ArchiCAD users rejoice

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist


If you're an ArchiCAD 11 user, you can stop feeling envious of your SketchUp friends' ability to work with Google Earth and the 3D Warehouse. The folks at Graphisoft (makers of ArchiCAD) just announced something called Google Earth Connections, which should make you feel a whole lot better.

If you use ArchiCAD, the full scope of the Google Earth/3D Warehouse workflow is now available to you. You can import models from the 3D Warehouse. You can upload models to the 3D Warehouse. You can send your ArchiCAD models to Google Earth and view them in context. The Graphisoft site has all the juicy details.

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Another delicious email newsletter about SketchUp

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist

If you're the sort of person who likes to receive informative, timely and occasionally amusing correspondence in your email inbox, you're in luck. You can now subscribe to no fewer than two such newsletters: the SketchUpdate (which we've been cobbling together for the last six years) and the new all-new CatchUp. Brought to you by our friends at SketchUcation, CatchUp features tips, tricks, interviews and all kinds of other helpful stuff for SketchUp people everywhere. If you're interested, you can sign up to receive it every month by registering for the SketchUcation Community Forums (the registration link is in the upper-left corner).

Allow me to go off on a tangent for a moment. Since I started working on SketchUp three years ago, I've been party to dozens of giddy conversations that involved the application of the suffix "Up" to everything we produce. Some examples: "LayUp" for what we eventually called LayOut; "MatchUp" for our photo-matching feature; "HiccUp" for a minor software bug; "ThrowUp" for a full-out crash—I think you get the idea. Feel free to use the comments thread for this post to add your own to our list.

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Hypercosm revisited

Posted by Chris Dizon, SketchUp Account Manager

In last September's SketchUpdate, we mentioned a very cool (though PC-only) product called the Hypercosm Teleporter. Basically, it allows you to securely embed a SketchUp model into a web page and navigate (orbit, pan and zoom) just like you can in SketchUp. Too cool!

The Hypercosm team has apparently been quite busy; they've made some big feature enhancements for the professional community that focus on better collaboration and communication. These include new annotation tools, a measure tool, an email tool, and more. You should also take a look at the Skin feature of the Teleporter. It's a great way to publish the SketchUp model in your own custom web page. If you're on a Windows computer, you can check out some of their example models in their SketchUp Model Gallery.

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No Olympic kickball team for us

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist

It is with deep regret that I inform you of the results of our office's final kickball game on Monday evening. After seven nail-biting innings, and with the score tied at three apiece in double overtime, the other team drove in a run to win the game. The kick that did us in was particularly impressive (almost suspiciously so); it soared high over the infield, landing between our outfielders and causing general mayhem as their runner crossed home plate. They celebrated as we consoled ourselves with the last of our intoxicants, and reflected on our fifth-place finish (out of five, unfortunately).

Congratulations to the team that beat us: That's What She Said, you were a noble and gracious opponent, and we look forward to playing you again in the fall league. Here's a picture of the Google Boulder team in happier times.

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Getting the right kind of top view in LayOut

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist



Some of you might know about LayOut, the all-new 2D presentation tool that we developed to accompany SketchUp. It's included with SketchUp Pro 6; if you don't already have it, you can download a free trial of Pro 6 to give it a spin.

Anyhow, I thought it might be a good time to write a Tips and Tricks post about the newest member of our family. Lots of folks are using LayOut, but a little extra help never hurts. In addition to this post, you can get started with LayOut in a number of different ways; check out this Help Center article for more information.

This post deals with how to get the right kind of top view of your model once you've placed it in LayOut. If you've ever tried to do it, you know exactly what I'm talking about—top views are almost always rotated awkwardly by default, and that's usually not what you want. Most of the time, you want the straight lines in your top view to line up with the edges of your page. The following image shows what I'm talking about: on the left is a view with a rotated top view; on the right, one where the model is "lined up".


As always, there's a nifty trick for getting the second (and more desirable) kind of top view. It involves one extra step: choosing to view your model from the front, back, left or right first, then choosing top. In doing so, you're telling LayOut which way to rotate your top view; the software always produces a top view by spinning the model "towards you".

Here are the steps, for the next time you need to do it yourself:

1. Insert a SketchUp model into your LayOut document.
2. Right-click on the model view that you just inserted and choose Standard View > Right (or Left, Front or Back) from the context menu.
3. Right-click again on the model view and choose Standard Views > Top.
4. If you want an orthographic (no perspective) view of your model, right-click again on the model and make sure Perspective is deselected.

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Auto-save to the rescue

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist


Has SketchUp ever crashed on you? Is the sky blue?

The good news is that SketchUp has an Auto-save feature that automatically saves your model every five minutes by default. The bad news is that most people don't know about it. Let's rectify that, shall we?

You fiddle with SketchUp's Auto-save settings in the General panel of the Preferences dialog box. On Windows machines, this is located in the Window menu; on Macs, it's in the SketchUp menu. You can tell SketchUp how often you want to auto-save, and you can even turn off auto-saving altogether. If you're working on a really large model and the pause that occurs when SketchUp auto-saves is bothering you, you can always tell the software to save less often.

Keeping in mind that SketchUp only produces an auto-saved file when something awful happens, you can find it in the same folder as the original file—it's called Autosave_filename.skp. If you've never saved your model (shame on you), you can find an auto-saved SketchUp file in your My Documents folder. If you're on a Mac, the file is here:
~/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 6/SketchUp/Autosave

Now get down off that window ledge and get back to work.

Model credits H!K for the axe; Jon for the laptop

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The all-new SketchUp 3D Challenge

Posted by Tyson Kartchner, Learning Guru


The SketchUp 3D Challenge is celebrating its first birthday! We've had a lot of fun creating the many dozens of challenges we've issued over this past year. It's pretty amazing what SketchUp users can create in the short span of a week. Now, hundreds of models later, we're pleased to announce that the 3D Challenge has been moved to a new community-run blog. In honor of the move, the first challenge will be a redux of the first one we issued a year ago: a chess set. There were a lot of fun entries last time, from traditional ones to sets created from nuts and bolts, driftwood, stone, Lego ... Who knows what y'all will come up with this time around? Check out this album of images from last year's chess challenge for inspiration.

There will be a new challenge every week, so next time you want to improve your SketchUp skills or just have some fun, just check out the latest challenge topic, and start modeling!

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Build Your Campus Competition for AU, NZ

Posted by John Leu, People Programs Specialist


The Build Your Campus in 3D Competition has launched in Australia and New Zealand! If you're a college or university student in either country, this is your opportunity to show off your university. All you have to do is model your campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth, and submit them through the SketchUp competition website. The winning teams will earn eternal online glory and an all-expenses-paid visit to our office in Sydney.

To enter the competition, you must be a college or university student in Australia or New Zealand, and you must be at least 18 years old. You can take on the project yourself or enlist the help of your classmates, and to do your best possible work, we suggest that you have a faculty advisor. The deadline for entries is October 31st, 2007.

We've recruited a really great panel of judges to help us determine the winners, including Andrew Carter of Utile Design, Karl May of Turner & Associates, and Andrew Maynard of Andrew Maynard Architects. Visit the competition website to learn more about best practices, see example models, and peruse a whole pile of Frequently Asked Questions.

You might not know that a similar Sketchup Competition just ended in the U.S. and Canada; you can read all about it. Check out the winning models, and get ready for some friendly, cross-Pacific rivalry.

We can't wait to see what you create. Good luck and happy sketching!

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