Here’s what I’ve written about so far in this series: In Part 1 – a 3D printed bear, and in Part 2, a few 3D printed cactus trees. This post will detail the most complicated of the objects I printed for this project: a customized boat. Maid of the Mist My son, whose state you’ll […]
In previous versions of SketchUp, you could manage extensions in the Preferences window. By managing, I mean enabling and disabling, or uninstalling. In SketchUp 2017, this is now done in the Extension Manager – I really like this improvement. Access it with this icon: All of your installed extensions, new and old, are listed […]
In a previous series, I showed how to model a few kinds of sails in SketchUp. These aesthetic landscape design elements are shade-providing canopies – very popular these days. See Part 1: Sail Canopy, Part 2: Canopy Support, and Part 3: Fluid Sail Canopy. In this three-part series, I’ll show how to create another element of […]
In Part 1 of this series, I showed how to use the Skelion extension to import terrain into SketchUp. This produces a much larger terrain area than what you could import using SketchUp’s Add Location tool, which imports data from Google Earth. While Add Location limits you to one square mile of imported terrain, Skelion is able to bring in […]
Building SketchUp models in context, a.k.a. geo-location, requires reference information. Whether working on bridges, residences, commercial development, or parks, including the surrounding area is crucial for accuracy. This post is about Skelion, available in the Extension Warehouse. If you haven’t yet installed an extension from there, see our post on how to do it. Add […]
In Part 1 of this series, I demonstrated how to model the surface of a sail canopy in SketchUp. In this post, I’ll model the sail canopy supports – the three tall, tapered truss structures in the three corners of the sail: Extensions You’ll Need From the Extension Warehouse, you’ll need these three: Profile […]
I love, love, love the CLF Shape Bender extension (by Chris Fullmer, available in the Extension Warehouse). It does lots of things, but one of my favorite things to do with it is to bend 3D text along a curve. (If you need to learn how to find and install an extension from the Extension Warehouse, […]
SketchUp is a great tool for creating 3D printed models. (And I happen to have a book on that very subject!) But you can’t feed a SketchUp model directly to a 3D printer; a model must be converted to the STL format. At least as of now, SketchUp doesn’t have a direct export to STL […]
In the previous post I reviewed SketchUp‘s Model Info window, highlighting some of the options it provides to make your SketchUp modeling life easier. People often associate Model Info with the Preferences window. The difference is that Model Info affects just the model you’re working on, whereas Preferences affects how SketchUp runs for ALL models. Also called System Preferences, you can […]
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