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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…

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…

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…

PNG Trees: Part 1 – 3D Warehouse
Consider this lovely model of a small cottage in the woods, by Verkley Design and Modeling: (You can download this model yourself by clicking the “3D Warehouse” logo above. Or you can try this out with any model that can use some landscaping features.) The trees in this model are well designed, making good use…

Soap Skin Table: Part 3 – Curviloft
Part 1 and Part 2 of this series showed how to use the Soap Skin extension to create curved faces within a set of arcs and lines. The curved faces make up the base of this table: In this post, I’ll show another extension that can be used for the same thing (and maybe does…