"No Thanks, Santa" - movie made with SketchUp

3D modeler Joel Metzger has a website called Treasure Inside, where you can find several very nice movies he's made. He emailed to tell me about his latest one, which features 5 reasons he doesn't need gifts from Santa.

No Thanks, Santa! from Joel Metzger on Vimeo.

I thought I'd share this before the holidays get going, because not only does it show some nice SketchUp work, but the message is a really nice one for the season. It's important to realize how lucky we are, in the scheme of things!

Here's what Joel wrote about his process for this movie:

The backgrounds, houses, trees, and props are all SketchUp. The drawings are all hand done, often by tracing over digital photos of myself and then coloring scans of those tracings. Sometimes I insert jpgs into SketchUp layers and sometimes I overlay stills in Photoshop. The movie itself is put together with Corel VideoStudio.

A friend of mine drew all the Santas (wonderful!) and I did the tracings of the Joel character (pretty sloppy!)

It is the latest of a series of short movies I've been making for the last couple years, Treasure Inside. The website is www.treasureInside.net. They are all about the beauty of feeling the peaceful flow of life inside. Perfect for this holiday season.

I got the idea for it from an international movie maker website I discovered recently. They put out a call for 3 minute movies for an Italian TV station, in a "Top 5" format they use. I sent in my idea, but was not selected. I decided to make the movie anyway and sent it to them. This morning I got an email from them calling it "brilliant". They might use it anyway. It would be shown all over Italy!

Joel has compiled his movies into DVD's - they might make nice stocking-stuffers this year!


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Math Forum Project: Dodecagon from a Circle

This month's free project on the Math Forum shows how to start with a circle, add some more circles and construction lines . . .



. . . and create a dodecagon.

Once you have your dodecagon, you'll also see some cool things you can do with it:


The Student Version has a question about the number of circle "sides" needed to start with, to create a dodecagon. The Teacher Version has the answer! Enjoy.



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What's Coming in Our December Projects?

We have some fun, colorful stuff for our subscribers this month! Going out on December 15 are these projects:

Christmas Ornament

Well it's not necessarily an ornament, but that's how it looks to me this time of year. It's actually an interesting geometric exercise which produces something beautiful. The Intersect Faces tool is the star of this project.



Barber Pole Spiral

One of last month's projects showed how to create a barber pole using a digital image of stripes. This time the project shows how to use physical geometry (lines) to create the spiral stripes.

Kairouan Tiling Pattern

This Islamic geometric pattern can be seen on a famous mosque in Tunisia. It's easily created in SketchUp using simple geometry, construction lines, and groups and components.

The project subscription is still just $36 for 12 months: 36 projects in all. You can sign up here.


Anyone can design anything in 3D! http://www.3dvinci.net/

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