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.

Please sign up to subscribe to our Projects of the Month . At just $20, you can't pass this up!
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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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Check out Tinkercad

Looking to explore something new in 3D design over the summer?

So... during this period between the announcement of the SketchUp sale from Google to Trimble to the date when the sale closes, I've had some time to look into some other design apps I've been hearing about. And yesterday I spent a while poking around with Tinkercad, which is great fun.

IMO, there are two main great things about Tinkercad - it's easy to use (and FREE!), which is great for those who find SketchUp overwhelming (such as kids in elementary school), and whatever you design can be easily sent to a 3D printer, like MakerBot. How cool is it for a kid to design a little robot and then get to actually hold it in hand? (Of course, you don't have to print anything, it's also fun just to design stuff!)

Here are a few interesting models I found on their "things" page:   

 

Here's a 3D birthday card which was printed:

I hate to compare Tinkercad to SketchUp - they are both 3D modelers but with different focuses. But here's my comparison anyway:

• SketchUp is certainly more robust, can be scaled to any size project (tiny mechanical parts to entire building complexes), and the design features enable much more detailed modeling.
• Tinkercad provides fewer tools but they are quite easy to use: drag in some primitive shapes, make some easy changes, add decorations, holes, etc. The printing export is simple, and if you don't have access to a 3D printer, you can send your model to one of Tinkercad's partners to have your model printed and sent to you.

Tinkercad is web-based, so nothing to install. It operates on WebGL, so they recommend using Firefox or Chrome. (However, for me it didn't work on Firefox but worked fine in IE, not sure why!) You need an account (also free) to save whatever models you create.

To get started with Tinkercad, their very fun website has Lessons - short, guided, tutorial projects that walk you through the 8 or 10 steps to create something. 

I think 3D printing is the way of the future, with more and more of these machines popping up in schools, libraries, and labs. It's becoming way more fun to be a kid these days! If the 10-year old me had been able to model and design my own toys (a large number of years ago), I wonder what sorts of things would have piled up in my basement....

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What's Coming in Our May Projects?

This is both a fun and practical month for subscribers to our Projects of the Month. The practical includes a project that shows how to replace a lot of components at once (not to say that's not also fun), and the other two projects deal with zombies. But you can be a zombie-hater and still enjoy these projects - they show how to create faces for the faceless, and how to make your characters speak to one another.

Zombies!
There are plenty of people in the 3D Warehouse you can use to populate your models. Google has provided many generic, 2D "cardboard cutout" people that are great to use because they have low file size, and always face you - giving the illusion of 3D without using a huge 3D model. But many of these people have no faces:

 

This project shows how to add faces to the faceless. (You don't have to make zombies, unless you're trying to get the attention of 10-year old boys.)

Zombie Chat
Once you have your zombies (or whatever creatures you decide to make), this project shows how to use the Text tool and layers to create a chat between your two, well, whatever characters they are. Play the quick movie below: 

Replacing Components
In this project you start with a set of identical windows, and add a flower box to just one of the windows:

Then you replace all of the flower-less windows at once, with the one that has flowers:

These are fun projects to get students interested in something other than the approaching summer vacations! Subscribe here.

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Zombie Chat

The kids in my SketchUp class have gotten into downloading the various people available in the 3D Warehouse. It's best to look for the 2D people (and animals and trees, etc.) because they have miniscule file sizes compared to the much more complex 3D people. And if created correctly, these 2D "cardboard cutout" people will always face you, no matter where you orbit the model. This gives the impression of 3D, while keeping your models moving fast.

But a lot of the Google-supplied 2D people are faceless - meant to be used to generically populate SketchUp designs.
 

So I showed the kids how to not only add faces and accessories, but also how to create a short movie that includes a dialog.

Both of these topics are included in the Projects of the Month, going out next week.


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