Interior Design Book

No, it's not quite ready yet, but the writing is almost finished! We're covering some important ground, which frankly we've never seen in another book on the subject. Here are the chapters:

1. Model a Room
2. Furnish a Room
3. Basic Furniture: Straight Lines
4. Advanced Furniture: Curvy Lines
5. Using and Changing 3D Warehouse Models (includes a kitchen design!)
6. Working with Color and Materials
7. Working with Digital Images
8. Presenting Your Designs (layers, scenes, etc.)
9. Plans and Working Drawings
10. Third-Party Products (rendering apps, models, other resources)

My co-author, Annie Elliott, recently blogged about the book, including a model she herself has recently created.

Looks promising, no? I'll keep you posted...


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What's in Our May Projects?

If you're a subscriber to our Projects of the Month, here's what you'll be getting when the projects go out on May 15:

Baseball Diamond

Spring means baseball (at least for those of us in the US), and laying out a baseball field is a great exercise in geometric thinking. Once you know the distance between bases, the radii of the arcs at the bases and pitcher's mound, plus a few more measurements, you can easily create your field.



DNA Helix

A few people have requested this project, and once I got into it, I saw that it was a bit more involved than I expected (it's been a long time since I took a biology class!) So I've broken this into two projects: Part 1 is included in May and Part 2 will go out in June.

Part 1 shows how to create the "skeleton" of the two helixes plus the base pairs between them.

Part 2 will show how to transform the skeleton into the 3D model.


Painting Wallpaper
Any digital image can be used to paint a face in a tiling pattern. This project shows how to take a wallpaper swatch from the Internet or your digital camera, and use it to paint a wall. You'll also see how to handle images that don't tile seamlessly.


The subscription is a mere $36 for 12 monthly sets of 3 projects. You can sign up here.


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May Math Forum Project: Pentagon from a Circle

I ran across this nice animation on creating a pentagon from a circle (taken from Wikipedia):


I thought this would make a great Math Forum project, and I just posted it as this month's free project.

It's a neat exercise in 2D thought: starting with one common object, a circle, and without knowing any numbers or angles, creating all the necessary lines to make a pentagon.

The Student Version has a question at the end about the number of circle segments you need to use for this project. The Teacher Version has the answer.

Enjoy!


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New: SketchUp Robotics Project

Last summer I partnered with a fantastic educational non-profit, CSTEM, and wrote several project modules for their annual robotics competition. Since last year I've gotten several requests from teachers and parents for some materials on using SketchUp for robotics; seems robotics is all the rage these days!

So CSTEM and I agreed to make one of the modules I wrote available for sale - a fun project that shows how to assemble a robot model using Lego Technics pieces.



The Technics models are available for free in the 3D Warehouse; I took models that were already there and spent many hours adding guide lines, hiding and un-hiding objects, and changing colors, so that the pieces are ready for easy import and assembly.

The last step in this project is taking the final robot and adding to a sample robotics competition field.



The project is a 39-page PDF that I'm listing for $20, on sale through May for $16.

CSTEM and I are planning on more robotics projects, which I hope to start writing over the summer. Your feedback is extremely valuable, please let me know if there is a specific robotics topic or problem you'd like to see addressed. And check out CSTEM's website for more info on physical robotics in the classroom.



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