Announcing the Madrid SketchUp Plugin Conference

When someone writes a plugin for SketchUp, he or she isn’t just looking to cram a few more icons into your toolbar. Plugins help users solve important design and workflow problems, so plugin developers have to be as keyed into the needs of SketchUp users as we are. Our Ruby API is a canvas, but it is the ingenuity of developers that makes the plugin community truly remarkable.

Today, I’m happy to announce that Íscar, the Spanish SketchUp Pro reseller and Authorized Training Center, is hosting the first-ever SketchUp Plugin Conference this fall.

The details:
Íscar’s conference will take place September 5th - 7th, 2012 in Madrid, Spain. The event is focused on the needs of plugin developers, distributors and resellers, though it’s open to everyone. The conference will be a venue for developers to present their plugins, share tips with other plugin authors, and even find new distribution channels for products. Users will see demos of the latest and greatest plugins, and have a chance to compare notes with people from around Europe and the rest of the world.

This conference is not being organized by the SketchUp team but we are co-sponsoring it, and a few of us will be in attendance. We may even cook up a presentation or two.

Register for the conference here. Questions? Check out this FAQ.

Posted by Chris Cronin, SketchUp Business Development

SketchUp's Summer/Fall Training Schedule

Our Summer/Fall 2012 SketchUp Authorized Training Center (ATC) schedule is now available: find a SketchUp ATC near you now. This season we're also offering a few new classes; allow us to pique your interest!

Mastering SketchUp: The SketchUp Workflow for Architecture and Building Design
Some amazing time saving tasks covered in this session include conducting a digital site survey, gathering building context, expediting as-built drawings, shadow studies, photo-real rendering, precise/accurate modeling, LayOut presentations, and ultimately creating construction documents with SketchUp Pro.

Washington DC: Friday, August 10, 2012
Seattle: Friday, August 31, 2012
Baltimore: Friday, September 21, 2012
Philadelphia: Friday, October 12, 2012
New York City: Friday, November 2, 2012
Boston: Friday, November 16, 2012
Register today

Bootcamp - SketchUp 101
This comprehensive one-week long SketchUp training course is geared for Architecture, Interior Design, and FIlm & Stage professionals. Whether you are new to SketchUp or have been using it for years, this introductory is designed to establish the core, fundamental skills that SketchUp users need to know in order to be proficient with SketchUp in a professional setting.

Los Angeles: Monday, August 6 - Friday August 10, 2012
Register today

Bootcamp - SketchUp 201
This comprehensive one-week long SketchUp training course is geared for Architecture, Interior Design, and FIlm & Stage professionals. This course focuses on supplemental workflows that increase productivity and save time. Attendees will learn to: Import custom image textures; Work with CAD files (import/export); Create photorealistic renderings with the Shaderlight rendering plugin; Work with Google’s mapping, and imagery databases to create geographically specific site models; Work with Dynamic Components and the Product Connect plugin to create schedules, and plenty more...!

Los Angeles: Monday, August 13 - Friday August 17, 2012
Register today

Bootcamp - LayOut 101
This comprehensive one-week long SketchUp training course is geared for Architecture, Interior Design, and FIlm & Stage professionals. This course is intended to provide users with a complete overview of the features and tools in Layout, and familiarize attendees with the workflow of using SketchUp and Layout to create professional working drawings.

Los Angeles: Monday, August 20 - Friday, August 24, 2012
Register today

Posted by Shara Rice, SketchUp Authorized Training Center Coordinator

Telling the full story with SketchUp Pro and LayOut

We often describe SketchUp as both design and communication software. Some folks don’t get the communication element, but for anyone who needs to share and collaborate with clients or partners, the fluid nature of SketchUp Pro and LayOut is essential.

Recently Nick Sonder, who runs a one-man shop for architectural design, sat down with us to talk about how he uses SketchUp Pro through the entire design process: using one 3D model as the basis for interior and exterior detailing, as well as for robust, unified, and precise construction documents used by contractors.

Posted by Mark Harrison, SketchUp Marketing

Office SketchUppification proceeding nicely

The good news is we're working really, really hard on the next version of SketchUp. The bad news is that doesn't leave a lot of time for decorating our temporary office space. I'm afraid we're only about half done printing out and pinning up all the beautiful work you sent in response to our appeal from last month. All the same, here are some shots of the office as it looked today. It's getting there, I think. (I took these photos on Saturday, which is why the place looks so empty.)

I thought it would be nice to share a gallery of the images you submitted, too. THANK YOU to everyone—almost a hundred people so far—who sent us something. Your pictures (and kind words) keep us focused on what matters.

The SketchUppers whose images appear above told us it was okay to share their work on our blog.

The temporary office pictured above is actually only three buildings away from our permanent location on the east side of Boulder. In the new space, we'll have the whole second floor to ourselves; our downstairs neighbors are the Garmin-Sharp pro cycling team.

Our current office and the one we'll be moving into in a few months are only a short distance apart.

A gradient filter makes the sky over our office park seem more ominous than it really is.

Most of the windows in our future office look west at the Flatirons, Boulder's most recognizable natural landmark.

Remember how I was bragging about our fancy new espresso machine a few weeks ago? Andrew and John managed to get it working for a couple of days, but then something happened, and now it's hors service. It turns out that a professional coffee behemoth like ours is only slightly easier to operate than an intergalactic starship. Here's hoping that the Caffeination Fairy grants our collective wish—and soon. I saw Jody asleep in the stairwell on Thursday.

So close, and yet so far.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist

SketchUp Pro Story: Bob Lang, Woodworker

Robert W. Lang is executive editor of Popular Woodworking Magazine, and the author of several books including “Woodworker’s Guide to SketchUp.” Bob blogs about Woodworking and SketchUp at his website ReadWatchDo.com. We asked him to tell us a little bit about his process and why he uses SketchUp Pro.

Building furniture is a rewarding process. Most of the challenge is problem solving; time in the shop is always in short supply and quality materials aren’t cheap. Good problem solving at the start allows a more efficient build and prevents costly mistakes.

The efficiency of SketchUp means I don't spend as much time designing and planning as I used to, which gives me more hours in the shop. Those shop hours are also better because I have a reliable reference that answers almost any question that might come up while I build. (Except for “where did I leave my pencil?”) I can concentrate on the physical work without being sidetracked with an hour or two of head scratching to solve a design or engineering problem

Early in my career, I fancied myself a designer and vowed to only create original designs. Then one day I read something from Gustav Stickley to the effect that if you wanted the ability to design new work, you needed to thoroughly understand everything that had been done before. Twenty-five years later, my work is mostly reproducing designs from the Arts & Crafts period of the early 20th century. This chair (below) is a Stickley piece, and despite its simple appearance there are a lot of subtleties to the overall design. These quirks are what make this furniture intriguing—the closer you look, the more you find.

When I'm planning a reproduction, I work a lot from photographs. My process is mainly the same one I used years ago with pencil and paper. Importing a photo, scaling it to actual size and measuring the photo on screen are far easier (and more accurate) than staring through a magnifying glass and using a proportional rule.

If possible, I work from photos I've taken myself; these are different than photos taken for publication. I'm looking for information, and the best source of that is a straight-on view. I'll do some things in Photoshop, sometimes correcting for lens distortion, but mostly I adjust the image to make it easier to discern details.

After I import a picture into SketchUp, I scale it so that parts I can measure with the Tape Measure tool match known dimensions. I place the images on a separate layer, so I can easily turn them off and on as I build the model. I usually build the model near the photos, but for some parts I work on top of them. To get the outline of the corbel under the arm, I traced the shape on top of the image, then extruded it to the proper thickness with Push/Pull.

I import photos into SketchUp and scale them to a known dimension. Sometimes I model next to the photo, and sometimes I trace directly over the photo.

Sometimes the photo will reveal something I'd rather not see. The next image is from early on in the process, right before I discovered that the lower rail between the front and back legs isn't parallel to the floor, as I have it in the model. That slight angle adds a lot to the appearance of the finished chair. It's the chair's way of saying “Come and have a seat!”, but it makes building the side assemblies considerably more difficult. Instead of five identical vertical slats, each one is a bit longer than its neighbor. Additionally, the shoulders of the tenons have to be cut at an angle rather than square.

With the photo available within the model for reference, I can check dimensions and details while I work. In this case I realized my first attempt missed an important but subtle detail.

Eventually, I have a model that I'm happy with; I consider this the halfway point of the process. The second half is extracting information from the model. Everything I want or need to know about every part of this chair is there on screen. Now the task is to pull out the information I need (or want to show someone else) and to put it a manageable form.

In the shop I tend to spread out until the project I'm working on covers every available horizontal surface. I follow much the same process when working in SketchUp: I make copies of the entire model (or portions of it) off in empty space somewhere to serve different functions. I create scenes for each of these views, with layers for dimensions, so I can export or print only that portion of the model. If you back up and look at everything, it's pretty chaotic.

Zoom Extents makes it look like I’ve made a horrible mess, but I generated several scenes in a short period of time, each showing important details by copying portions of the model and moving them into empty space.

That said, each scene has a lot of value; there are a number of ways scenes can be used. In my work on books of measured drawings and for Popular Woodworking Magazine, scenes are exported to Adobe Illustrator to use for two dimensional drawings (plans, sections and elevations) or three dimensional exploded views.

This is a typical Scene that I will print and take to the shop to use as a reference for each part of a complex assembly. The model contains precise information about every part, and if I forget to print a dimension I’ll fire up the laptop, open the model for a closer look and measure the parts in the model.

For a project build video, I exported an animation of several scenes and used that clip in the finished video to explain the construction process. For my own use in the shop, I print 3D views of groups of parts and stages of the process for reference. For the side assemblies of this chair, I printed exploded views as well as details such as the image of the leg joinery. In SketchUp, it doesn't take long to create these extra views. So far, when I wonder “Can I do this with the model?” the answer has been, “Yes I can, it works very well, and it doesn't take very long”.

Instead of standard cutlists, I create views such as this to accurately lay out the parts. It might take 5 minutes to drag each leg out of the Components window and add dimensions, and it saves hours in the shop. It’s surprising how close this is to having real parts to refer to.

One unexpected benefit of using SketchUp is that it turns out to also be a great tool for teaching woodworking. Unlike a valuable antique, a 3D model can be taken apart to study how it goes together. When I teach a class on building a piece for real, one of the main lessons is the sequence of doing the work. This is a crucial skill for successful building; knowing which parts to layout and cut first, how those first parts affect the following parts, and how to group parts together in sub-assemblies to make the final assembly simple. With a good model, an inexperienced builder can work all of that out before getting to the shop, learn the lesson in less time and not risk wasting valuable materials or shop time. The boost in confidence from this makes a significant difference in both the quality of the time spent building and in the quality of the finished product.

Reproducing a Stickley Morris chair is a lot of work, but there is a built in reward when the job is done.

Over the last 30 years, I’ve invested a considerable amount of money in tools to do my job. A large portion of that has been spent on computer hardware and software. Looking back, the best investment has been the money I spent on SketchUp Pro. I started using SketchUp thinking it might be an effective drafting tool, but it's turned out to be much more than that. This simple-to-use software program is the best thing I’ve found for all phases of design, engineering, planning and communicating.

Posted by Steve Dapkus, SketchUp BizDev Team