KBIS 2010

Well folks KBIS 2010 is over...

What a great show this year.  Chicago is such a great city, other then the fact that it can be brutally cold and windy, its a really nice place to hold a convention.  There is lots to see in the city, whether its great architecture, art, shopping, or most importantly for Chicago, MUSIC!

We all had the privilege of seeing these guys live one night when we were out there. (Check out the triple necked guitar!)

We also had the chance to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  They were incredible!

Let's cut to the chase:  SketchThis, along with Igloo Studios, Kraftmaid, and Paul Anater were all there presenting Sketchup in Kraftmaid's technology booth.

We did presentations all day, every day of the show.  Presentations ranged from Bart's 2020 imrovements, to Mark Johnson's Google Apps, Alex Oliver, Paul and I on Sketchup.  The presentations went great all weekend.  Our little booth was overstuffed most of the time with eager learners.  We were surrounded by celebrities and shiny objects on all sides, so at first we were a little worried that we weren't going to draw much of a crowd.  We started off by giving the best presentations that we could, and then we introduced the cheer.  At the beginning and end of each presentation we got the ever growing crowd to cheer as loudly as they could!  It was epic!  I feel like every person in that show had some pent up energy they needed to release some way, and the cheer seemed to do the trick.  This had a great effect on our attendance, word seemed to spread on the show floor that we were having a great time, and teaching a lot of great stuff.  Soon, we realized that our little corner was filled to the brim, and the celebrities were not doing as well as us!

Even after the presentations, the buzz was positive and great.  Sketchup is pretty new to the kitchen and bath industry.  Kraftmaid has really stepped up and given us some great stuff to design with while using Sketchup, and the fact that they are on the forefront of this new technology really legitimizes it for our industry.

I talked for hours with many different designers from many different fields that were really amazed at what this program could do.  I think a lot of people went home and checked it out.

If you saw us there, post a comment below, we'd love to hear what you thought of everything.  If Sketchup caught your interest, there are a lot of learning opportunities coming up, all of which I will be blogging about soon!

Here is one of the kitchens I used in my presentations.  I built this kitchen step by step, in about 22 minutes to show how easy it is to use Sketchup.  Feel free to explore this model.  If you want to see it in Sketchup, go to www.Sketchup.com and download it, its free, and you'll be able to play around with this model all you want.  Its made with Kraftmaid cabinets!

Move over Sang!

Sketchup can be configured so many different ways. You can add your own plugins, styles, components, and templates to name a few.

One of the most important things to set in Sketchup is your default workspace. When you start Sketchup for the first time, you get a choice of several different templates. Most of the templates are aimed at architects and engineers.

To make life easier for us designers, I have created a custom template that you can download and install into your Sketchup. Why do all the work when I have already done it for you! This template includes the corect drawing units (inches) and some custom styles for your designs.

Check out this video on how my template works:

To download this template for yourself, head on over to the download section of SketchThis.NET

We've gone social!

Even though in terms of technology, the internet is rather young, I think its here to stay! Since the internet became really popular, it has changed so much. I remember when it was a real novelty to see a picture on a website! Nowadays, if there isn't an "App for that" or a video on your site, you just aren't cool. Don't forget about "being social" as well!

It seems that internet users, rather then dealing with "real" social situations, have decided that socializing over the internet is much better. At first, I was a little skeptical of this whole social networking phenomenon. Now that the Whitehouse has a Facebook page, and we are Tweeting to space, I am convinced that social networking is here to stay.

So, throw my hat in and fill out my social networking portfolio with the following social networks!

Twitter - Here you will find our random thoughts and links as they relate to Sketchup (You can also pick up our Twitter feed to the left side of this blog.)

Facebook - You can "Become a fan" of SketchThis here. We try to keep this page very relevant to Sketchthis.

Email - If you are old school, and still using that ancient technology called email, you can sign up for our monthly newsletter.

So there you have it! SketchThis has social skills now!

KBIS!

I am proud to announce that SketchThis.NET has been invited to KBIS this year to present with Igloo Studios and Kraftmaid Cabinetry in their "technology" booth at the show! We will be giving presentations during the show. Stop by and see all of us. This would be great chance to see Sketchup in action live, and get any of your questions answered! As we get closer, I will post more details.

But before the show, you can still get a lot of your Sketchup questions answered right here. In every blog post, I try to offer some tips and insight into using Sketchup in kitchen design. Often when people are faced with the prospect of using a new piece of software it really helps to see what its capable of from start to finish. I find it easier to start with the big picture, to make sure it can do what I want, and then work my way down to the details.

To help folks really see what Sketchup can do for them in kitchen design, I have put together this three minute video montage of a kitchen being designed in Sketchup. After seeing this you will have a really good idea of what Sketchup can do for you! Share it with your friends, and as always, please visit our website to ask any questions you may have.

Sketchup 7: Texturing just got a little easier!

Sketchup has many textures in it that are shipped right along with the software.  If you want more textures, you can download some Google provided material bonus packs.

I have found that some of the wood textures that are shipped with Sketchup are a little lacking in detail.  I often times will create my own textures from images that I find on the web.  A simple Google image search turns up endless pictures that are ripe for use as wood textures.

In Sketchup 6, you were able to make any image that you found a texture, however if you imported it and you found that the image wasn't quite right, you had to go back out of Sketchup, edit the image, and then start over....  This was frustrating, as sometimes textures looked good until you got halfway through texturing your model and then you found out that in some circumstance they didn't look so good.  Now you had to delete all the textures you had, and start over.

This frustartion is gone in Sketchup 7 now.  The Google team added a nice new feature that hasn't really seen much coverage since the launch of Sketchup 7.  I love this feature, and I use it all the time.

In your "Preferences" in Sketchup on both the Mac and PC, you are now able to specify a default image editor.  What this allows you to do is import a texture, and place it in the model as you always have been able to do.  But now, if you don't like the way the texture looks, say it needs to be cropped, rotated, or touched up, you can do so by right clicking on the texture in the materials browser.  Instantly you favorite image editor is launched, you make the changes you want to make, click save, and before you have a chance to switch windows, all your textures in the Sketchup model are updated!  No need to start over and re-paint everything!

I took some screen shots of this process in action, so you can get an idea of how this works.  For my default image editor, I will be using Google's Picasa photo organizer.  For those of you that think that Google has also shipped me a case of Kool Aid, know this:  I am about as graceful with photo editing software as these dancers.  I find that for the basic things I do to photo textures, like straightening, cropping, and rotating, Picasa works great.  (Its also free too)  However, Sketchup will play nice with any photo application out there, so if you are any good at Photoshop or others, you can probably do this better then I can!

First, get on over to your favorite search engine and find some pictures.  When you find the one you want, save it to your computer, taking note of where you saved it.  (You will need to show Sketchup where this file is when you import it)  As you will see, I picked a particularly ugly wood texture, I did this because its easy to see its imperfections, and what is happening to it as we edit it.  I don't typically design kitchens made out of old sheds!

Next, inside Sketchup, find your "Materials" window.  If this isn't already open, you can find it under the "Window" menu.  When you see the window, click the little house icon.  This will show you what materials are already in your model.  This is where we are going to create the new texture from the image that you just downloaded.  On the PC there is a small plus icon that you can click on to create a new texture, on the Mac you can right click in a blank area and select "New Texture".  You will then be prompted to find that file just downloaded.  Once you do that, it will appear in the list of textures as ones that are "in the model" you can now select that texture and paint it on whatever surfaces you want to.  In my case, I ended up with this:

This isn't exactly what I wanted.  There are a few bad things going on here.  First, the boards are facing the wrong way.  Second, I don't like that big smudge that is in one of the boards, nor do I like the big black line, or the nail holes at the end of each board.  Don't worry, we can fix this easily!  Find the texture again in the materials browser, right click on it, and click "Edit Texture" You will then see a little tray slide out (already pictured above) that allows you to tweak the texture in Sketchup.  Really all you can do here is just change its size.  What we are going to do now is edit it in the photo editor that we setup earlier.  Just to the right of the texture name, there is an orange arrow flying out of a box, click that.  This will load the texture image in your photo editor.

Now that we have this image loaded up in Picasa, I will have another sip of Kool Aid fix this picture the way I want it.

Here you can see that I have rotated the image, and I am cropping it to get rid of the smudge, and the nails.

Here is the image, all cropped and ready to go.  Now all I need to do is click Save, and head back over to Sketchup

And there it is!  Just the way I wanted it.  I did have to stretch it a little higher in Sketchup by changing its height. This can be done in the "Edit texture" tray.  You will see dimensions that you can type in to change the size of your texture.

So now you know how to really make some nice textures in Sketchup.  The really great thing about this feature is that you can do it at anytime.  Even if I had this whole model textured up, and I changed the texture with my image editor just like I showed you here, the whole model would be updated without you having to repaint all your textures!  How cool is that!

If you have a great example of this, please email me your models, I would love to feature them here.