Export your SketchUp models to 3D PDF format to share them with people that doesn't have Sketchup Català - Castellano - Deutsch If you want to share your 3D model with someone that doesn't have SketchUp installed or you simply want to integrate your 3D model in a 3D presentation, you might be interested in this commercial plugin. SimLab 3d PDF from Sketchup allows you to directly export 3D PDF from SketchUP. There is a free trial for 30 days. The license costs 95$.
Click on the image below to see a PDF created with this plugin
The free trial doesn't allow full control of the advanced features though. WIth a more complicated model, I also found some bugs (duplicated elements on the wrong position).
On the positive side, the plugin can export the section planes and it will add a buttpon to toggle them. So it really becomes like having sketchup (without editing tools) inside your pdf file. You can also select geometry and switch it off and on depending on what is it that you want to see.
A new Free Plugin to unfold your Model in SketchUp. Català - Castellano - Deutsch Some time ago I posted about the Unfold Tool Plugin for SketchUp. Recently I found out throught the Daily CathUp that Pumpkinpirate has released a better Unfold tool called Flattery. I set myself to try it and produced this quick video about it.
A Plugin to help you turn your models into STL files ready for 3D Printing Català - Castellano - Deutsch With the evolution of 3D printing technology, 3D Printing is becoming more and more common during the design process. To get good results with 3D printing we need to be sure that our model is ready for it. Sketchup is a great design tool, but you will agree with me that sometimes a model might get quite messy if we are not paying too much attention to the way we model.
CADSpan has a free plugin to convert your model into what is called a "water tight" model. Water tight models are needed for the 3D printers to be able to produce the physical model in one piece. The Plugin also eliminates duplicated and overlapping faces. It basically cleans up the model and lets you export it to the STL file format system that's the standard. See the video below by CADSpan.
The Plugin can be found at the CADSpan website. There is a Free and a Pro Version of it.
Le Corbu recommends SketchUp... Català - Castellano - Deutsch This is just a silly funny piece of work put together by Paul from Viewsion (Sketchup Ireland blog) to promote the use of SketchUp. I thought it was funny enought to share it here. Enjoy
These are part of a more complete set of Plugins by TIG that contains very other useful tools. The ones detailed here are the ones I found more useful (because I needed to use them), but the others are quite handy too. Installing the full set of tools from here, will add a Toolbar to SketchUp that will allow you to easy access all the Plugins on this set.
Alternatively, you can access them going to Plugins --> Extrusion Tools.
Two Plugins to link Sketchup models with schedules and simulate the construction process Català - Castellano - Deutsch I was looking around for Plugins to use in sketchup to easily simulate the construction process. I am following a schedule management class, and would like to do a bit more than just the schedule part, but try to link it with a visualization of the construction model based on a simple SketchUp model. I came across two three plugins that seem to do the trick.
The first one, and the only free one, is called onTime5D. On the video below you can see a very brief preview of its functionality. The plugin seems to be in process of development, you can follow up on this on the author's website.
The first second one is called xD Virtual Builder, developed by D-Studio. It can be found at their website: www.4dvirtualbuilder.com. I tried it a bit, but didn't have the time to properly test it. As described in the features, it allows you to import schedule files in xml format from MS Project, Primavera and Asta Powerproject. You can check the Getting Started Tips, and take a look at the video below to get an overview of the Program. Unfortunately, it is not free, there is a free trial, but the cheapest version (without XML import) sells at $59.
The second third one is called Synchro Project Cosntructor. It is not just a Plugin for SketchUp but a full Scheduling and Project Controlling Tool. This is the reason why it is much more expensive, over $800. Nevertheless, it allows to import SketchUp Files and to then use its features to create a 4D simulation of the construction process. It imports MS Project and Primavera Files and seems more complete (it has to for the price!). Find more info on the Product Website and on the following video.
Any insights on these Plugins? Do you know of any free Plugin to create 4D simulations in SketchUp based on Schedules? Please share!
Extrude any face along a path. it sound like Follow Me tool? Well it is much better and faster. Català - Castellano - Deutsch TIG set of Extrusion Tools is great. Another Tool of this set I wanted to show you here is the ExtrudeEdgesByFace.rb. This one allows you to Extrude a face following a line or set of lines (straight or curved). I know this might sound exactly as the Follow me Tool, but it is not. The advantages compared to the Follow Me Tool is that the Face doesn't need to be properly alligned with the profile to be extruded properly. See these two images.
If you want, you can rotate the face and use the Plugin again and the result would be this one.
Another advantage of this Plugin compared to the Follow me Tool is that it allows you to do multiple Extrude Operations at the same time. Like the one below. I selected the Face and all the paths, and in a single operation i got this result.
A powerful Plugin to create a "Loft Surface" between curves. Català - Castellano - Deutsch Not so long ago, we saw the Loft Plugin by Chris Fullmer that allowed us to create Lofts between curved edges. Although the Plugin was useful, it had some imprecisions and not so much functionality.
TIG, inspired by this Plugin, has created the extrudeEdgesByLoft.rb Plugin. It is, for its functionality, like a much better version of the previous Plugin by Chris Fullmer. It creates the Loft surface with better precision from given curves, see below.
Besides creating the mesh, it allows you to choose if you want to reverse faces or soften the edges.
And even if you want to eliminate the edges you used to create the loft operation.
Another Great Plugin by TIG. It can be downloaded here (you need to be registered)together with other Extrude Tools that we will soon see here.
Extrude Edges or faces with a rotation. Català - Castellano - Deutsch ExtrudeEdgesByLathe.rb by TIG allows us to Extrude Polylines or Faces following a circular path defined by an axis and a rotation angle. The Plugin is part of a suite of several Extrusion Plugins by the same Author that can be found here. The Plugin Allows you to do the following.
We can set all the properties of the extrusion on a dialog box that appears after we run the Plugin. These are the options for the previous example.
And if we select a face instead of a polyline, the plugin works too!!
Place components along a path with this awesome plugin from Chris Fullmer. Català - Castellano - Deutsch Placing components along a path is now a piece of cake with this Plugin from Chris Fullmer. The components allows several options like rotating the components as they are placed, scaling them etc. It is a very useful tool. I usually had to do this sort of task in AutoCAD using the MEASURE and DIVIDE commands. Now this can be done direclty and very easily in SketchUp. See Chris's video to get a better idea of what this does.
Record your moves and export them as a set of images to create an animation Català - Castellano - Deutsch We saw on a previous post how to create an animation using the Flightpath.rb plugin. If what we want is to create a walkthrough, the Camera Recorder Plugin works better (at least for me). With this Plugin by Chris fullmer, you can walk through the mode using the walk tool from sketchup, and record the moves and get them exported to a series of images. See the video where Chris Explains how to use this Plugin.
SketchUp animations exports are pretty bad in quality, how to improve that? Català - Castellano - Deutsch I had to export an animation for a recent project at school, and the regular exports from SetchUp were way to bad in quality. So I set myself to try to find a better way to do that. A bit of research on the internet showed me that if you export the animation as individual images and compile them on a movie file, the results should be better. Following some of the advice from Colin Holgate on this thread I exported my different scenes as series of JPEGs (I didn't realise it was better to export as PNG, I read the thread to quickly). The export resolution as 2048 x 1152 for a 16:9 widescreen format. Colin on his post explained he exported at 4096 x 2304 px, but my machine is old and I was time pressed to finish this, so i had to sacrifice quality for time. Also, the methodology is slightly different, since he was exporting from a Mac and I was doing it from a PC. In any case, the steps I followed were these:
Configure the Animation so it does not pause on each scene (see this post about it)
Export the Animation ( I used export as JPEG and quality 2048x1153px, ideally you want to export a bit higher quality and PNG format)
Reduce the Exported Images to a lower resolution (I reduced them to 853 x 480px)
Compile the images in a Movie file using Quicktime Pro
Combine the different scenes and add credits + music using Adobe Premiere Pro
This is the video after following these steps.
As you can see, the quality is still not impressive. This is due to several reasons:
I exported as JPG by mistake instead of PNG
I should have exported the original images in higher quality to reduce the flickering of lines
It was my first time using Premiere, so I had no idea which settings I was using.
As you see, I am still a newby on this, I just wanted to share the work done. Anyone who has some advice on how to better attempt to get a high quality animation out of SketchUp that is still manageable in size, feel free to comment.
Do you need to create a flythrough animation in SketchUp? Use this plugin to set up the scenes. Català - Castellano - Deutsch The Flightpath.rb Plugin allows you to easily create fly through type of animation. It is very simple to use and has several options to set the target of the camera.
If you want to do a fly through sort of animation, you probably want to use the first option, which basically creates an animation where the camera follows the path (it basically uses the next node or vertex of the path as the camera target). For other sort of animations (like the one I am going to show on the next post) you can use the other three options which basically let you choose if the camera points to a single target all the time, if it changes target on a straight line from one point to another, or if the target moves also on a second path.
The Plugin can be downloaded here for free. There is a newer version of the plugin called Flightpath 2, also available at Smustard, it costs 7$, but I haven't tested it.
This is an open question, not a solution. Is there a Plugin for that? Català - Castellano - Deutsch I've been asked if there is a way to export the SketchUp layers when exporting to AutoCAD as 2D drawing. All my Google searches have been useless, so here comes the question in case someone can help with this. Is there a Plugin to Export as 2D Drawing from SketchUp to AutoCAD and get the geometry to keep the layers from SketchUp?. Right now the only thing that seems possible is to separate the geometry in Cut Edges and Profile Edges. SO please, if anyone knows how to do this share it here! THanks
Another curved surface creation Plugin. SketchUp is becoming more powerful day by day. Thanks to TIG this time! Català - Castellano - Deutsch Need to extrude an edge following two contour edges? A new Plugin by TIG will do it for you. The "Extrude Edges by Rails" plugin developed by TIG allows you to select the edge to be extruded and the two rails to use as extrusion path. On the following example, see how from the three curved lines shown on the upper picture, I created the surface on the lower picture. Pretty cool ha!?
To use it (after installing the plugin) go to Plugins-->Extrude Edges by Rails. Just a bit of advice before running it, the example shown here took more than 5 minutes to be created (I am running a 3 year old Laptop 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2Gb of Ram). At some point I though the computer was hung, but it didn't, just be patient.
What are the steps to follow to model a terrain in SketchUp? See them following this series of posts. Català - Castellano - Deutsch The first thing we need to do to be able to model a terrain, is to have clean topographic lines. This task is definitely better done on a CAD drafting platform such as AutoCAD. Ideally, we want to have topo-lines all connected, without gaps in them, and of course we want each of this topo lines to be at the right height. Getting this clean geometry is probably the most time consuming proces of modelling the terrain. See below for a "before and after" version of a typical topo file.
Once we have it, we just need to import the geometry to Sketchup and we are ready to start. To model the terrain, we need the SandBox tools. Although they come standard with sketchup, they need to be activated, so if you can´t see them, go to Windows --> Preferences --> Check that the box of the SandBox is Active --> Then go to View --> Toolbars --> Sandbox.
Before we proceed to use the sandbox tool to model the terrain, I strongly encourage you to use the Simplify Contours Plugin to simplify a bit the topo lines. Otherwise, the resulting terrain might be too heavy to handle.
Once we have done this, we simply need to select topo-lines, and click on the "from contours" tool in the Sandbox toolbar.
This will create the basic terrain. As you can see on the image below.
To represent it resembling a real life model I also added the sides and to be able to understand better how the terrain works, I used Chris Fullmer's "color by Z" plugin to paint the terrain. See below.
On future posts we will see how to add simple roads, how to place buildings, how to add vegetation, context terrain from Google earth, etc. I´ll try to use this same model for the other tutorials so anyone can follow them by downloading the file. BTW, tomorrow is thanksgiving, so those who celebrate it, have a wonderful time with your families and/or friends. Don't get too crazy with the shopping deals...we are still on recession. Show me more...
Another free form editing plugin for SketchUp. Who said sketchup could only handle boxy geometry?? Català - Castellano - Deutsch Editing curves and so called free form geometry is something important when we want to design buildings that are something more than a set of boxy shapes. Slowly, the ruby programmers are coming with more and more plugins to do this, turning SketchUp slowly into a great tool, too, for free form modelling. The latest one I came across with, is the Geometric Curve Smoothing. What it does is better explained on the video below.
The plugin is still under development (currently version 1.1 is out). You can download this version via the author's page.
Push faces smartly with this plugin from a4chitect. Català - Castellano - Deutsch The standard push pull tool doesn't give us sometimes the results we want when the geometry we have is not formed by perpendicular faces. If we have oblique adjacent faces to the one we want to push/pull. Let's see an example of what I mean. On the following model, we want to push the face colored in orange.
The standard Push Pull tool only considers the selected face, regardless of what type of geometry is adjacent to that face. The result would be something like this.
But if what we want is that the push operation understands that there is an oblique face "touching" the face we are pushing, we need to use the SmartPushPull plugin created by a4chitect. This plugin will allow us to get the following result without the need of complicated cleanups.
The plugin is still under development, so I'll just post the link to the Sketchucation thread where you will be able to download it and get the newest versions as soon as they are published. One of the things you will notice is that the current version v0.26 does not delete the original face and lines, but this can be partially solved by using the "delete coplanar edges" plugin, that we saw on a previous post at CAD-Addict.
Need to paint a bunch of faces randomly? Don't do it manually, there is a plugin for that. Català - Castellano - Deutsch Chris Fullmer published a while ago the plugin clf_extrapolate_colors.rb that allows us to paint a bunch of faces with random colors. It is very easy to use and it allows a good level of control on the randomization process, i.e. which colors should appear more often, etc. On the smustard page where you can download the plugin there is also a very useful video posted by Chris that explains more in depth what this plugin is capable of.
New update available. Català - Castellano - Deutsch I am quite late on this, last weeks my access to internet has been less regular than desirable. In any case, a new update on SketchUp is out. Version 7.1 brings some new features, so far nothing impressive though for what I've seen from the videos posted at the Official Google SketchUp Blog. Judge by yourself. New Tools in SU to model context
New Tools in Layout 2.1
As I said before, so far I am not impressed by this new features. What about you? Did any of you try them? Are they worh updating to 7.1?
Export your SketchUp models to 3D PDF format to share them with people that doesn't have Sketchup 
