Sketch-up up date

[STRAT]

The latest upgrade for Sketch Up will be due out in June - subscribers should automatically receive it!

 

some new features -

 

Dimensions and Annotation

Improved Arcs, Circles, and Polygons

Curved Faces and Soft Edges

Material Transparency

Animation Export of AVI and MOV files

Filled Polygon Vector Output in EPS and PDF

VRML Export

Modeless Layer Control Palette

 

Here's an image done in 3.0 (taken from sketchup site)

 

 

[ May 19, 2003, 06:19 AM: Message edited by: STRAT ]

[bigcahunak]

Sounds and looks promising.

Thanks for the update.

[Craig Ramsay]

Fantastic that looks much better than v2.

 

Hope it's not buggy

 

Craig

[Kevin3D]

Would sketch-up be a good app for someone like myself who is a non-architect & works with DWG drawings for the purposes of doing 3D archtectural fly-throughs?

[garethace]

Would sketch-up be a good app for someone like myself who is a non-architect & works with DWG drawings for the purposes of doing 3D archtectural fly-throughs?

The only way to answer that question is to download the 8 hour trial software from www.sketchup.com.

 

I sometimes do fit into a passive designer role myself (normally when i am working on masterplanning projects, which don't require me to work on individual buildings) and i have been playing around with the trial version over the weekend.

 

I would suggest trying it out - i was surprised by how fast it was, and uncomplicated to do stuff with sketchup. I imagine with a bit of time spent with the manuals and excellent tutorial videos available at the sketchup site - i could master it as a software.

 

The sketchup site has a great forum too, so you wouldn't be entirely without a support mechanism to sort out difficulties with using it etc.

 

Gareth.

 

P.S. Even the seasoned cgartists here may find this particular movie nice to look at - as good an explanation of section tools + cg models, explained in video tutorial as i have yet to come across.

 

http://www.sketch3d.com/video_qt.php?file=http://downloads.sketchup.com/Demos/Sectioning/d7-section_basics.mov

 

[ May 19, 2003, 11:06 AM: Message edited by: garethace ]

[STRAT]

Kevin3D - sketchup is like an extention of autodesk's AEC modeller. it's a block modeller. a massing modeller. very fast, very easy to learn, very conceptual and gives a very 'sketchy' feel to the lines it draws (this can be adjusted to your own liking). a beginner can learn this with no prior experience very very quickly.

 

it isn't a rendering package (you cant assign materials and lights) and at the present it doesn't animate (no fly throughs). but it will cope with DWG's.

 

as garethace suggests, download the demo and try it out for yourself

[Kevin3D]

garethace & strat,

 

thanks for the info guys! I'll give it a try!!

[Fgra]

Actually, you can assign materials, any material you want, though it maps in limited directions and follows the orientation of the raw image from it's point of origin. As for lights, you can render exterior and to some degree interior scenes using sun shadows, of course not as accurate for interiors but effective as a concept image.

 

For architectural modeling you can very well model anything you want in it's entirety, i've finished various project types completely in sketchup and 'ported them over to lightscape (though a tad heavy at times because of tesselation) for rendering or exporting sketchup renderings and touching them up in photoshop. (check out Marco Fastidio's rendition of the beach resort) Rendering is totally limited to line expressions so you may do well to just take advantage of the modeling speed it can offer.

 

Consider sketchup primarily as a design tool for easy model concepts and massing studies, the great thing is the way you can work on a mass and whittle it down to a very detailed model when your design nears it's point of finality, believe me, revisions are a snap.