I was just made aware of a very cool new plugin for Sketchup called “View Parts”
Put simply, it takes an assembly of parts and lays them out in scene tabs. This is something I’ve done manually over the years to show how an assembly of parts will look. I’ll let the video below do the explaining:
You can find this plugin right inside Sketchup 2013′s Extension Warehouse. It’s free, and absolutely worth checking out.
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.
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If you need to design kitchens, and you’ve been stuck with slow, outdated, expensive design software, today is great day for you.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.
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!
I’ll keep this short and sweet:
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!
I am pleased to announce the SightSpace 3D v1.1 update for Android devices is now available on Google Play. If you are not familiar with SightSpace, it views SketchUp (and other KMZ format files) on Apple and Android devices in Augmented Reality by superimposing the digital designs in the real-world in real-time, enabling you to walk through the model by simply moving your device. Additional features include stereoscopic red/cyan 3D, annotate 3D models, bookmark favorite views, take screenshots, share notes and photos, and more.
And a quote from the Limitless computing website.The SightSpace mobile app for SketchUp has the following improvements for Android:
- Compatibility for Android devices running 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
- Addition of a slider to control how sensitive your device is in Augmented Reality mode (this will only appear if your device has a gyroscope). As of right now, SightSpace is able to run on over 1300 hundred DIFFERENT models of Android devices. That is a lot of variation for us to account for. Each device is slightly different, so to give you the best experience, this slider will control how much movement the device picks up from you.
- Improvement of our custom VYZAR Augmented Reality engine and various bug fixes.
Note that SightSpace has a very cool feature that we designed ourselves: built in stabilization in Augmented Reality. When you hold your device still, SightSpace will always correct the orientation of the model. This may take a few seconds. I have included a video below of how to use the automatic Android Augmented Reality stabilization for SightSpace so you can see this in action.
Are you on a Mac? Have you noticed that perhaps some, if not all of your web dialogs in Sketchup appear to have black bars where you are supposed to enter text?
Well, the reason why this is happening is that those web dialogs are rendered by your default web browser. In the case of the Mac, that’s Safari. You cannot choose what browser Sketchup uses to render the web dialogs.
Apple a while back pushed an update that caused this bug.
There are two choices to fix this:
1) You head over to SketchUCation and follow this thread. There you will find two solutions. One will show you how you can downgrade your Safari to a slightly older version that didn’t have this bug. While this isn’t all that hard to do, it’s a pain.
The other solution looks seemingly brilliant, but requires a software engineer or a 14 year old to pull off…
2) You can upgrade to Mountain Lion. After seeing this bug, a lot of Mac Sketchup users were hesitant to upgrade, I was. I was lucky enough to have dodged the Safari upgrade on Lion so I never had to experience this bug on my production machine. I have tested Sketchup on Mountain Lion since hours after it’s release and I can say that it works flawlessly in every regard. So go ahead and give Apple you $20 dollars, it’s well worth getting rid of this bug if you use web dialogs every day.
Brizo and Igloo Studios have released 103 new Sketchup models of some of the best faucets around. They’re available for free on the 3d Warehouse for you to use in your next Sketchup model.
They are beautifully modeled as well. Take a look at this side by side comparison of a Sketchup model, and an actual faucet. I know what you’re thinking, it’s rendered. Well, it’s not. Igloo has a fantastic method of taking photo textures and wrapping them around 3D models so that these faucets look great at any angle.
These beauty of these Sketchup models, much like Brizo faucets is more then skin deep, they’re quite smart. They are embedded with information that can help you, the designer use these in your model and get the information you need, see this screen shot from Sketchup:
Dimensions, model numbers, and even a link back to the faucet on the website are all there.
So you’ve built your fantastic model, and you want to get a list of all those Brizo faucets you’ve specified so that you can order them really easily. You CAN do that. Just use Product Connect, a free plugin for Sketchup that allows you to run reports on your models. Igloo and other companies have made tons of Product Enabled models that you can use. If you want add information to your own models so that you can get a report, you can do that easily with their plugin. I’d explain it more, but I think this video can best do this awesomeness justice:
