General SketchUp Info

SketchUp Shortcuts: Handy List

A SketchUp user who found my long-ago SketchUp projects on the Math Forum (those projects are no longer hosted there), recently told me about a one-page site she created: http://sketchupshortcuts.com/ Here’s a peek:   I’m a big fan of using shortcuts, and it’s sometimes hard to remember what key does what. You can set up […]

MSPhysics and the Ames Illusion: Part 2 - MSPhysics Prep

In Part 1 of this series, I ended with the distorted room that would house the illusion itself. It looks like this:   But in the saved view, the back of the rook looks more like a regular room:   In this post, I’ll show how to set up the room to work in MSPhysics, […]

MSPhysics and the Ames Illusion: Part 1 - Room Setup

I recently wrote up a kids’ project for Beanz Magazine on how to create the Ames Illusion in SketchUp. (If you have kids, or are a kid, check out my last Beanz project on jigsaw puzzles.) What is the Ames Illusion, you ask? It’s an optical illusion in which a person appears to grow or […]

SketchUp's Visiting Professionals Program

If you’re a professor or instructor in higher ed, this post is for you! Did you know that SketchUp has an arsenal of experts, ready to share their expertise with teachers and students? And that you may be able to get someone to come out to you, FOR FREE? All thanks to SketchUp’s Visiting Professionals […]

Sculpture Modeling - Organic Shapes, Part 2

In Part 1 I showed how I modeled an organic sculpture using a few neat SketchUp extensions. That project consisted of two sculpture models, and here’s a description of the second one. My model appears in this rendering – it’s at the top left corner, along the sidewalk.     The idea was that the […]

Sculpture Modeling - Organic Shapes, Part 1

I recently had a fun design job with a local architect. The idea was to make a conceptual model that loosely resembled a specific sculpture. The sculpture model would be placed in a SketchUp model of a new, mixed-use project, to show in context what a similar art installation would look like.     (The […]

PNG Trees: Part 4 - Adjust for Shadows

The other posts in this series focused on how to create models of trees that have transparent background and always face the camera. This last post in the series is about solving the problem of shadows. Here’s a face-camera tree:   And here’s the same tree with shadows turned on (menu: View / Shadows). Because […]

PNG Trees: Part 2 - Face-Camera Component

In Part 1 of this series, I showed how to find some efficient and well-modeled trees in SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse. In this post, I’ll show how to create your own “face camera” trees from scratch. I’ll start with the same model – a house that could use a few trees around it.   All you […]

PNG Trees: Part 3 - Stand-Alone Tree Model

In Part 2 of this series, I showed how to import an image of a tree and make a face-camera component. In that example, all of the work was done within the model itself. But if you work often with landscape elements, you might want to build yourself a library of tree or shrub models […]