Sketchup 2013 is out!

Today the Sketchup team released a new version of Sketchup, aptly titled “Sketchup 2013

The Sketchup team has added a host of new features to Sketchup. One of my favorits is the “Extension Warehouse”. From right within Sketchup you can now browse, install and update extensions. A centralized plugin repository is something that I think Sketchup has needed for years and it’s finally here.

In addition to the Extension Warehouse, you’ll find speed improvements and hatch patterns in LayOut, a reworked toolbar interface for Windows (Customizable toolbars!!) and a whole new icon set.

In the coming weeks we’ll go into more detail on these features, but for now, I suggest you go give it a download.

www.Sketchup.com

SketchThis Kitchen design plugin released!

It’s finally here! After years of development, testing, and more testing the SketchThis Kitchen Design Plugin is finally ready for public consumption.

If you need to design kitchens, and you’ve been stuck with slow, outdated, expensive design software, today is great day for you. Even with Sketchup’s meteoric rise as one of the most popular and easiest to use 3D modeling tools, there’s never been a dedicated plugin to make designing kitchens so fast and easy… Until now…

This plugin features an incredibly flexible library of Dynamic Components built by kitchen designers, for kitchen designers. In addition to that you’ll find a growing materials library, Shaderlight enabled lights for rendering, and a host of help videos. Best of all, when you’re designing kitchens you can swap doors in and out right from the cloud.

Speaking of the cloud, every aspect of this plugin is hosted in the cloud. What does this mean for you? As we continually develop and add to the component library every user benefits from every change instantly, no waiting for software updates and long installs!

The plugin runs on any version of Sketchup 8 or later. It will work on Mac’s and PC’s.

Most of the content that is available is free, and “pro” content is available as a subscription for $29.99 per month.

Download for free right here and check it out!

A new way to design

It’s been a long time coming, but the SketchThis.NET Kitchen Design Plugin for Sketchup is finally here. Built by magic and powered by awesome, it will make your experience using Sketchup much faster and easier then ever before. Here are the headlines:

It works on Sketchup Free or Pro, version 8 (or later)
It works on Mac’s and PC’s
It’s very easy to install
It’s totally cloud based, so you always have the most up to date components
Features a highly configurable catalog of cabinets designed by and for kitchen designers
Has a library of configurable doors
Has content from the 3D warehouse, curated especially for kitchen designers, no more searching through 1000′s of bad models just to fine the one that you need (Appliances, faucets, sinks, etc)
Has built in Shaderlight lights and window components, to make your Shaderlight renders easier
Social Login (Create your account with Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and more) Now you don’t have to remember another password!
The basic version is free, and the pro version is available for a very small monthly fee (TBA)
Much, much more!

While the plugin isn’t ready for general release just yet, we’re looking for beta testers. What do you get when you beta test? For the time period of the test you’ll get full access to all of the pro components. With your feedback, we can squash bugs and make this the most awesome plugin for kitchen designers anywhere.

If you’re interested…

Request your invite to the beta here

Basecamp 2012 videos posted!

You may have read my Basecamp recap here: But now the Sketchup team has posted hours and hours of video. I’ve picked out a few that I thought were really interesting for you to watch. If you weren’t there, this is the next best thing!

Basecamp 2012

BASECAMP 2012

It’s been about 6 months or so since Sketchup was aquired by Trimble. As much fun as Basecamps always are, I was really interested to see what Trimble had in store for us since they’re now settled at their new home.

Monday started up with a presentation by Trimble folks, and John Bacus, the product manager for Sketchup. While there was no announcement of a new version of Sketchup, there were some very interesting things. First, Sketchup will now be released annually, and the next version will be called “Sketchup 2013″ so that basically confirms we’ll see something early next year. Also, the Sketchup team really recognizes that developers are so important to what they do. For starters, they have release AND open sourced “TestUp”. TestUp used to be an internal testing tool for the Sketchup team only to root out bugs, but now it will be available to any developer. This was met with a tremendous applause by the developers in the crowd.

The next major announcement is that Sketchup has reached out to developers who have written STL import and export tools and worked with them to open source those plugins so that they will be available to Sketchup users. It sounds like these plugins will be baked into Sketchup soon as well. For those of you that use STL, or have a MakerBot (more on that later) this is huge.

The other major encouraging news we heard during this opening keynote was that they are hiring developers. At Google, it seemed like Sketchup was a bit of an odd fit at times, and they didn’t put a lot of engineering effort into the software. Google engineers program many web based languages, and Sketchup is based on a very different language. My guess is that they were unable to shuffle engineering staff around Google to fill needs, and they never really hired outside.

That’s just speculation on my part, the big news is that Trimble is ready to throttle up development big time on Sketchup, which I think is fantastic. So if you’re a great Sketchup developer and you want a job, now might be the time!

Followed by John Bacus, we got to have Bre Pettis, the CEO of MakerBot Industries give a keynote speech. I’ve had the chance to hang out with Bre and he’s a pretty interesting guy. He’s also a huge Sketchup fan. Sketchup is what gets a lot of the models into the machines that his machine builds. Check out www.MakerBot.com to see how these incredible 3D printers work.

Another highlight of the week was the MakerBot lounge. There were several machines running all weekend pumping out all kinds of wonderful widgets, all from Sketchup models. If you go back in this blog, you’ll see how the Markbot works. Check here:

At the end of the first day, all 280 of us went to a local bar. But we didn’t go there to eat and drink, we went there to pitch ideas for the “unconference” the next day. The way an unconference works is that everyone in attendance who wants to present pitches an idea, and then they go right into presenting sometimes with only minutes to prepare. It can be fun, chaotic, and always interesting. If you were there for this particular pitch entitled: CAD MUST DIE! You were in for a real treat.

Now besides all the informative learning I did the rest of the week, Sketchup pictionary was about the most fun thing I did. It’s a little hard to see here, but there were two big TV’s, two identical computers with Sketchup connected to a screen, and hundreds of avid Sketchup fans willing to step up to the plate to model words for the crowd to guess. Fueled by creativity, drink tickets, food and energy from the crown, this insane contest went on for hours. It was so entertaining! I definitely want to do this again next year!

On the last day we did a design “charrette”. This was a design challenge where teams of 10 people were set the challenge to come up with the classroom of the future. We were given just over two hours to design a classroom, and come up with a presentation. We had to present to a panel of local teachers and were judged. The winning team was then pitted against each other in a “death match” round of Sketchup trivia. Last modeler standing won a MakerBot.

This was an absolutely fantastic trip to Boulder. I’ll be honest, when Sketchup broke away from Google, I was a little nervous. In the months following the acquisition I was more optimistic. After going to Basecamp, I am genuinely excited. Trimble loves the community that they have gotten, and they want to support us and give us even better tools to work with in the very near future.

Big thanks to Sophie Feng for all of these pictures!

Wine, Cobblestones, Steel & Mussels #InStyleTour

If you thought this was the title to my new Italian mobster flick that I’m directing, you’d be wrong. It actually were some keywords from a fantastic day I got to spend in Boston’s North End on Tuesday.

Social media is all the rage today, and if you ever thought it kept people from “real” interaction, you’ll see that this event is far from that.

Giovanni Decunto and Blanco teamed up to bring a local group of designers who are active on social media together for a great night of networking.

We started out at dinner, at Ristorante Villa Francesca for some fantastic wine, mussels and dinner.

After dinner, Christy Emens from Blanco told us about some great new faucets and sinks from Blanco. In addition, we learned about Blanco history. Blanco is a very old German company that has a history of designing and manufacturing it’s products in Germany. They take great pride in the quality of their products. As a kitchen designer, I’ve always regarded Blanco’s quality a lot higher than most, but I never realized that they had the great manufacturing pedigree that they do!

Next it was over to the artist gallery of Giovanni Decunto. His paintings were described to be before we got there, and I’d share that description with you, but it would really do it no justice. These paintings were layered in a way that I’d never seen. Some of the paintings, by my guess had 1/4″ of paint on them! This gave them a really amazing texture and depth that just doesn’t translate to pictures.

This picture of Steve Jobs was about 8 foot square, and featured glow-in-the-dark paint. I would have bought it, something seemed wrong about carting a painting that was worth twice as much as the car it was riding in…

It wasn’t just the food, wine, steel and art that made this a great evening, it was meeting all these like minded folks who have been brought together by social media. Had it not been for Twitter and Facebook, I never would have met these people. Because of social media we were all able to not only expand our connections, but our knowledge.

This night wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work and support from Blanco, Chirsty Emens, Andie Day, Todd Venditouli, & Giovanno Decunto, and for that I like to thank them! These events are hard to put together, and even harder to make successful. I’ve been to a fair amount of these types of gatherings, and my experienced opinion says it was quite the success!

If you’d like to follow more about this event, search for #InStyleTour on Twitter!

Maker Faire NYC 2012 recap

As you may know, I had the pleasure of attending Maker Faire in NYC with the Trimble Sketchup team this past weekend. It was an absolutely fantastic and inspiring experience.

This was the Trimble Sketchup booth at Maker Faire. Yes, that bulldozer was part of our display.

3D printing was big at Maker Faire. There were two tents devoted to it entirely and they were packed. I’m proud to say that I was in the booth that featured Maker Faire’s largest 3D printer. Yes, the Cat D6 you see in the background is actually a 3D printer.

So this is the largest 3D printer I’ve ever seen, and it was certainly the biggest at Maker Faire. How does it work? See those two big masts that stick up from the blade in front? Those are highly sensitive GPS receivers. Inside this monster machine there are servos that are hooked to the steering controls. Feed in some terrain data and all an operator has to do is get in and push the gas pedal and the blade moves around to cut the terrain to centimeter accuracy.

How do you get that terrain data into the bulldozer? Well, you need a terrain scanning, autonomous scanning drone! Also something we had on hand.

That’s right, with Trimble’s Gatewing you can scan terrain, modify it in Sketchup, feed it into the dozer, and automatically reform the land. Unfortunately due to what I can only describe as “ridiculous” regulations, we were not allowed to send the dozer around digging up the Hall of Science.

But that wasn’t the only 3D printer we had in the booth. Thanks to MakerBot Industries, we also had three MakerBots working overtime to make all the plastic widgets we could dream up. I’ve always been fascinated by 3D printers and CNC machines, going so far once as to build my own CNC machine. I’ve never had a chance to play around with a MakerBot. It was certainly a treat to use one. The ease at which you could take a Sketchup model and “print” it out in 3D was amazing.

The machines we got to use were these:

We made everything from replacement cell phone parts, to camera mounts, Bat wings, and Deloreans (in flight mode of course). In the coming weeks I will be posting more specific details about what we were making.

Bertier Luyt brought his EggBot which is a CNC machine for writing on eggs and other round objects. Yeah, I didn’t get it either, just watch the video:

As if the weekend didn’t get any more badass then getting to play with some of the coolest stuff a nerd could think of, I got to take a tour of Makerbot headquarters, lunch with Bre Pettis, their CEO and a tour of their new store in New York City that just opened. Check out what they have in the front window… This is a ball bearing roller coaster that aside for a few steel supports to hold the whole thing up, was made entirely with a Makerbot:

So it was truly an inspiring and amazing weekend. I’ve got so many pictures and stories to tell. I can’t thank the Sketchup team enough for this amazing opportunity!

Stay tuned for more!

Basecamp is almost here!

Matt over at MasterSketchup.com gave me this great map of all the hotel options and the location of the Sketchup office for Basecamp. Bookmark this in your phone for when you’re there to help you get around!

View Sketchup Basecamp 2012 in a larger map
There are apparently a few more spots left if you want to go to Basecamp. If you’re a Sketchup user, there is no better place to be than this event!

http://sketchupbasecamp2012.eventbrite.com/

Maker Faire: Here I come!

In just a few days, I will be at Maker Faire in NYC. Best of all, I get to spend it with some of the members tat the Sketchup team. Even better? We’ve got MAKER BOTS TO PLAY WITH!

Stay tuned here and on my Twitter feed for coverage!

Basecamp is BACK!!

I’ll keep this short and sweet:

BASECAMP IS BACK!

That’s right kids, Sketchup is hosting another Basecamp at their world headquarters in Boulder Colorado. I’ll be there!

If you missed the last one in 2010, here are the highlights:

Will you be going? Let us know in the comments!