The über-modelers over at FormFonts have just launched a new blog. From the looks of it, the content is fresh, relevant and nicely varied. Some of my favorite recent posts:
This post (their first one) talks a little bit about the history of FormFonts. Well worth the read. Welcome to the blogosphere, FF!
Hello college basketball fans! It’s March and that means March Madness is in full swing. 65 teams were pitted against each other in this single elimination tournament to decide the 2010 NCAA Men’s College Basketball Championship. In getting into the spirit of the season, Google launched a College Basketball webpage to see the latest results, get live information on teams, manage your bracket, and tour 3D models of the arenas.
Here at the SketchUp office, we gathered 14 models of the arenas and added them to a Featured Collection. These models are located all over the country, and largely created by users like you. Especially cool is the model of the Energy Solutions Arena in Salt Lake City, where you can fly inside and see the interior of the model! Both the Edward Jones Dome and the HSBC Arena are great examples of high quality photo-texturing, and the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis was created using Google Building Maker.
We also put together a 3D tour (kml file) of these arenas for Google Earth 5. You can see the relation of the cities to one another and explore the surrounding 3D models. Creating a tour like this is a snap with the touring feature in Google Earth 5.
So explore the collection, enjoy the tour and hopefully rejoice in how well your bracket still looks.
Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist
As people who already know what SketchUp is, I doubt anything in the video we made recently will be groundbreaking news. Nonetheless, we’re proud of it, and we thought you might be interested.
Some notes before you watch it: This was my first time “acting” in a non-training video – I know I won’t be winning an Oscar anytime soon. Also (in the interest of full disclosure), I did design the DVD coffee table in real life, but my good buddy and coworker Tyson Kartchner built it in his garage. This is a good thing, as power tools and I don’t always get along.
The table will soon be residing in a member of the SketchUp team’s dwelling, but if you’d like to build something like it, I’ve posted the model to the 3D Warehouse.
I used SketchUp to design the “set” for the video, and LayOut to create the storyboard we used to plan it out and shoot it. As you can see, we stuck to it pretty closely:
(click the image to see it bigger)Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist
Here’s an interesting article that James found on the BBC website: The UK government has announced plans for a zero-emissions house that meets new standards for energy efficiency and all-around eco-friendliness. Besides that, the article includes images of a SketchUp model. How can we tell? The two little girls with the basset hound on the second floor belong to Scott, our engineering manager.
Posted by John Bacus, Product Manager
You’ve probably noticed the little person who appears in every new SketchUp file you create — in fact, you’ve probably deleted him more times than you can count. Or maybe you’re one of the hundreds of people who delight in doing funny things to him and uploading him to the 3D Warehouse.
Here why he’s there: Sometimes it’s hard to know how big something is when you’re just sketching it out for the first time. So we added a scale figure (a person, basically) to some of our default SketchUp templates. That way, you can rough out an idea by modeling relative to the person, instead of by paying close attention to the Value Control Box. Having a little dude on the screen also helps new users figure out which way is up.
With each new release, we’ve used a different member of the SketchUp team for that scale figure. In SketchUp 6, the lucky victim is Bryce, but we’ve also used Sandra, Greg and me in earlier releases. If you look in the “2D People” collection in the 3D Warehouse, you can see components for lots of other SketchUp folks, too. So next time you’re deleting Bryce, remember that he’s a real person, and that he has feelings, too. Then go ahead and erase him. I do it dozens of times a day – and I sit right next to him.
SketchUpdate 