The Google Sketchup Thread

I didn't even know the 3D Warehouse existed until today.

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/

It's like Sims grew up!

I love how it constantly reveals all this stuff that you didn't realize was even possible to DO in Sketchup.

DUD: people building weird, scale-less models so that when you drop them into your project you have like fifty-foot fire hydrants and stuff.

Also note that the search results don't fill the screen right, so it's easy to overlook that there are pages and pages of other results.

essential: Mid-Century Modern furniture

Anyone tried out Sketchup Podium? http://www.suplugins.com/gallery/index.html I haven't, and photorealism isn't my thing, but I still have to say WOAH:

http://www.suplugins.com/gallery/large/0007.jpg

http://www.suplugins.com/gallery/large/0008.jpg

holy shit. i may not like it either (although it is amazing) but most potential clients would love it.

Yeah, exactly. I mean if it's as easy as they make it look, you suddenly have an in-house rendering department at the same desk as the people designing the thing! Yowiezowie.

It also reminds me how much I want one of those Perriand/Corb LC2 chairs! There are a few here at school and they are tres comfy although all in black. I like them best in Corb's horrendously ugly 1920s salmony brown color.

Man, WOW @ photorealism^^^

Ok, thanks to 3D Warehouse my new favorite thing to do is import famous structures and build extensions for them.

Also a popular studio exercise for first-year architecture students (depending on the professor of course)!

Look at me, I'm a first-year architecture student!!!

Wait, are you going for it after all? Or just experimenting via Sketchup and ILX? Bravo either way!

re: Perriand/Corb lc2

is that this chair:

http://www.productwiki.com/upload/images/lc2_grand_conforte_armchair.jpg

?

Just experimenting ATM, Casino.

That's the chair! It's not quite as doughy and absorbing as it looks but they are good chairs. I might be a bit too tall for them to be ideal.

Charlotte Perriand was the major tubular-steel-furniture designer in Corb's office, though he gets most of the credit on paper I believe this is really one of hers.

i/m not a huge fan of that chair though it is ridiculously comfortable.

also good luck rox!

I'm kind of a simpleton when it comes to furniture - all my architectural sophistimacation goes out the window and I just devolve to feels good/doesn't feel good (with a dose of cute/un-cute). Hasn't stopped me from blogging about the stuff though.

bookmarked!

i actually have one classy piece of furniture. Robin Day's Forum sofa. it was the most expensive thing i've ever bought!

actually i have other classy pieces that were all cheap finds like an arkana tulip base side table which i bought in a junk shop for £3!

it's this one but it's nicer because the top is rosewood and the base is more gunmetal than chromed.

http://www.20thcentury-decorative-arts.co.uk/Arkanatable.htm

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=e76457b55a3c041cfe49db72b6ffb2c9 - this one?

xpost

sorry for the thread diversion.

xpost - that one but it 3 seats.

The best thing I have is my hexagonal "in every suburban den" end table. :-(

aka this http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=915c251b91a8195c88ce13d0c8749b7f&prevstart=0

well that's kind of exotic to me since i have never seen one.

and, the perverse thing is, even though it's part of the job i mostly hate houses with expensive modernist furniture in them.

i enjoy looking at that kind of thing but i really cant imagine living in a place that exclusively modernist

I always think of the passage in "From Bauhaus to Our House" about starving, penniless architecture students saving up for their second Barcelona chair. The thing is that I really like modernist furniture but really have no interest in recreating some cold, purified modernist interior - would rather they just be part of a mishmash in rooms with wood paneling and beaded curtains, see also the "i would someday like to own an awesome house from the 1970s" thread.

i saw a home i loved today at this blog:

http://atelier-ad.blogspot.com/2008/12/in-my-next-life.html

beautiful isn't it?

the table in pic 5 of that post is the larger version of the one i got for £3.

That's a really expert mix of styles.

The whole Italianate thing does nothing for me, but that might just be because I've been grading Palladio papers for days... ;)

would have thought he graduated years ago

This is his distant heir, Steve Palladio. Unfortunately there are some deviations from the precedent.

hahah I am notorious in my office for my vendetta against the Barcelona chair. Fuck that 11" seat height power icon.

not a fan

there's too much chair and not enough seat

too many rookies, not enough PROS

how about the paimio chair?

hi, you aren't comfortable

but i'm into sprawly chaise lounges (xxpost)

would sooner sit on http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3169/2707400881_33fd0a8830.jpg

The Mies day-bed is the worst, though - no give whatsoever, you have to adopt this corpse-like posture but you don't even get the real back-correction of laying on a hard concrete floor. It's just awkward.

We have a Paimio chair in the building but I don't think I've ever tried it yet! It LOOKs like it wouldn't be comfortable - but then I thought the same thing about the Eames LCW:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2235/2378273832_73a8c6711a_o.jpg

...and it's actually really great!

this is one of those threads where you wish ILX had tags so future generations could know this was a thread full of furniture

looks like a stubbed out cigarette filter (xxxpost again)

New thread! Discuss Designer Furniture of the Past and Present

lol @ architecture nerds taking over ile

I'm as big a mid-century furniture geek as any, but I get really pissed off at architects who go on all the time about how clients aren't willing to take chances and then turn around and spec enitre furniture packages that are 40+ year old designs. Interior designers are really much better at furniture than architects, shock.

Who's stateside and up for an ICFF FAP?

uh I actually like the furniture discussion on this thread so non-design geeks don't hijack the discussion with "that stuff is all SO EXPENSIVE! I bought this thing at IKEA and it was really hard to put together!"

haw

On the Sketchup kick, remind me in a few days to show the before-after of my project this quarter from when I was using Sketchup to bang things around and try stuff out, to Revit when I was actually putting together the final drawings. It's not a fully developed building in either version ("Theater support spaces will be....somewhere in this, this general area") but with Sketchup I was able to move pieces around and try out different configurations, with Revit I was able to start making those pieces feel of a one-ness with each other and not jump out AS pieces.

(Granted, I had color-coded all my program pieces in SketchUp so, yeah, the garish green and the garish pink were never going to feel of a piece together, but still.)

lol @ architecture nerds taking over ile

Very welcome as far as I'm concerned! Ten Architects thread is one of my very favourite threads. Dr. Casino's Flickr I sadly had not bookmarked, I should have after Eurotrip pics.

Sketchup looks rather initimidating. Would a CAD background help?

Hyggeligt, have you DLed it? (The free version is pretty extensively featured, although useless for actual office work b/c you can't export CAD.) It's one of the easiest programs to learn, in my experience anyway - especially if you use their video tutorials. You just kind of draw shapes and tug on them to make stuff. You can work your way up to much more elaborate models but it's very intuitive. I learned it before I learned anything else, certainly before I learned CAD.

And you can ask this thread for help!

it's all modelled so you can get down into it. i'll maybe post another image later. there's actually a lot of modelling in it. i was using it mainly to get used to the tools in sketchup itself so even though they haven't used the scheme (yet!) it was very useful for me.

my first chair. pretty basic in comparison...

http://i37.tinypic.com/29576t5.jpg

really liking sketchup but think sometimes it might be easy to do things the hard way and hard to figure out how to do them the easy way.

nice work - how did you do the background like that and the extension line things?

background is a style?

Jed_ was that the place you worked on that looked like the cabin of a classic transatlantic cruiser? I like the space, I don't think it's too cartoony. I definitely think that it could help to do it from perspectives. I did not install this last night. Real life got in the way ;_;

background is a style, yep, you can mix up textures and backgrounds and line settings from styles. extension lines are just tape measure and protractor lines i used in construction.

hyggeligt, yes it was, well remembered! its another part of the same building.

sister sledge, that looks v good and i have never messed around with those settings. i'm actually torrenting tutorials for sketchup so it looks like i have some way to go with it, which is exciting.

you're clearly pretty handy already judging from the model above! and yeah i like the look of it too, wouldn't call it cartoony at all.

this is a more emotional critique, but i love that bar, and did indeed discuss many films there. it's comfy and nicely lit, and the dynamics for conversation are really good.

There you go Jed_, a winner is you!

schlump, thanks! that means a lot.

assuming you mean the part that i did design rather than the part that hasn't been done yet :/

so i'm trying to use this for a high school level geometry / chemistry course and i'm finding some stuff i like and some stuff i don't like. as far as a tool for teaching about prisms goes, it's fantastic! my main beef with it is that there doesn't seem to handle objects with curved faces very gracefully. there isn't, for example, any easy way to make a sphere and move it around. it's easy enough to make a tube, but the way the tubes connect isn't the most logical/rational. and as far as i can tell, sometimes the only you can make the drawing tool snap to the correct direction is to fiddle with the view using the orbit tool.

so anyway, this seems pretty great for architecture (since's it's built all around sketching right-angled shapes in 2-d and then "pulling up" into 3-d) and possibly even engineering, but not that great for playful visualization. i can't really figure out a great way to use this to make a model of a water molecule, let alone a 3-d cartoon character.

Sphere instructions here - http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=39024 but agreed that it's neither instinctive nor ideal.

thank you, i've seen those sphere instructions. one of the problems with that set of instructions is you can get weird edge effects and overlapping or redundant faces depending on how you size and orient your original circles.

sketchup seems like a nice, lo-fi version of autocad civil 3D. is there a lo-fi version of 3DS MAX out there?

sometimes the only you can make the drawing tool snap to the correct direction is to fiddle with the view

yeah that's a major annoyance, would be easy to have modifier keys to pick the direction.

I agree, wonder if there's a plugin for that. I'm often waving around randomly trying to "catch" the blue axis...

Just came across this place: http://www.shapeways.com/
They have one of those 3D printers, and can turn 3D models into physical objects (up to 35x40x25cm, I think) which you can order. Now I just need to work out how to turn SketchUp models into Collada files, which is what it uses. And also how to make my models "watertight" so that they can be 'printed' as solid objects. Also how to get the money I'll need to piss away on making weird little useless but cool-looking objects.

That is well nifty. Tried to get a gauge of prices by looking at other folk's models, they seem to range from 10 bucks to over 2000. Hmmm.

Had forgotten about Sketchup over the break too, need to get back to it.

The base cost seems to be $1.50 to $3 per square centimetre, depending on the material--above that there's the creator's mark-up, which I guess you avoid of making things for yourself.

These 3d printers are like now under $5K or something.

I want one!

make one yourself (diy 3d printer using powdered sugar as the medium):

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/candyfab

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2162/2068476306_72caa51a7d.jpg

omg that is serendipitously awesome - I have to pitch a concept today for this quarter's studio project ("A research center for [your choice]") and had already settled on it being a research center for candy, confections, and pastry - now I can really make the pitch sing!

haha that machine + a candy research center = BLDGBLOG post in waiting

still want to learn how to use this. hmm.

btw i got an A in design and planning :D :D

http://www.babyethiopia.com/WindowsLiveWriter/goldstar.jpg

Congrats!

So in ten minutes with this, as an absolute total and utter novice who's never used anything more technical than Paint for drawing, I made a scale model of our new sofa, half of which arrives on Wednesday.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/newsofasketchup3dvisual.jpg

I now feel like the greatest architect who ever lived. Obviously I am not, but there you go.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/newsofasketchup3dvisualwithcats.jpg

add a lady

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/newsofasketchup3dvisualwithcatsgirl.jpg

????

^ make the cat say that

add a hernia on the lady.

sketchup thread nsfw, thanks

add another lady

first draft of new bathroom tiling pattern:

http://i40.tinypic.com/2lse3hi.jpg

Needs more monsters...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Picture1-32.jpg

i'm glad my apartment isn't that colourful

nb this is my inspiration for tiling pattern:

That Motorik Beat

i keep on trying to click on nick's living room and spin it around

It's not really quite THAT colourful...

The wave of the future: sketching over Sketchup renderings!

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3342/3341566415_1e297e871d.jpg

I'm pretty pleased so far, but I would always rather be doing cartoons than working on studio so it kind of works out...

(Plus, this way I don't have to solve all the missing pieces of the project...just doodle 'em in!)

Just started playing with this today. I'm wondering if I can add this to my tech skills.