rotational sculpture that can be a pedestal, vase, candle holder or anything else you like. With a 3D printer or a CNC lathe you have everything you need to also make these into physical objects.

Step-by-step instructions are on the companion website for my new book:

http://sketchupfordesign.com/tutorials/turn-yourself-into-a-vase-with-sketchup-making-rotational-portrait-sculptures-from-silhouettes-for-3d-printing/

Enjoy!

I just posted a tutorial on my new SketchUp book’s companion site, http://sketchupfordesign.com, about how you can use SketchUp to create geometry for structural analysis. You can find the article (and the video) here:

http://sketchupfordesign.com/tutorials/analyze-this-creating-geometry-for-structural-analysis-in-sketchup/