What's Coming in our August Projects?

Our projects this month include one two-parter and another where you use the very fun Inkscape. You can sign up to subscribe here - the year is still on sale at just $20!

Sky Sphere

Ever wanted to see your model surrounded by nothing but blue sky and some clouds? This project shows you how to make a sphere (more or less) painted with a sky image, that you can use to encompass a model.

Sky Sphere Animation

Part 2 of this project shows how to use the sky sphere model to create an animation of a model (an airplane in this case) flying through the sky.

Curvy Text in Inkscape

Text along a curve is tough to do in SketchUp, at least not without a lot of editing work. But it's easy to do in the free 2D drawing program, Inkscape. This project shows how to make a text string like this:

And import it into SketchUp as a graphic with a transparent background.

 

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Free Project: Getting Started in Tinkercad

SketchUp has paved the way for new 3D modeling applications, and one that I've recently run across is Tinkercad.  It's a FREE, web-based application that enables you to quickly model objects that can be produced on a 3D printer.

I recently wrote Getting Started in Tinkercad (PDF), a free project, ready for you to download and use. If you have kids home from camp, this is a great activity to keep their brains firing till school starts!

The project uses my usual-step-step method to work through this cute little boat:

 

The Tinkercad team has a similar boat printed out (I believe from a MakerBot):

 

Enjoy!!

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Sky Sphere Animation

I just finished writing the August projects that will go out in a couple of weeks (so ahead of schedule!), and here's the video of one of the projects:

The airplane in the model isn't really moving, of course. It is sitting inside a huge sphere painted with a sky image. It's a very fun project - sign up and you'll get the write-up on August 15.

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This Should Get Mark into the GTA!

Mark Eisenhardt is the director of technology at The Albany Academies, and clearly an avid SketchUp fan. He sent me the link to his 60-second application for this year's Google Teacher Academy in New York:




I asked Mark for some details about how he created this amazing video, which is done ENTIRELY in SketchUp:

This animation stems from a lesson I do in 6^th Grade where the students create a model of the Solar System as it was at the moment of their birth. They research planetary orbit radii to model the orbits, generate an image of planetary positions as of their “birth moment,” and then position planets that I scaled at those positions. The scale of the planets is not the same as the orbits because the model is not as fun if they were!

Each planet has a “detail” layer. The students import related 3D warehouse models and/or Planetary Factoid Images, that they create, onto those layers. They then disappear and appear the models/images as their animation tour progresses through their Birth Moment Solar System.

For my animation I added different styles to change the background and edge colors to enhance some of the models. I also added another 6^th grade project at the end where the students create a prism that has a 3D model of a constellation of their choice, usually their birth sign. This animation uses my example model of Orion – I attached the Google Icons to each of Orion’s major stars and used the CMP layers to change visibility during the animation.

As you might imagine, this model has a lot of layers:

And several styles that are used by the various scenes:

 This model uses a whole bunch of scenes (the tabs across the top of the screen shown below), for changing visibility of styles and layers This is how Mark "disappears" and "appears" various parts of the model as the animation focuses on a planet.

 

 This to me is the perfect integration of Google apps and features - hard to see how Mark doesn't get accepted with this. Good luck!!

(The only glitch could be that Google doesn't "count" SketchUp anymore as one of its products, not sure how that works as far as the Google Teacher Academy...)

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What's Coming in Our July Projects?

Want to beat the July heat? Get yourself into an air conditioned room and make these cool things in SketchUp! If you're a subscriber to our Projects of the Month (still on sale for just $20 for 12 months), here's what you'll get on July 15:

Picture Letters

Another idea that came from one of my students, this project shows how to create 3D letters starting from a picture. (When I showed this one to my own kids, I couldn't get my computer back for an hour!)

Rug from Photo

The idea for this project comes from my upcoming Interior Design textbook. It shows how to take a photo of a rug (or a picture, wall hanging, door), and use it to create a "real" rug in your SketchUp model.

Custom Watermark

Wouldn't it be cool to attach your own logo or graphic to your SketchUp models? This project shows you how (check out the 3DVinci logo below).

  

Don't let our summer sale pass you by! So much fun for just $20 - get our Projects of the Month today!


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My Visit to Makerbot

Last Friday, I went up to Brooklyn, NY to pay a visit to Makerbot Headquarters. One of their engineers showed me around, and now I want a Replicator even more than before! 

Their big, warehouse-type room housed a design team whose job is to test out the printers by coming up with interesting 3D models. I'd call that my dream job (except that it was 100 degrees outside and their office isn't air conditioned!) There were also maybe 15 Replicators scattered around, with maybe 10 churning out various things.

Here's a short video I took of the Replicator building up a pumpkin - they wanted something orange to test out a new orange plastic color. The model looked to be about 4 or 5 inches high when completed, and the total production time was maybe 3 hours.

They have a lot of display cases about, showing off some of the fun things they've printed.

My thoughts on the Replicator involve taking it to schools, libraries, labs, etc, and getting kids to design and print whatever comes to mind. Apparently the majority of these models start either in Tinkercad (for the younger crowd) or SketchUp (for more sophisticated designs). For organic shapes, like that pumpkin above, the designers used Zbrush.

The main drawback, at least at this time, is that a small model (think around 3" x 3" x 3" or similar) can take an hour or more to print. So the machine would need to be kept somewhere for a few days at least, assuming each kid in a class wants to print his or her own thing.

If you have one of these machines, I'd love to hear feedback! Email: bonnie - at - 3dvinci.net.



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I Want a MakerBot Replicator

3D printing is all the buzz today. When I started looking at Tinkercad, I saw examples of models printed out in the MakerBot Replicator, this cool-looking machine shown here:

I recently read a couple of blog posts about kids using this machine to print out things they've designed.:

Big Kids, Small Kids, and 3D Printing

Smart Kids and 3D Printers

I will be at MakerBot's office at the end of this month, and hope to see a cool dog-and-pony show. I want to watch this thing in action, and not just on YouTube. Imagine how cool it would be to take this thing around to schools, libraries, fab labs, and watch kids produce what appears in their imaginations.

I'll keep you posted!



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Awesome 8th Grade Math Models

Jan Cohen is a middle-school math teacher at New York's Heschel School. I introduced SketchUp to her and some of her colleagues a few years ago, and her students have taken to SketchUp like a fish takes to water!

Jan sent me her collection of year-end models from her eighth graders, and I'm posting here some of my favorites. Maybe I'll turn some of these into subscription projects!

"Golden Spiral"



"Portfolio 1"



"Golden Pentagram"



"Pentagons"


Here is a close-up of one pentagon - notice the stars within stars within stars:


 The generically-named "Math Project" is one of my all-time favorites!

 

 I'm trying to recreate this model, without using complex scaling-within-group techniques and without using mathematical multipliers. Here's the center:

Finally, one called "Building." I'm not sure what math went into this model, but it's quite cool. With no elevator, you need to run up four flights of stairs. . . 

 . . . and once you make it to the top, you can play ping-pong, pool, foosball, or jump into the hot tub.

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What's Coming in Our June Projects?

Summer's coming, and don't you have tons of free time for more reading? If you're staying connected to the world of 3D design, you'll love these projects, going out as part of our Projects of the Month subscription. And as an added incentive, to encourage SketchUp'ing during the lazy days of summer, our subscription is on sale for just $20 - a steal for 12 months of projects!

Aligning a Painting

You can find tons of painting, pictures, and posters in the 3D Warehouse. But many of them aren't created properly - they don't "stick" to walls and they're not positioned correctly. This project shows how to fix that.

Dizzy Text

This is another student-inspired project - I had a class of 11 kids doing this recently. For lack of a better name, this project shows how to create dizzying text with checkerboard patterns - perfect for sending messages to friends!

Replacing Components with the Outliner

Similar to one of last month's projects, this very fun project shows how to use the Outliner - SketchUp's handy but little-known organizing tool - to quickly change and replace components.

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We Got Mail!

A few years ago I created this video describing the Hirschhorn Tile:


This beautiful tiling is one of the subjects (and the cover model!) of one of my GeomeTricks Aperiodic Patterns books:

Well, guess who found this video and got in touch with me? The very person who discovered this tile: Michael Hirschhorn! Call me a geometry geek, but that would be like Justin Bieber emailing my 8-year old daughter :-)

We've already had lots of back-and-forths, but here's a snippet of what he wrote about the background of how he got to this tiling:

Back in the early 1970's, the Faculty of Science here [in Sydney, Australia] set up a program by which kids from (what we call) high school in their second-last year (so aged 16 or 17 or so) were invited to apply to spend a week near the end of their school year (November) involved in a variety of projects (in Physics, Chemistry, Math, Biological Science, .. ) in groups of about six, led by an academic. (About 120 students were involved each year.) In 1974, Professor George Szekeres led a group on the (very optimistic) task of finding all pentagons that tile the plane (a problem, incidentally, which is not known to be completely solved even today.) I was a young and junior member of staff (27), and looked in at what they were doing. They very quickly (within a day or two) restricted their goal to finding all equilateral, convex pentagons that tile the plane.
The group found a cosine rule that holds in an equilateral convex pentagon. At about the same time, I noticed that in every tiling we knew, the angles came together as follows A+B+C=360 degrees twice for every vertex where 2D+2E=360 degrees. (Each angle occurs twice in such an arrangement, and 2A+2B+2C+2D+2E=1080 degrees =3 times 360 degrees.) I suggested that there may be a tiling in which  2A+B+C=360 degrees, B+2D=360 degrees and C+2E=360 degrees. The Professor took home these relations and our cosine rule, and with considerable amount of work (by hand) found the solution,  A=60, B=160, C=80, D=100, E=140 degrees. He brought in his solution the next day, we cut out many such pentagons, and discovered it really did tile the way I proposed! Four such pentagons together form shapes like little penguins that march across the plane in rows, and the rows fill the plane. And that is essentially where our discoveries ended. The students then wrote up the week's work, and presented it to a large audience on the Friday night. After that, on my way home in the car, I had the thought, "What happens if we put six of the 60 degree angles together?" And by the time I reached home, I suspected that I could continue the tiling to cover the plane. So I got out my 20 or so pentagons, and, lo and behold, it worked! 

 
Mike also showed me a Hirschhorn tessellation that I hadn't covered in my book:

And he also described an irregular, equilateral pentagon tiling that tiles just like the 9-sided "Bent Wedge" covered in the same book:

Even if you aren't into geometry, you gotta admit that these are some pretty pictures!


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