Bonnie's Blog: 3D design for K-12 and beyond: April 2013

Monday, April 8, 2013

What's Coming in Our April Projects?

Going out next Monday to those who subscribe to our Projects of the Month (still on sale for $24.95 for a year!) are these three fun projects:

Giant Mutant Killer Ants

In this project, you use SketchUp to pick a spot on Earth and import some huge ants that will be taking over a city. Then you get too see what the creatures look like on the actual Earth (well, Google Earth, the next best thing).

Walk Through

This project shows how to use SketchUp's Walkthrough tools: Position Camera, Walk, and Look Around, to create an animated tour of a house's interior. (My animation from this project can be found in the next blog post - scroll down or go to http://3dvinci.blogspot.com/2013/04/walk-through.html.)

Moire Pattern

This project is better seen as an animation - by creating sets of stripes of various sizes, you can create a model that shows a Moire pattern, in which your eye fills in wavy black curves where no curves actually exist. (See my animation father down on this blog: http://3dvinci.blogspot.com/2013/04/sketchup-moire-pattern.html.)

Walk Through

Following my previous post, which has a video of a SketchUp Moire pattern, here's another result of one of this month's Projects of the Month.

It's an animation of a walk-through, showing various rooms of a house. The project showcases SketchUp's Walkthrough tools, which simulate standing in a specific position, walking, and looking around. When you create scenes of specific walkthrough "stops," you get a very nice presentation.

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

SketchUp Moire Pattern

Check out this video (sorry, not the best resolution) of a Moire pattern in SketchUp:

This comes from one of the April Projects of the Month, going out next week. There's nothing overly complicated in making the model itself - the trick is getting the right viewing angle so that your eye "fills in" all those wavy black lines.

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

Friday, April 5, 2013

Fantastic New Kitchen Design Plugin

My friend and colleague Eric Schimelpfenig has been working on this for years, and now it's here: SketchThis - a fantastic SketchUp plugin for kitchen designers. Check out the very dramatic teaser vid:

Eric is a professional kitchen / bath designer, and a longtime SketchUp aficionado. He does training and custom 3D modeling, and now SketchThis is the culmination of his years of experience in 3D. He's a whiz at dynamic components - SketchUp objects you can configure. Dynamic components can be parametric, change materials, have choices of sizes, you name it. I saw his dynamic components demo at last year's Base Camp, and within 50 minutes he built *from scratch* a set of cabinets that any kitchen designer would kill for.

SketchThis has mostly free content, so anyone can download and play around with it. For kitchen and bath pros who want access to the entire content database, there is a $29.99 / month subscription fee - Eric sees SketchThis as direct competition with 2020 (the current industry standard) - and his subscription is WAY cheaper than what you'd pay for a 2020 seat.

Please give SketchThis a try, and feel free to share your feedback (bonnie@3dvinci.net). I'll probably include a project on this in one of my upcoming subscription projects, using the free content of course, so look for that email in the next month or two!

And Eric and I have been planning out a kitchen / bath design book, based on SketchThis, but also to include more general design and planning tips and info. Lots of news to look for in the hopefully near future!

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