In the West, some of the longest-standing architecture is found in churches and cathedrals. As cities grow and evolve over time, structures come and go with the requirements of society. Through changes over centuries, though, major cities in Europe can still be recognized by their large churches. Enrico Dalbosco (Arrigo Silva, as he is known in the Google 3D Warehouse), a resident of Padua, Italy, understands why churches last and has taken up the cause of showing them off in 3D on Google Earth.
"I have devoted myself to modeling churches because I really like ancient and modern art. Through many, varied periods of time, churches have brought together the highest expressions of artistic skill and their construction has brought together the most renowned architects, sculptors and painters. I think for this reason I am not the only person who is interested in modeling churches for Google Earth and there are still a profusion of beautiful sites of all religions awaiting a modeler!"
Enrico is a retired electronic engineer and has many hobbies including music and photography. He's played classical piano since childhood and is also a fine artist working in watercolor and with ceramics (check out his ceramic buildings and landscapes). In 2007 when, surfing the Internet, he came across Google Earth and was excited to see everything there: sky, fields, roads, houses of Padova, Italy...the whole world, as he describes it.
"What was even more exciting was discovering that here and there on the Earth's surface there sprouted cities, towns, several buildings, monuments, and churches. I wondered, who made them? Was it something I could do too? So I came to discover Google SketchUp. Before that I had never used a 3D package."
Initially, Enrico thought it was necessary to fix all the edges, one by one, entering exact length but quickly discovered that SketchUp took care of scale on its own.
"SketchUp had additional surprises in store for me: in addition to being free (which is a good starting point!), the product has a completely intuitive interface that seems to anticipate what I am trying to do (split surfaces at midpoints, rotation, array-copy, group, create named groups etc.). I must say that I have a thorough knowledge of software usability because of my professional background and SketchUp has one of the best user interfaces I've seen."
In an ironic twist of fate, it was actually Enrico's work with a non-geo-located model, a bust of Beethoven, that most impacted his workflow for creating Google Earth buildings.
"A key learning for me was discovering the power of projecting textures: you can take a flat image and project it onto a complex form. I found a beautiful 3D bust of Ludwig van Beethoven in Google 3D Warehouse, and I sensed that I could 'paint' him, so I found a portrait of Beethoven. I was able to import the portrait as a texture and mold it to the contours in one fell swoop! It was a little miracle, to paint with a single command, and within seconds the countless shapes that made up the face of great musician!"
His first creations were the churches of in neighborhood and the Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua, which proved a challenge because of the complexity of its structure. To address the challenge, "I adopted the old method of the Roman emperors ( "divide and conquer": if you want to solve a problem, split it in several parts...) subdividing the structure into simple elements: the façade, the transept, the church towers, the domes ..." For the photo textures, Enrico searched the web and found lots of photos taken on the ground from all possible view-points. The divided (and conquered!) structural elements can be seen in the graphic below.
Modeling Western religious architecture requires an understanding of the structure of vaults and domes - the "onion dome" characteristic of Orthodox Churches can be particularly daunting.
"Indeed," says Enrico, "the primary challenge that the Cathedral of St. Basil in Moscow posed was its domes: due to their incredible variety of shapes and colors, I couldn't find a single formula to cover all of them, and so I had to adopt different strategies - smooth and relieved domes, colored and textured domes ... it took some experimenting, trial and error, but in the end I was able to create all the varied dome shapes, including the most twisted, of course, always using the well-tested Beethoven method to project textures!"
Enrico expanded his dome-modeling techniques in working on the domes of the Church of the Nativity in Suzdal.
"In this case, I adopted a more complicated strategy: I initially prepared, with SketchUp, a geometric model of each dome (onion with and stars) and then I created a screen-shot which I then projected (once more using the Beethoven method) these texture on the sectors of the “real” domes. I worked really well."
Clearly, Enrico is pushing the boundaries of what is possible and how ornate and beautiful models for Google Earth can be. It's a revelation!
Featured Modeler: Arrigo Silva
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 12:00 PM
We're awash in Building Maker models!
Friday, October 23, 2009 11:30 AM
We didn't know what to expect when we released Google Building Maker last week. Would we hear crickets? Would we be hit by a tidal wave? Somewhere in-between? Well, the headline of this post says it all! We've been trying to find dry land in the sea of models you've created! So I guess you like the app!? Seriously, we're doing our very best to review and process these models into Google Earth as quickly as we can. Thousands of models are included in the first wave which will be visible in today's 3D buildings release, so look for yours!
If you don't see your model in the 3D Buildings layer of Google Earth, there are two possibilities: It either needs some additional work on your part to meet our acceptance criteria, or, it's still in our processing pipeline. You can check the status of your models by visiting the Google 3D Warehouse, logging into your account, and looking at the bottom of the model details page. If it's been accepted, it will look like this:
We may have been overwhelmed with the volume of models but that doesn't mean that we haven't taken notice of the incredible models that have been created. We're very impressed! In fact, we've created a new Best of Building Maker collection in the 3D Warehouse to showcase your work, like this cathedral by geo-modeler chrischibuilder.
If you'd like to stay informed on the latest Building Maker news you can follow us on Twitter. We'll be posting updates when new cities are available for modeling, tips & tricks, and other product news.
Happy modeling!
Bright idea: a LayOut case study
9:30 AM
Clear communication of ideas and plans is an important part of the design and/or building process, regardless of the scope of the project. Mike Brightman, of See Before Building and Bright Ideas Consulting, has provided a few examples of how he used the presentation and documentation capabilities of Google SketchUp Pro to communicate with contractors, design with a client, and submit permit drawings for approval.
See his case study for more information on the problems he was trying to solve, and what he did to solve them.
"SketchUp Pro and LayOut are extremely efficient in all phases of the design process. I can generate a concept, thoroughly explore and revise my design, create design documents, generate permit drawings, and then export from SketchUp Pro to a 3D .dwg model or 2D .dwg snapshots. This work-flow gives me all of the speed and freedom of SketchUp Pro and the ability to move into the construction document phase in CAD."
Design It Shelter Competition: The Winners
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:39 PM
Earlier this year, we teamed up with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to launch the Design It: Shelter Competition. People all over the world were invited to use Google SketchUp to design small buildings and submit them for consideration. We received over 600 entries from 68 countries – the level of participation was astounding. You can check out all the entries on the Guggenheim website.
Two prizes were offered: the People's Prize and the Juried Prize. To determine the winner of the People's Prize, students from the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture winnowed down the entries to a list of ten finalists. Visitors to the Guggenheim website could vote for their favorite; the shelter with the most votes won. A jury of seven experts selected the winner of the Juried Prize.
Here's a video that announces the winners and talks a little bit about them:
The winner of the People's Prize is the CBS – Cork Block Shelter
by David Mares of Setúbal, Portugal
Each of the winners will receive transportation to New York City for two people, accommodation for two nights, "backstage" tours of both the Guggenheim Museum and our New York Google office, and free admission to a number of other NYC museums. The Juried Prize winner will also receive a check for one thousand dollars.
Congratulations to the finalists and to the winners. Thank you to everyone who submitted a design, and thanks to everyone who voted.
Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist
It's design competition season
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 8:45 AM
If you're like me, you enter competitions to win cool stuff, to challenge your brain a little, or to try new tools. Well, some friends of SketchUp have told us about a few design competitions they're hosting this Fall to keep you busy (warning: these might have an impact on your day job). Have fun and good luck!
Pumpkin Carving Contest
Hosted by: SketchUp Island Blog
Deadline to enter: October 24, 2009
Website
Furniture Design Competition
Hosted by: Vaughan Benz
Deadline to enter: November 15, 2009
Website
Parkitecture: Designing the Garage of the Future
Hosted by: Dwell
Deadline to enter: November 20, 2009
Website
Putting Mexico on the Map
Hosted by: Google team in Mexico
Deadline to enter: November 30, 2009
Website (Spanish only)
Let's talk SketchUp ideas
Friday, October 16, 2009 11:30 AM
As some of you've seen, we recently launched a Product Ideas series for Google SketchUp and Google SketchUp Pro. If you aren't familiar with Product Ideas, then you'll definitely want to check it out. You can post thoughts on how to make SketchUp better as well as vote on suggestions from other users. The more you vote, the better we can tell which new features are important to you.
In the past three weeks, we've seen some amazing responses. SketchUp users from around the world submitted over 300 ideas to our series. We've heard everything from "fix the shadow bug" to "edit projects collaboratively" to "keep it simple." However, we still want to hear what you think. This SketchUp series will be closing on October 22nd (that's next Thursday), so add your suggestions and votes soon!
Finally, we also want to let you know what we think. Many of the suggestions that have come up are ideas that we've been talking about too. Some of them are possible, some of them aren't, but we think that you should get honest responses to the top ideas (and yes, we did respond to the "fix the shadow bug" suggestion). Visit the Answered Ideas section to see all of our replies.
Thank you to everyone for sharing, and check back soon for the results.
Introducing Google Building Maker
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 9:00 AM
Hot on the heels of the SketchUp 7.1 launch a couple of weeks ago, we're pleased to announce the release of the latest addition to our 3D family: Google Building Maker is a super-specialized, online tool for creating buildings specifically for Google Earth.
Building Maker lets you choose a building to model by looking at aerial imagery. After you've told it what you'd like to model, Building Maker loads up several different aerial views of that building taken from different directions. You then align simple 3D shapes – boxes, prisms, pyramids and others – to the different views. Building Maker takes care of all the photo-texturing for you; it uses the aerial photos to "paint" your building when you save it. Models you create with Building Maker are stored in the Google 3D Warehouse, and are automatically considered for inclusion on the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. If your model looks good (and if there's no better one already in its place), it'll appear in Google Earth (for millions of people) within about a week.
Check out this video to see Building Maker in action:
We're launching with 50 cities that are ready for Building Maker. We'll continue to add cities as fast as we can, but feel free to jump in and give Building Maker a test drive whenever you like. Modeling in a place you're not familiar with is a great way to learn something about it.
So is Building Maker supposed to replace SketchUp? Absolutely not! SketchUp is a general-purpose tool that people use to model everything under the sun. Building Maker, on the other hand, is a specialist. For folks who want to make models and see them in Google Earth, it's simple, efficient and (we hope) downright fun.
Here's something else we think is neat: Anything you create with Building Maker, you can download and open in SketchUp. You can tweak textures, refine geometry – whatever it takes to make your building even better. When you're done, uploading your improved model to the 3D Warehouse further increases its chances of being accepted into Google Earth.
Some more things you should know about Building Maker:
- Building Maker is an online app, meaning it runs entirely in your web browser (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.).
- To get credit for what you contribute, you need to sign into your Google Account.
- Make sure you have the latest version of Google Earth installed on your computer.
- If you're on a Mac, you need to download the Google Earth plug-in directly.
Mark Limber, Product Manager and Matt Simpson, User Experience Designer Permalink | Links to this post |
Document this!
Monday, October 12, 2009 4:50 PM
Scanning the Internet over the weekend, I came across a great LayOut 2.1 blog post by a friend of the SketchUp team, Eric Schimelpfenig. Eric is a kitchen designer and the author of Sketch This!, a blog dedicated to helping design professionals use Google SketchUp Pro and LayOut for kitchen design.
Below are Eric's LayOut images. If you have SketchUp Pro installed, you can download his LayOut file to check it out for yourself.
In the last post, I started to tell you about LayOut 2.1's most useful new feature, dimensioning. After testing the new dimensioning feature on small projects here and there, I took the plunge and created my first full presentation and kitchen plan in it.
I started with creating the SketchUp model, coloring it, and setting up all my views. Then, I sent it over to LayOut. Over there I was able to create different pages with all my views. I started out with all the perspective views. These are typically the views that you would go over with your customer during presentation.
Next, I added some elevations and sections of pertinent parts of the kitchen. These pages have all the dimensions, cabinet codes, and notes for the contractor or installer. The last few pages contain some detail parts, and the counter top details.
While this may look like just a normal plan generated from any other cad software, there is one really nice benefit with using the SketchUp to LayOut workflow: All of the views are referenced off of the original 3D model. What this means is that the workflow process isn't a one way street. If at anytime during the creation of this document I need to change something, I only have to do it in the SketchUp 3D model once. When I save the model, each and every page in LayOut is updated, so all my changes are reflected everywhere.
Yes, other cad software packages can do this, but SketchUp does it very easily.
A new place for your models
11:30 AM
Last week, Google released "Place Pages" in Google Maps, which provides maps, reviews, pictures and other information about a place - all in one view. The Place Page shows where the place is located, how to get there, what users have to say about it, and what it looks like.
For many buildings and landmarks, you can also view a 3D model of the building. You can spin the building around and see its front, back and sides. Need to know where the entrance is? Rotate the building to find it. These 3D models were created by 3D enthusiasts , uploaded to the Google 3D Warehouse, and are now available for view by millions of Place Page users.
For example, take a look at the beautiful Cathedral of Dakar in Senegal, modeled by Google 3D Warehouse user "zappy bibicy".
Place Page offers a new venue where millions of people can explore and learn from the 3D models created by Google 3D Warehouse users. Enjoy!
Introducing a new Help Forum
Friday, October 9, 2009 4:35 PM
As you may know, we've recently launched the Google SketchUp Help Forum alongside the launch of Google SketchUp 7.1. While our previous Help Group was a great resource for answering your questions - helping you find answers, and sharing your expertise with other users - it's our hope that the new forum will be all of that and more.
We've developed many new and exciting features which we think will make it easier and quicker for you to find the answers that you're looking for and chat with others in the SketchUp community. Some of the new things in the Help Forum include:
- Find answers before you even ask your question! The forum will automatically suggest a similar thread as you begin typing your question in a new post.
- Mark any reply as "Best Answer" and show this reply right below the original question. If you post a question, you can mark any reply to your question as "Best Answer" as well.
- Create richer posts by referencing all kinds of online sources, including images and videos.
- Get to know others in the forum better by creating a useful profile, which includes an avatar.
- As you build your reputation as an expert, you increase your "level" in the forum. After a while, who knows - you could be the next SketchUp Sage!
If you'd like, you can watch an instructional video about the new Google Help Forums, or you can dive right into the SketchUp Help Forum. It's already hopping and open to new members. We hope you can stop by and say "Hi!"!
Jody Gates, SketchUp Support Team Permalink | Links to this post |
SketchUp Pro in construction - video case study
Thursday, October 8, 2009 5:00 PM
The development of virtual construction models is a great way to communicate more effectively, resolve issues before they happen, and save time, resources, and money on construction projects. Our friends at Mortenson Construction have helped us with this video case study that shows how, using Google SketchUp Pro, they were able to develop virtual construction models that helped them communicate more effectively and become more innovative builders. Have a look at the video below for more details:
The sweetest model you'll see this year
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 2:35 PM
Time to have your socks blown off. Jacques (a.k.a. Silvershadow) is a SketchUp god who hangs out on the SketchUcation Community Forums, and he's done it again. I'm completely serious when I say that looking at his work makes me, simultaneously:
- inspired to hole up for a weekend and do nothing but make beautiful things with SketchUp
- never want to build another 3D model again, knowing I'll never come close to Silvershadow's level of über-SketchUp-ninja-mastery
Note: All images are a combination of SketchUp and VRay rendering.
The best place to immerse yourself in the heavenly glow of this endeavor is to read through this SCF thread. You'll need a free login to see the images, but signing up is well worth it.
New book: Google SketchUp for Site Design
9:00 AM
Our friend Daniel Tal's new book about SketchUp is getting terrific reviews, and we couldn't be prouder of him. Google SketchUp for Site Design: A Guide to Modeling Site Plans, Terrain and Architecture is a rollicking thrill ride of 1970's murder and intrigue on the high seas. Think it's not? You'll have to get a copy to see.
Truthfully, this book covers SketchUp topics that no one's even come close to explaining in previous volumes: terrain modeling with the Sandbox tools, techniques for working with huge models, how to wrestle CAD files and using Ruby scripts, just to name a few. He also writes about something he's dubbed "SketchUp Process Modeling", a start-to-finish workflow for completing massive projects without losing your marbles.
The book includes hundreds of beautiful color images with helpful annotations and captions. Flipping through it the first time, I couldn't believe how much work Dan must've put in. He's a practicing landscape architect who uses SketchUp every day in his work, so the material's relevant to pros in a way that most books aren't.
Be sure to take a look at the website Dan built for the book, and be sure to check out his YouTube videos; they're great.
Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist
Featured 3D Warehouse Product: KraftMaid by Masco
Friday, October 2, 2009 2:45 PM
Many products have an aesthetic value on their own, but only really come to life when you see them placed in context. The folks over at KraftMaid Cabinetry have done an extraordinary job of not only uploading individual cabinets into the Google 3D Warehouse, but also providing complete kitchen designs meant to inspire designers.
KraftMaid’s models are Dynamic Components, meaning they're extra-easy to use: Each component is configurable by means of SketchUp's Component Options dialog box. The benefit? Instead of having to download dozens of models for each size and material combination for each cabinet, designers can download a single model that represents all possible configurations. The doors and drawers have built-in animation, too. With less work for KraftMaid and less hunting around for designers, everybody wins.
One more thing: Mark Johnson from KraftMaid has created a couple of 3D Warehouse collections to showcase modelers' designs: Projects by KraftMaid Fans and Designers + Architects using KraftMaid. If you'd like to submit your work for inclusion, click the "contact the owner" link on either collection's home page to send a message directly to Mark.
Steve Dapkus, SketchUp Team Permalink | Links to this post |Copenhagen and Marseille now in 3D
Thursday, October 1, 2009 9:35 AM
Copenhagen, Denmark and Marseille, France have recently been added to the quickly growing list of 3D cities in Google Earth.
Now you can go and visit these cities by opening Google Earth and making sure you have the 3D Buildings layer checked on. Make sure to view places in Marseille such as Notre-Dame de la Garde and Muséum d’histoire naturelle de Marseille and places in Copenhagen such as Frederik's Church.
Catch a short glimpse of these cities in these videos and visit our YouTube channel to check out many other videos showcasing 3D content in Google Earth.
Permalink | Links to this post |
