When you're working with rounded objects whose edges have been smoothed, it's sometimes hard to make things look good. That's because curved surfaces don't automatically produce a profile edge that helps to differentiate them from the background. You can see what I'm talking about in the images that follow; notice the (what I consider to be) unsatisfying outline of each of the rounded objects below?
Without Profiles turned on, rounded objects don't stand out.
Turning on Profiles in the Styles dialog box produces a completely different result. At a Profiles setting of 2 pixels, perimeter edges become clearly visible. They're a little chunky, though—and that's not always the effect I'm aiming for.
Profiles that are 2 pixels thick often look too bold and cartoony.
Dialing down Profiles to 1 pixel solves the problem (see below).
Using a Profile thickness of 1 pixel makes rounded objects pop out from the background.
While this trick might seem obvious, it actually took eight years to soak into my brain. I never understood the benefit of setting my profile thickness to a single pixel. After all, edges are already that thickness—why spend the computer cycles to draw them again? Now I know. I thought others might benefit from my epiphany, embarrassingly late though it is.
It's worth mentioning that telling SketchUp to draw Profiles can slow things down considerably if your model's pushing the limits of your polygon budget. I only switch Profiles on when I need them.
Today we’re introducing the latest version of Google Earth, our interactive digital atlas. Now you can explore your childhood home, visit distant lands or scope out your next vacation spot with even more realistic tools.
In Google Earth 6, we’re taking realism in the virtual globe to the next level with two new features: a truly integrated Street View experience and 3D trees. We’ve also made it even easier to browse historical imagery. Over the next several days on our LatLong Blog, we’ll be digging deeper into these great new features, but here’s an overview to whet your appetite.
3D trees I think we can all agree that our planet without trees would be a pretty desolate place. Besides the ever-important task of providing us with the oxygen we breathe, trees are an integral part of the landscape around us. In Google Earth, while we and our users have been busy populating the globe with many thousands of 3D building models, trees have been rather hard to come by. All that is changing with Google Earth 6, which includes beautifully detailed, 3D models for dozens of species of trees, from the Japanese Maple to the East African Cordia to my personal favorite, the cacao tree. While we’ve just gotten started planting trees in Google Earth, we already have more than 80 million trees in places such as Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo. Through our Google Earth Outreach program, we’ve also been working with organizations including the Green Belt Movement in Africa, the Amazon Conservation Team in Brazil and CONABIO in Mexico to model our planet’s threatened forests.
To enjoy these leafy additions to Google Earth, make sure you turn on the 3D buildings layer on the left side panel. As a starting point, try a search for “Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco.” Once you arrive at your destination, click the zoom slider. You’ll then be taken down to the ground where you can use our new ground-level navigation to walk among the trees.
3D trees in San Francisco, California
Integrated Street View When Google Earth was first introduced, people were wowed by the ability to virtually fly from outer space right down to the roof of their house. While flying over rooftops gives you a super-human view of our world, the ground level is where we experience our daily lives. We took our first baby steps toward bringing the Google Earth experience to street level with our implementation of Street View in Google Earth in 2008, which enabled flying into Street View panoramas. In Google Earth 6, the Street View experience is now fully integrated, so you can journey from outer space right to your doorstep in one seamless flight.
Now, you’ll notice that Pegman is docked right alongside the navigation controls—an ever-present travel companion ready whenever you want to get your feet on the street and take a virtual walk around. Just pick up Pegman and drop him wherever you see a highlighted blue road to fly right down to the ground. Once there, you can use the navigation controls or your mouse to look around. And unlike our earlier Street View layer, you can now move seamlessly from one location to another as if you’re walking down the street by using the scroll-wheel on your mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you want to visit somewhere farther away, simply click the “exit” button and you’ll immediately return to an aerial view where you can easily fly to your next destination.
Drag and drop Pegman to enter Street View. The blue lines indicate where Street View imagery is available.
Easy-to-use historical imagery One of the features people told us they liked best in Google Earth 5 was the availability of historical imagery, which enables you to visually go back in time to see such things as Warsaw in 1935, London in 1945, and Port-au-Prince Haiti before and after the devastating earthquake of January 2010. But it wasn’t always obvious when historical imagery was available for a particular place, making this feature one of Google Earth’s lesser-known gems.
So with this new version, we’ve made it very easy to discover historical imagery. When you fly to an area where historical imagery is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If you click on this date, you’ll instantly be taken back in time to view imagery from that time period. You can then browse through all the historical imagery available for that location, or simply close the time control and return to the default view.
The site of Google's Mountain View campus in 1948
To download Google Earth 6, or to see videos of our newest features, visit http://earth.google.com.
Google Demo Slam is a little piece of tech we put together to help people wrap their heads around all the cool/useful stuff that Google offers. It's the perfect way to wake up after stuffing yourself with Thanksgiving turkey.
Here's a SketchUp Demo Slam by DIY filmmaker Erik Beck of Indy Mogul:
If you haven’t discovered Ponoko yet, you’re in for a treat. Ponoko is about turning the stuff you dream up into physical objects that you can hold in your hands. Nothing beats seeing your designs come to life.
To coincide with the launch of their new Personal Factory 4 services, I’m happy to announce a nifty competition we’re helping the folks at Ponoko to promote. Basically, the challenge is to produce a piece of instructional content that’s equal parts enlightening and entertaining. Each entry must be titled “How to use Google SketchUp for Ponoko 3D printing,” but aside from that, the format is pretty open. Text, images and video (or some combination of the three) are all fair game.
The prizes are noteworthy: All three winners will each receive SketchUp Pro 8, a 12-month Prime subscription to Personal Factory 4 and a voucher for having something made. The prizes for first place alone are worth $1500.
The competition deadline is four weeks from now; all entries are due December 17, 2010. Visit the official announcement page for all the juicy details, and have fun making the world a more interesting place to be.
Today, we’re happy to announce that three more Japanese cities are viewable in 3D in Google Earth: Yokohama, Sendai and Saitama.
Sun rising over Yokohama.
You can now tour photo-realistic, 3D buildings in these cities without leaving your house—or climbing aboard a shinkansen.
If you’d like to extend your virtual stay in Japan, you can take a tour of Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka or Kyoto, which are also available in Google Earth’s 3D Buildings layer.
We want to thank the many users who modeled and contributed 3D buildings for these Japanese cities. If you’re interested in creating buildings for your town—or for any town—we have several easy-to-use tools to get you started.
With Google Building Maker, you can create and contribute a building in as little as 10 minutes. In Japan, Building Maker is available for the following cities: Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Kobe, Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka, Saitama, Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo and Yokohama. And if you’d like to refine your building bring it into Google SketchUp for fine-tuning.
'Tis the season... for software competitions! The folks at Reallusion (the talented makers of iClone) have recently launched the Bring Your Architecture to Life SketchUp & iClone Rendering Contest. With a combination of realistic materials, detailed landscape entourage objects, spiffy lighting effects and full-fledges animation, iClone is a really nice way to present your models.
If you use SketchUp on a Windows computer, you should definitely give iClone a whirl. The material incentives for entering this competition are substantial; An iPad, a Sony Cyber-shot digicam, SketchUp Pro 8 and plenty of other goodies await the winners.
The deadline for entering is midnight on December 15th, 2010. Visit the contest page on the Reallusion website for more details. Also wander over to this thread on SketchUcation—you'll find links to tutorials and advice that should give you a jump-start, if you need one.
This past summer, Supermodeler Arkadiusz Pawlowski (a.k.a. Arek, a.k.a. aroo) decided to hold a SketchUp workshop for students at the Nicolas Copernicus University of Toruń. He partnered with fellow Toruń alumni Radoslaw Golba to teach the course. I asked him a few questions about the experience:
Arek alongside the workshop participants
Why did you decide to hold a workshop?
It was like an impulse I had on my way back from the 2010 Google Mapper and Modeler Summit held in Zurich. I came to the conclusion that it would be a good thing to organize classes for students to teach them what I knew about geo-modeling with SketchUp.
So the purpose of the workshop was to teach students how to geo-model?
Yes, but I also wanted to increase the students’ knowledge of modeling tools and have them practice visualizing objects in a digital 3D form. I encouraged them to work independently and to further develop the skills that they could use beyond geo-modeling.
Workshop in session
What was the schedule like for the workshop?
Since most of the students had never used SketchUp before, the first day of the workshop was used to let them familiarize themselves with the program. On the second day, students went out to collect photographs of selected buildings, and then later edited the images to make textures for the model. The third day of the workshop was for actually modeling the buildings in SketchUp and then texturing them with the previous day’s photos. All of the complete models are in a collection on the 3D Warehouse.
The workshop was also supported by the Department of Cartography, Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems of University of Toruń, who handed out certificates to participants at the end of the workshop... and Google provided t-shirts. :)
Workshop participants sporting awesome Google shirts
See more photos of Arek’s workshop, and download the placemarks of all the buildings created in the workshop, then view the models in Google Earth.
Posted by Nicole Drobeck, Geo Community Program Manager
Today we’re announcing a new approach to bestowing “Super Modeler” status on our geo-modeling rock stars. More on that below—but first a little history.
A new form of 3D modeling began when @Last Software, the maker of SketchUp, was acquired by Google in 2006. Modeling 3D buildings for the purpose of viewing them in Google Earth went from being a quirky activity to a new art form. We refer to it as "geo-modeling.”
Being 3D enthusiasts ourselves, we were always on the lookout for good building models in the 3D Warehouse. When we discovered particularly impressive ones, we would add them to the featured modeler collection.
Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood by Arrigo Silva
Internally, we used the phrase “super modelers” to describe the people creating these amazing models, but it wasn’t until we started planning the first geo-modeling conference in August of last year that we began to publicly refer to modelers in this way. Following the event, a newsgroup was established, a collection created, and the user community representing some of the most skilled geo-modelers was officially born.
As the geo-modeling community expanded, so did the number of people creating remarkable models. We continued to add new modelers as we discovered them, and earlier this year we introduced badges in the 3D Warehouse—with one designated specifically for Super Modelers.
The coveted Super Modeler badge
With badges comes competition—more and more modelers began to ask how they could earn this honor. As time passed it became evident that we needed a clear set of criteria by which a modeler would be considered. The time had also come to establish greater transparency for how these decisions were being made, and who was making them.
So today we’re announcing a new process to become a Super Modeler—you decide!
It works like this: Each month the Super Modeler community will nominate ten geo-modelers who they believe are, well, super. Votes will be accepted for a three-week period. At the end of that period, the modeler who has received the most votes will become the newest Super Modeler.
In addition to being awarded a Super Modeler badge, the winner’s collection will be prominently featured on the Google 3D Warehouse until the next Super Modeler is selected. They'll also receive a one-of-a-kind “I’m a Google Supermodel(er)” t-shirt from the Google team.
You can see all 55 entries at the bottom of this page. Thanks to everyone who submitted a design and congratulations to the winners. Each of the top three winners will receive their lamp as a physical, 3d printed object, complete with fixture and stand. They'll also receive a SketchUp Pro 8 license, courtesy of us.
There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you—I pointed to this work in the introduction to our SketchUpdate newsletter a few months ago, but I’ve never mentioned it on this blog. A glaring omission, I realize.
ixlrlxi (I don’t even know his real name) is a Russian concept artist who likes to model retro-futuristic-looking vehicles in SketchUp and render them with V-Ray. They are, in a word, mouth-watering. Here’s a sample of what you’ll see when you do yourself a favor and visit this thread on conceptart.org:
Scroll to the bottom of the thread for an amazing tutorial about ixlrlxi's process.
Instant Roof, by Chuck Vali of Vali Architects, is a truly great SketchUp Ruby script. Its purpose is simple – you use Instant Roof to quickly create gables, hips, sheds and trellises anywhere you need them. This script has everything going for it:
It's easy to install. Pop one file into your plugins folder and you're done.
It's easy to learn. Chuck (the script's author) has put together a huge pile of fantastic instructional PDFs and videos on his website. The in-product help is also comprehensive and well-placed.
It's easy to use. Everything's right there in the Plugins menu, so you don't have to memorize and keep track of a bunch of little tool icons. The input method for telling the script where to put gables and sheds couldn't be simpler.
To use Instant Roof, you select a face and choose Plugins > Instant Roof > Make Roof. In the following image, I chose to use the California Ranch roof style:
Selecting just a face produces a hip roof.
By default, the script produces an entirely hipped roof; it slopes in all directions. To produce a roof form with a gable, select an edge in addition to the face, then run the script:
Select an edge to tell the script where to draw a gable.
Selecting edges on opposite sides of the building results in gables over both:
Select two edges to create gables on both ends of the roof.
If you select three edges, you end up with a shed:
Selecting three edges produces a shed.
The script handles increased complexity beautifully:
Once I'd wrapped my head around what I was doing, this roof took 3 seconds to generate.
Here’s Chuck showing off Instant Roof on YouTube:
Instant Roof includes a number of roof styles, but they're all just preset combinations of parameters that you can fiddle with to produce almost anything you need. Slopes, eaves, fascia, rafters – they'e all infinitely adjustable.
The script comes preloaded with a few parameter presets, but you can create and save your own.
And if that's not enough, Instant Roof can also create a few different roof details: mission tile, shingles, standing seam and sheet metal.
Mission tile and metal standing seam are two of the roof details you can apply with Instant Roof.
Instant Roof comes in two flavors: free and Pro. The latter gives you the ability to choose from a much larger number of roof slopes; that's critical if you're using the script to do serious work. At US$39, it's a bargain. I can only imagine what impact Instant Roof will have on urban designers, art directors, set designers, concept artists and anyone else who needs to whip up convincing built form, quickly.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this script's author has done a phenomenal job of creating tutorials that should answer all your questions. Visiting his site will be one of the best things you do today – I guarantee it. Here's a screenshot of what you can expect to find there:
Visit Chuck's website for videos and printable help resources galore.
Without Profiles turned on, rounded objects don't stand out.
Profiles that are 2 pixels thick often look too bold and cartoony.
Using a Profile thickness of 1 pixel makes rounded objects pop out from the background.
Sun rising over Yokohama.
