SketchUp for Education

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MSPhysics and the Ames Illusion: Part 3 – Go!

In Part 2 of this series, I left off with the room and person, ready to animate in MSPhysics to see the Ames Illusion. Here they are:   Before getting into making the person slide across the room, run the simulation to make sure the person is stable and won’t topple over because of the […]

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 Projects for Kids

A few months ago I joined up with Beanz Magazine – a bi-monthly publication that teaches kids about all things tech. If you have kids who like coding, robots, Minecraft, 3D printing, electronics – please check it out. There’s a print and online version, and my own kids have spent time enjoying many of the […]

SketchUp Arcade! Debut at ISTE

We took a bit of a posting break recently – summer is a crazy time with kids at camp and (too short) vacations. We’ll do our best to keep posting! One reason for the radio silence is that I spent part of last week at the ISTE Convention in San Antonio. This is a huge […]

New Book: Modeling with SketchUp for Entertainment Design

 If you get 3DVinci’s email newsletters, you already heard about this a few days ago. After 5 long years of on-and-off and back-and-forth, I have an exciting new book to announce!   Click the link above for book details, and to see lots of pretty pictures from some of the pages 🙂 Here’s the story: […]

Paper House Project: Part 4 - Photo Match Painting

We ended Part 3 of this series with a simple house, modeled entirely in SketchUp, with these two images saved as screen captures: Now we’ll use these images to paint the blank house, which was copied from the original house. Photo Match Axes With Photo Match, model location and directions are essential to get right. […]

Paper House Project: Part 3 - Photo Match Setup

Part 1 of this series on paper houses showed how to use SketchUp to create and unfold a simple house, which can be printed, folded, colored, and assembled. Part 2 showed how to create the same house painted in SketchUp, with the help of a graphic editor. This post, as well as the next one, show […]

Paper House Project: Part 2 - Edit Texture Images

Part 1 of this series showed how to use the Flatten and Unwrap extension to make a simple paper house in SketchUp. In that project, your kids (or you) print on blank paper and use markers or crayons to add windows, doors, materials, etc. This project shows a different method: painting materials in SketchUp. I started […]