I'll keep this short and sweet:
That's right kids, Sketchup is hosting another Basecamp at their world headquarters in Boulder Colorado. I'll be there!
If you missed the last one in 2010, here are the highlights:
Will you be going? Let us know in the comments!
I am pleased to announce the SightSpace 3D v1.1 update for Android devices is now available on Google Play. If you are not familiar with SightSpace, it views SketchUp (and other KMZ format files) on Apple and Android devices in Augmented Reality by superimposing the digital designs in the real-world in real-time, enabling you to walk through the model by simply moving your device. Additional features include stereoscopic red/cyan 3D, annotate 3D models, bookmark favorite views, take screenshots, share notes and photos, and more. And a quote from the Limitless computing website.
The SightSpace mobile app for SketchUp has the following improvements for Android:
- Compatibility for Android devices running 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
- Addition of a slider to control how sensitive your device is in Augmented Reality mode (this will only appear if your device has a gyroscope). As of right now, SightSpace is able to run on over 1300 hundred DIFFERENT models of Android devices. That is a lot of variation for us to account for. Each device is slightly different, so to give you the best experience, this slider will control how much movement the device picks up from you.
- Improvement of our custom VYZAR Augmented Reality engine and various bug fixes.
Note that SightSpace has a very cool feature that we designed ourselves: built in stabilization in Augmented Reality. When you hold your device still, SightSpace will always correct the orientation of the model. This may take a few seconds. I have included a video below of how to use the automatic Android Augmented Reality stabilization for SightSpace so you can see this in action.
Are you on a Mac? Have you noticed that perhaps some, if not all of your web dialogs in Sketchup appear to have black bars where you are supposed to enter text?
Well, the reason why this is happening is that those web dialogs are rendered by your default web browser. In the case of the Mac, that's Safari. You cannot choose what browser Sketchup uses to render the web dialogs.
Apple a while back pushed an update that caused this bug.
There are two choices to fix this:
1) You head over to SketchUCation and follow this thread. There you will find two solutions. One will show you how you can downgrade your Safari to a slightly older version that didn't have this bug. While this isn't all that hard to do, it's a pain.
The other solution looks seemingly brilliant, but requires a software engineer or a 14 year old to pull off...
2) You can upgrade to Mountain Lion. After seeing this bug, a lot of Mac Sketchup users were hesitant to upgrade, I was. I was lucky enough to have dodged the Safari upgrade on Lion so I never had to experience this bug on my production machine. I have tested Sketchup on Mountain Lion since hours after it's release and I can say that it works flawlessly in every regard. So go ahead and give Apple you $20 dollars, it's well worth getting rid of this bug if you use web dialogs every day.
Brizo and Igloo Studios have released 103 new Sketchup models of some of the best faucets around. They're available for free on the 3d Warehouse for you to use in your next Sketchup model.
They are beautifully modeled as well. Take a look at this side by side comparison of a Sketchup model, and an actual faucet. I know what you're thinking, it's rendered. Well, it's not. Igloo has a fantastic method of taking photo textures and wrapping them around 3D models so that these faucets look great at any angle.
These beauty of these Sketchup models, much like Brizo faucets is more then skin deep, they're quite smart. They are embedded with information that can help you, the designer use these in your model and get the information you need, see this screen shot from Sketchup:
Dimensions, model numbers, and even a link back to the faucet on the website are all there.
So you've built your fantastic model, and you want to get a list of all those Brizo faucets you've specified so that you can order them really easily. You CAN do that. Just use Product Connect, a free plugin for Sketchup that allows you to run reports on your models. Igloo and other companies have made tons of Product Enabled models that you can use. If you want add information to your own models so that you can get a report, you can do that easily with their plugin. I'd explain it more, but I think this video can best do this awesomeness justice:
