Google Data

James McSweeney is the Senior Compost Specialist at Highfields Center for Composting where he helps design and establish composting systems across Vermont. Highfields Center for Composting is one of the many non-profit organizations to which we’ve granted SketchUp Pro Licenses as part of the SketchUp for Nonprofits Program. We chatted with James recently to learn more about the work done at Highfields.

Can you give us some insight on the mission at Highfields Center for Composting?

Originally named “The Highfields Institute”, our organization was conceived in 1999 by former dairy farmer Tod Delaricheliere. We research, educate, and provide technical services for composting and comprehensive food waste recycling programs. The mission at Highfields is to close the loop on community-based, sustainable food and agricultural systems in order to address things like soil health, water quality, solid waste, farm viability, and climate change.

What kinds of projects has the organization taken on?

Highfields has supported community composting programs throughout Vermont, from working with individual elementary schools to help them compost on-site, to developing regional food scrap collection programs and composting operations.

When did Highfields start using SketchUp?

Highfields had done a lot of design but it was mainly on graph paper—we weren’t using any computer design technology when I started about 5 years ago. I had played a little bit with SketchUp but I was just using the free software and found it to be really intuitive. I picked it up and brought it with me as a skill.

It was really time consuming to take the 3D models and turn them into a design from which someone could build. I would have to export these 2D .jpg files and put it in another program and then go back and fix it—and it would have to be this three step process any time I would need to change a small detail… or maybe even more. When I found out about SketchUp Pro I was like “I need to have this!” As a non-profit with a limited budget we found out we might be able to get it.

Highfields Center for Composting seems to work a lot in education and schools. Can you tell us about some of these programs?

With SketchUp we created the “Designing a Bin System for Hot Composting” tool. This school design tool was a new thing for us in a lot of ways. The idea is that it’s like an open source design guide. Schools are different sizes and they have different needs. It’s a guide that’s there to help someone at a school create an on-site composting system themselves. It has the basic design elements, how to size the system and the things to think about as they’re designing the system—but a school is generally going to work with a volunteer (a parent or teacher who is able to build) to create their own custom design plan.

The guide allowed us to not jump in and have to develop custom plans—it was something free that someone could download and develop custom plans for themselves. Our goal was for more schools to compost rather than get a bunch of contracts to design custom systems for everybody—that can be really time consuming.

Then we have the Close the Loop program which is there to assist the school from start to finish. We have the technical services side of Close the Loop which is really the composting system guidance and then we have the education program which is where we go in and train the schools on implementing the program in the cafeteria and the classroom.

Are there any features in particular that make SketchUp useful?

The biggest thing looking at SketchUp Pro is being able to work in SketchUp while also in the 2D LayOut and the way that it will be presented to the client. It helped us make our work really user friendly as well as aesthetically pleasing.

[The ability to document our designs] expanded our market and our ability to educate folks and represent composting in a much more professional looking manner. It also just added a lot of efficiency to my work. It’s definitely saved me many many many hours on my work…and frustration. And it’s really fun to work with.

Without SketchUp, we would be doing the same work by hand or paying a contractor, which would be much more time consuming and we would have less control over the end product.

Learn more about the Highfields Center for Composting and help them continue their work by donating here.

Posted by Sophie Shephard, SketchUp team

Today, President Barack Obama celebrated a national “Day of Making” by hosting the first-ever White House Maker Faire. And we got an invitation to join in the festivities. Imagine that. My mom is proud today.

On the SketchUp team, we think of ourselves as “Meta-Makers” in that we make tools that folks like you use to in turn to make something awesome for yourselves. It has been great to see the tool we originally designed for architects and building construction professionals grow in all kinds of previously unimaginable directions. The Maker movement, it turns out, is deep in our collective DNA.

Maker Faire, organized by our friends at Maker Media, is a gathering of fearless, curious and inventive people who enjoy learning and who love sharing what they’ve made with one another. The SketchUp team has been participating in Maker Faires around the world since 2006, showing off projects from hexapod robotics to CNC-fabricated Wikihouses and through them we’ve made a ton of friends in the Maker community.

Since the first event over nine years ago, there has been explosive growth in the number and quality of these events. This year alone there are over a hundred Maker Faires happening in cities all around the world— more events than we could ever hope to attend. But today’s event is a bit different, a bit special. It isn’t every day that you get an invitation to the White House. Steve Berglund, Trimble’s president and CEO, was at the event today and had this to say; “It is an honor to participate in this White House event. Today we saw innovators of all ages using tools like SketchUp to help shape the future. There has been a lot of talk lately about how the Maker Movement will transform and revitalize American manufacturing. Today’s event demonstrated that the possibilities are endless.”

I think Steve is exactly right— there really are endless possibilities. He also pointed out how nice Bill Young (one of our Wikihouse collaborators and master of all things ShopBot) looked all dressed up and wearing a necktie. I’m pretty sure it was a clip-on.

Events at the White House hold a special place in our culture, and with them come opportunities to make stronger than usual statements about what we all want to see in our future. Today, Trimble has renewed and formalized its commitment to the spirit of curiosity, invention and entrepreneurship that exemplifies the Maker Movement. SketchUp Make is here to stay, and we’re going to keep making it better and better in the future. And we need your help.

If you’re a Maker (c’mon… What SketchUp user isn’t) and you want to get involved, join us today in celebrating the “Day of Making.” Make something and tweet a screenshot to @SketchUp tagged with #NationOfMakers. Better, post it to 3D Warehouse and share a link from your model the same way. And when you’re ready for something bigger, sign the Maker Pledge (I did, and so should you) and help to organize the Makers in your community to do something great for our future.

Also… stay tuned for news from the first-ever Paris Maker Faire (aka “Le Maker Faire”) this weekend. Omar and I will be there with Bertier and all of our “SketchUp Friends” for the weekend. Hope to see you there!

Posted by John Bacus, SketchUp team

Paris, Paris, Paris… what a wonderful city in the summer time.

And if you happen to find yourself there on June 21 and 22, come and join the SketchUp Heroes conference, where French SketchUp uber users will be presenting their projects to the public.

Even better, SketchUp Heroes is co-located with Maker Faire Paris, and we are giving away tickets visit the Faire. Voilà: great makers and great SketchUp modelers all in one place! For a chance to win a pair of tickets, just fill out a simple form here. We have a limited number of tickets, so we’ll be doling them out on a first-come, first-serve basis. We hope to see you there!

We’re hiring! The SketchUp team needs an experienced graphic designer (with 3D modeling skills) to work on graphics for marketing, training, and some in-product applications.

You’d be designing trade show socks one day and website mocks the next—it’s a pretty broad job description. The person we hire will be able to work without a lot of direction across just about all of SketchUp’s teams:

• Marketing needs data sheets, brochures, schwag (shirts, etc), and any number of other last-minute items.

• Our Web team needs wireframes and paint mocks that will serve as the “blueprints” for our website.

• Sales needs trade show booth banners and graphics.

• Training needs help with online training tutorials and manuals (designing them, not authoring them).

• Our Product team needs splash screens and fancy dialog boxes for every new version we release.

The job is about 20% print and 80% web. We work with Adobe’s CS toolset a lot, but we try to use our own stuff (SketchUp and LayOut) as much as we possibly can. The position is full-time, it’s located at SketchUp World Headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, and candidates must be legally allowed to work in the USA.

If you think you might like to be the next new member of the SketchUp team, please fill out this form. It’s pretty straightforward, but there is an assignment: You must complete a special design project in order to be considered.

It’s a standard one-page brochure for SketchUp Pro that we would hand out at an architecture-focused trade show. The design brief includes copy, models, images, logos, fonts and colors. The deadline for completing the assignment and filling out the form is 11:59 MST, Wednesday, June 18th.

After we’ve looked at everything that’s submitted, we’ll contact our favorite candidates and ask them to formally apply for the job on Trimble’s hiring website. Good luck!

The SketchUp Marketing Team

We’re hiring! The SketchUp team needs an experienced graphic designer (with 3D modeling skills) to work on graphics for marketing, training, and some in-product applications.

You’d be designing trade show socks one day and website mocks the next—it’s a pretty broad job description. The person we hire will be able to work without a lot of direction across just about all of SketchUp’s teams:

• Marketing needs data sheets, brochures, schwag (shirts, etc), and any number of other last-minute items.

• Our Web team needs wireframes and paint mocks that will serve as the “blueprints” for our website.

• Sales needs trade show booth banners and graphics.

• Training needs help with online training tutorials and manuals (designing them, not authoring them).

• Our Product team needs splash screens and fancy dialog boxes for every new version we release.

The job is about 20% print and 80% web. We work with Adobe’s CS toolset a lot, but we try to use our own stuff (SketchUp and LayOut) as much as we possibly can. The position is full-time, it’s located at SketchUp World Headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, and candidates must be legally allowed to work in the USA.

If you think you might like to be the next new member of the SketchUp team, please fill out this form. It’s pretty straightforward, but there is an assignment: You must complete a special design project in order to be considered.

It’s a standard one-page brochure for SketchUp Pro that we would hand out at an architecture-focused trade show. The design brief includes copy, models, images, logos, fonts and colors. The deadline for completing the assignment and filling out the form is 11:59 MST, Wednesday, June 18th.

After we’ve looked at everything that’s submitted, we’ll contact our favorite candidates and ask them to formally apply for the job on Trimble’s hiring website. Good luck!

The SketchUp Marketing Team

Two weeks ago, a few folks from SketchUp HQ traveled out to New York City for the first-ever PER/FORM live design competition. “Live” as in real-time, head-to-head SketchUp modeling. As far as we know, this was a first for a SketchUp competition, one that we were excited to see play out.

Organized and hosted by Sefaira at the Pratt Institute’s Manhattan campus, this unique event challenged designers to demonstrate that we don’t have to choose between high-performing buildings and beautiful design. By considering performance impacts during the earliest stages of design, architects and engineers can make information modeling choices that serve both the form and function of a building.

Contestants hard at work in SketchUp and Sefaira for the PER/FORM live design competition. Photo: Stephanie Murano

Most of the competition’s contestants traveled to participate in the competition, coming from all over the U.S., as far away as Hawaii. Prior to the first round, Sefaira revealed that the proposed site for the day’s live design competition was actually the same Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project that contestants had worked on during the online round. The challenge for the day was to reimagine the site, just north of the High Line park, not as it is today but as it will be in 2018.

Contestants spent the first round working from scratch in SketchUp on the form of their proposed structures, taking into account the new, 2018 context buildings. The second round saw contestants focusing more closely on the feedback they were receiving from Sefaira for SketchUp’s real-time analysis engine. Using that feedback, they refined their structures’ siting, form, and glazing.

Design submissions from the three finalists

After receiving feedback from a learned panel of judges, the three finalists — Andrew Herbst, John Campbell and Junrui Wang — faced off in a final, live design round. In the end, Junrui Wang’s unconventional low-lying structure won the top prize, as it performed well in the Energy Use Intensity metric and integrated seamlessly with the High Line.

PER/FORM’s three finalists (left to right): Andrew Herbst, Junrui Wang (winner), John Campbell. Photo: Stephanie Murano

Thanks to all the participants for their considerable efforts throughout the PER/FORM competition and to Sefaira for trying out this exciting new competition format.

Posted by Chris Cronin, on behalf of the SketchUp team

Two weeks ago, SketchUp enthusiasts, professionals, developers… heck, friends from across the globe gathered in snowy Vail, Colorado for 3D Basecamp 2014. What can we say? It was a blast.

3D Basecamp 2014: wish you were there!

After braving a major snowstorm on the drive to Vail, intrepid Basecampers jumped straight into morning training sessions to sharpen their SketchUp skills. The official festivities kicked off in the afternoon with our 3D Basecamp Welcome Address and Keynote. After our team at Trimble poked around SketchUp’s history and future, we introduced our first tablet product, the SketchUp Mobile Viewer for iPad (and then we orbited a Vermeer).

For our keynote, Nick Ierodiaconou — co-founder and our good friend at WikiHouse and OpenDesk — offered a fantastic keynote on the roles for open source and design in helping solve some big problems out there in the world. At SketchUp, we’re geeks for design thinking, and we’re inspired by the act of making. If you are too, you’re in for a real treat with Nick’s keynote:

After our general session, the real work of Basecamp commenced. Twenty presenters, over forty sessions exploring architectural visualization, construction documentation, the business of 3D printing, virtual reality, modeling for courtroom presentations or ancient history research, and so much more. It’s amazing what happens when great SketchUp minds come together. But don’t take our word for it: watch the presentations from 3D Basecamp 2014 on YouTube now*, and see for yourself.
*If you actually watch all our Basecamp videos, you may want to consider coming to the next event in person.

Basecamp 2014 featured over 40 presentations and workshops from some of the sharpest SketchUp modelers around. You can find many of the Basecamp 2014 presentations on YouTube.

Our Basecamp 2014 presenters were brilliant and incredibly generous with their knowledge. They’re also great pals who’ve been part of our SketchUp family for some time now. We also reconnected with old friends from SketchUcation, Smustard, and the SketchUp Sage — it was great to see everyone, even if there was hardly enough time to catch up between sessions.

We met a lot of new friends in Vail too: Christina Eneroth from Sweden, who has dreamed some incredibly useful extensions. Our Twitter pals at PGAV Destinations, who design whale shark tanks for a living (Seriously?). The folks at Skalp, who are working on a delicious tool for supercharging SketchUp sections. And many, many more folks who shared their fascinating projects and modeling methods.

A meeting of the SketchUp minds at 3D Basecamp 2014

On Monday night, this cross section of the SketchUp universe collided at the Vail Cascade for our Basecamp party. We brought back SketchUp Pictionary (which may actually reinforce some bad modeling habits) and there was a significant photo booth line for the opportunity to take a Sophie selfie (now, definitively, a collectors’ item).

A friendly game of SketchUp Pictionary with a few hundred new friends. No pressure.

Posted by Mark Harrison, SketchUp Team
You can check out all of our photos from 3D Basecamp 2014 here. And all the Basecamp videos are here.
Thanks for hosting all our stuff, Internet!

Many of you have asked us: “How can scan data be used in SketchUp?” We care a lot about usability, so the notion of importing 500 million points into SketchUp often makes us twitch. Recently, though, we spotted an opportunity to update an existing Trimble tool and allow scan data to be leveraged in SketchUp without overloading or overcomplicating your models.

With that, I am pleased to announce the Trimble Scan Explorer Extension. Using this tool in SketchUp Pro, you can now import scan data from Trimble RealWorks projects as references for building 3D models.

Introducing the Trimble Scan Explorer Extension for SketchUp: a tool for using scan data from Trimble RealWorks as a reference for accurate 3D modeling.

This extension starts by visualizing point clouds as lightweight images created from the original scans. You can rotate and zoom around the scan, and use simple tools to easily specify points, lines, edges and walls. These entities then appear directly in SketchUp in various ways.

Without any context in SketchUp for extracted points and edges, scan data imported straight into SketchUp would be pretty challenging to work with. To help you see where you are working in the point cloud, this extension includes an easy-to-use edge extraction tool that provides the important cues you need for modeling building space. This tool brings edges into SketchUp as guides — think of these as “edge clouds” that you can use as the basis for accurate modeling.

One click provides the shell of the structure.

If you need more of the detail, use the rectangle or polygon selection tools to extract more “edge clouds” from a portion of the scan.

Scan data is very accurate. Maybe too accurate for effective modeling. The trick is that scanning technology captures the bumps and curves in real world surfaces. If you tried to extract the edges directly from this kind of data, they would not produce good planes for efficient modeling in SketchUp.

Using the Trimble Scan Explorer, you can constrain the extraction of edges and surfaces vertically and horizontally to ensure you can model from them in SketchUp. Fields for entering your Edge, Geometric, and Snapping Constraints are provided, to allow you to get the results that you expect from these automated routines. For example, If you have a tilted surface that doesn’t align with the axes, you can turn off the constraints to extract the edges of the surface, independent of its orientation relative to the axes.

Another tool that provides quick results in SketchUp is the two-point wall selection tool. Simply click on two points on a wall you’d like to display in SketchUp, and presto!, the wall is imported as a SketchUp component. You can sequentially click your way around the room to model all of the walls this way; and if you like, automatically add the ceiling and floor. An option to close the walls further reduces the number of steps needed to model a simple room.

Wall components created from selectively referenced point cloud data using the Trimble Scan Explorer Extension

If you’d rather model your walls from selected guide points, the extension provides point and line picking tools that allow you to select the exact elements in the scan you’d like to use in your model. For instance, the automated corner extraction tool uses the intersection of planes in the scan data to identify room corners. You simply draw a box around a corner to extract the exact corner of interest. It works with interior, exterior, and oblique corners, and might just be the most useful tool in this powerful extension.

Charles Haertling’s 1969 “Boulder Eye Clinic”: scanned and represented in the Trimble Scan Explorer Extension

The Boulder Eye Clinic with SketchUp guidelines extracted from Scan data: the curved edges posed a challenge, but a large amount of detail was obtained quickly as contextual guide lines for accurate modeling

Posted by Richard Hassler, Hardware Product Manager

As most SketchUp Ruby extension developers would agree, debugging has always been a bit of a pain. In the past, there have been a few community projects that added debuggers to SketchUp, but these were often difficult to set up and some were abandoned over time. The rest of the Ruby community enjoys debugging with Integrated Development Environments (IDE) such as RubyMine, NetBeans and Aptana RadRails. All of these generally rely on various gems to be installed for remote debugging. Getting these gems to work within SketchUp’s embedded Ruby is usually non-trivial.

This week, we’re taking a small step towards making debugging for SketchUp extensions a bit easier. At 3D Basecamp 2014, we’ve announced an open source Ruby debugger framework. You’ll find the source code for this project hosted under our GitHub account:

https://github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-ruby-debugger

We currently support Windows only but you can expect Mac support soon. Setting it up is easy:
Simply grab SURubyDebugger.dll from GitHub and copy it into your SketchUp installation directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014
Launch SketchUp with the following command line arguments:
SketchUp.exe -rdebug “ide port=1234″
The port should match the remote debugger port setting configured in the IDE.
SketchUp will start up and appear to be frozen. It is waiting for the debugger to show up.
Launch remote debugging in the IDE, SketchUp should continue running. You should see breakpoints hit when Ruby code execution reaches the specified lines.

If you are unfamiliar with installing and configuring the IDEs, we’ve posted some step-by-step instructions in the GitHub repository wiki.

We still have a few TODOs (such as multi-thread debugging, breakpoint conditions and exception breakpoints), so if you are versed in Ruby’s C API, please contribute to the project.

Happy debugging!

Posted by Bugra Barin, Software Engineer

As designers, makers, builders, artists, teachers, students, and all around 3D troubadours, we’re passionate about our ideas, and even more so about seeing them take shape. If you’re reading this, chances are that either you or someone you know is as obsessed about SketchUp as we are. And you know how that obsession can penetrate every corner of your life. Sometimes, the only compulsion greater than push-pulling your ideas to life, is the desire to show off your brilliantly creative work, on any and every device you can get your hands on.

Up until now, one aspect of (most of) our lives has been sadly neglected by SketchUp’s addictive lure. That deliciously curvy piece of brightly lit glass you call your iPad (maybe you call it something else, but lest we digress…).

Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce all that changes. As 3D Basecamp kicks off in Vail, we’re also welcoming the SketchUp Mobile Viewer for iPad to our product family.

We’ll be telling you all about our new tablet viewer in this blog post, but we’re guessing that some of you might already just want to go buy the thing. You folks can find the SketchUp Mobile Viewer here on the iTunes App Store.

Say hello to the new SketchUp Mobile Viewer for iPad

The SketchUp Mobile Viewer app lets you explore, and present SketchUp models on your iPad. The app’s touch interface provides navigation controls for Orbit, Pan, and Zoom, allowing you to swipe and pinch your way to 3D nirvana. And you’ll notice that models are rendered with certain Style settings based on your Last Saved View, including the Sky, Ground, and Background color, as well as Face settings.

Model Viewer screen with the Cameras list open

Additional navigation controls include a Zoom Extents tool, and a Cameras list that gives you access to SketchUp’s standard camera views (Top, Front, Left, etc) along with any camera positions that were saved as Scenes in your model.

After starting up the app and logging in to your 3D Warehouse account, you’ll find your public and private 3D Warehouse models displayed on the home screen. From there, you have the option to view your models and/or download them for offline use.

The SketchUp Mobile Viewer also lets you search and browse the entire public 3D Warehouse, meaning you can explore the millions of glorious creations available in what we consider to be biggest and best repository of 3D models out there. After clicking a search result, the app’s detailed view provides a high resolution thumbnail along with key model details like title & description, author name, and file size.

Detailed search results: get a better look before opening a model in 3D or downloading it

We’re incredibly excited to make this app available to SketchUp and 3D Warehouse users, and even more excited about what’s in store for future versions. (Hold tight, Android folks!) We hope to bring even more of the SketchUp model viewing capabilities you’ve come to know and love to the SketchUp Mobile Viewer, and to expand the ways that folks present, share, and collaborate on the tablet platform. That’s where you come in: let us know what you think of the SketchUp Mobile Viewer. We’re always listening for ways to improve our products, to make them the tools you’ll want to use. So thanks for your feedback, and happy orbiting!

Posted by Mike Tadros, Product Manager

Four words: One. Million. Downloads. ShaBoom!

This week, we are pleased to share that over the past 10 months, SketchUp users have downloaded 1 million extensions from Extension Warehouse, our online repository of add-on tools.

Extension Warehouse launched last May. Since then, over 50 developers have contributed 245 extensions. Our extensibility team has carefully reviewed each extension for quality, both initially and whenever a developer uploads a new release. New extensions and upgrades are being submitted daily. The range and quality of these tools are simply amazing. Without a doubt, these extensions make SketchUp even more useful, versatile, and fun.

In addition, the SketchUp Ruby API received a major upgrade to version 2.0 in SketchUp 2014. This update was a much needed improvement, but the downside was that many existing extensions were not necessarily compatible with the latest version of SketchUp. Thankfully, we’ve see the SketchUp developer community rise to the occasion like a rocket ship. Today, over 70% of extensions are compatible with SU 2014.

Extension Warehouse has also played a role in the creation or distribution of several open source projects, including the SketchUp STL extension, Shapes, WikiHouse and Developer Tools. Anyone is free to contribute to our open source projects on github.

If you haven’t installed an extension recently, we’d encourage you to spend some time browsing Extension Warehouse inside SketchUp (Window > Extension Warehouse). Whether you are looking for a productivity boosting utility or a full blown rendering application, there really is something for everyone. Also, many folks don’t realize that the Extension Warehouse is one of the best ways to manage an extension library. If you ever need to quickly update, migrate, or re-install all your extensions, log-in from to Extension Warehouse inside SketchUp and check out the great features on the “My Extensions” page.

We would like to extend (pun intended) a huge “Thank You!” to all the extension developers and loyal users who have helped us reach this one million downloads milestone. The first year of Extension Warehouse is shaping up to be a great one, and we have big plans to make year two even better. Stay tuned!

Posted by Bryce Stout, Extensibility Product Manager

In the past year or so, we’ve noticed several major publications attempting to interpret the “maker movement” through its sociological, economic, and technological implications. For us, it’s still pretty simple: making things is fun, especially when you do it with friends.

This is, really, why we go to Maker Faires. We love building stuff and learning from other makers. So, looking forward to this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area, we’d like to try something new: a collaborative project with the maker community that hacks the greater Maker Faire experience.

Together with the team at MAKE and ShopBot Tools, we’ve cooked up the Maker Faire Design Challenge, a competition to design and fabricate the information kiosk that helps visitors navigate Maker Faire. If your design wins, we’ll work with you and build your project together at Maker Faire Bay Area in May. When the show closes down, your project will join Maker Faire’s event quiver, and the open-sourced design will be shared with Maker Faires worldwide.

You’ll find all the details about the competition on Makezine.com, but since you’ve already cozied up to the SketchUpdate, here’s a bit more about how it works:

The design challenge: create an information and wayfinding kiosk that improves the experience of people finding their way around Maker Faire Bay Area (a pretty expansive event). You can enter by filling out this form and including a link to your SketchUp model on 3D Warehouse. And because this is an open-source competition, we’ll curate the best designs and share them with the broader maker community in our open 3D Warehouse collection.

One of our goals for this project is to improve the Maker Faire experience in a sustainable way, so you’ll want to pay close attention to the Challenge Guidelines. We’re looking for a project that’s simple, useful, economical, buildable, reusable, and (for sure) fun. Oh, and it should be made primarily out of CNC’d plywood. For inspiration see: Shelter 2.0, WikiHouse, AtFab, and beyond. Have questions about what makes for a good design? Drop a comment into this forum thread.

On April 21st, we’ll announce the design challenge winner, and here’s where the fun starts: Together with editors from MAKE, the SketchUp team, and our friends at ShopBot, we’ll work together to prep your project for fabrication and then build it with you at Maker Faire Bay Area. Then, we’ll fly you out to Maker Faire Bay Area, and we’ll all get our hands dirty building the thing. So, read-up on the Challenge Guidelines (a design brief, if you will) and show us what you’ve got. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Posted by Mark Harrison, SketchUp Team

A few weeks ago, we blogged about how information modeling works in SketchUp. A data-rich .skp can pull off some complex feats, but we prefer to think about an information model as a simple relationship: graphical geometry with any kind of data associated.

With no data, the model is only a design (and maybe a very good one). Without the model, the data is, perhaps, only a math problem (and maybe a pretty smart one). Put them together, and you have the basis for one incredibly powerful output of information modeling: performance-based design.

Architects who practice performance-based design are often trying to measure, adhere to, or optimize building performance: the measurable index of a building’s energy efficiency or operational cost.

The folks at Sefaira are pretty keen on this idea. Their plugin — Sefaira for SketchUp — helps architects make decisions that optimize building performance while designing in SketchUp. So now imagine understanding how early-stage conceptual (or practical) choices might affect a building’s ability to retain or dissipate heat throughout the day. We think this is a powerful way to think about design, so together with Sefaira (and some other friends), we’re hosting a competition focused on performance-based design. We call it PER/FORM.

PER/FORM: a live performance-based design competition

You can learn all about the PER/FORM competition on this site, but here are the basics: After an April 2nd registration deadline*, the competition starts with a design brief and three weeks of access to Sefaira for SketchUp. You’ll also have support from the Sefaira team so that you can learn the ins and outs of performance-based building design.

We’ll select 30 winners from the online round, and — here’s the kicker — those finalists will have the opportunity to compete live in the final round at the Pratt Institute’s Manhattan campus on May 17th. That’s right: this is going to be a real-deal, big city SketchUp shootout.

The top three designers will take home cash prizes, and the winner will see his or her design featured in Metropolis Magazine. What’s that? You don’t have much experience with energy or information modeling? Well, three weeks of free access to a SketchUp energy modeling plugin sounds like a good place to start, right?

Posted by Mark Harrison, SketchUp Team

*We’re sorry to say that this competition is only open to U.S. and Canada participants. Stay tuned for future contests that don’t have this restriction.

If you poke around SketchUp.com today, you’ll notice a few things are different. For one, a new version of SketchUp is available for download in ten languages. You’ll also find that we’ve completely rebuilt 3D Warehouse, our online repository for the millions of models shared by SketchUp users worldwide. SketchUp 2014 is here, and there’s quite a bit to explore.

A new look for 3D Warehouse

Every day, 7,000 people search for a “sofa” on 3D Warehouse, and then find around 10,000 sofa models to choose from. That is an incredible amount of choice — probably the most you’ll find on the web. Today, we’re giving the millions of models in 3D Warehouse a facelift at 3dwarehouse.sketchup.com. As you poke around the new 3D Warehouse, you may notice that you can now navigate 3D models on the web as you do in SketchUp (using a WebGL enabled browser). Have a look for yourself:

Bringing a SketchUp viewer to the web is a big deal to us. We spent a lot of time tuning our WebGL Viewer so that your models operate smoothly and retain their SketchUp feel. We’re also thrilled that SketchUp users can now share orbitable 3D projects (in full screen, if you like) on their own webpages using the 3D Warehouse embed gadget.

Want to share your 3D models on the web? The 3D Warehouse embed gadget has you covered.

As you read this, our 3D Warehouse render robots are churning through tens of thousands of models a day, converting raw .skp files into a 3D streaming format dialed for SketchUp models. In the meantime, any newly uploaded models published to 3D Warehouse will render after just a few minutes, so you can start orbiting your new models pronto.

While this new Viewer turns any webpage into a 3D stage, we also wanted to point a spotlight on the most useful models in 3D Warehouse. So, working with product manufacturers, we’ve started curating the highest quality collections of real world models into their own category: Product Catalogs. Now, when you need a particular faucet, sliding door, window arrangement, or office chair, 3D Warehouse helps you choose a component that can actually be specified.

There’s quite a bit more to discover in the new 3D Warehouse — new upload options, increased file size limits, a refreshed UI — you can learn more about it all here.

A closer look at information modeling

In a world of ever-evolving CAD acronyms, people often ask “Is SketchUp Pro BIM?”

BIM is short for building information modeling, and the fact is, we’ve always considered SketchUp Pro to be a highly capable and inclusive information modeler. But what does that mean?

As we see it, the foundation of information modeling is an association between information of any kind and the graphical geometry in a model. And SketchUp’s core tools — groups, components, the Ruby API — have always enabled users to make this association and use the data embedded in models. BIM professionals may use information models for clash detection and quantity takeoffs; woodworkers may use them for joinery design and cut lists. In fact, a quick scan of Extension Warehouse shows that SketchUp users have been modeling, specifying, scheduling, analyzing, and reporting with information for some time now.

Building on this open and flexible information modeling capability, SketchUp Pro 2014 includes a feature called Classifier that lets you tag objects with standard classifications or types. We’ve preloaded this release with IFC 2×3 classifications (a standard for building information modelers), but you’re free to use any classification system you want. If you’re wondering if this tool is for you, we’d encourage you to learn more about it here.

A duct segment by any other name…

And because data embedded in information models is often used by other software programs (especially in BIM), we’re adding the IFC file type, another BIM standard, to our roster of supported exports. So go ahead, try out your BI in any M you like.

But wait, there’s more…

Of course, the best way to explore SketchUp 2014 is to try it out yourself. The team working on LayOut delivered on one of our top documentation requests with a feature we call Auto-Text; we’ve also made some important tweaks to the the core SketchUp modeler; and our API has been updated to Ruby 2.0 standards. If you’ve purchased SketchUp Pro 2013, you’re already qualified for a free upgrade to this latest version. And if you use SketchUp Make, go ahead and update here for free.

Posted by Mark Harrison, on behalf of the SketchUp Team

When SketchUp was invented more than a dozen years ago, our team envisioned a tool which was simple to learn and simple to use, but powerful and capable of building complex models of all kinds of real world things. SketchUp, we dreamed, would be a tool which made designing, building and operating things easier, faster and more efficient. Maybe, even, more fun.

The key to that dream was an arsenal of simple and direct modeling tools coupled with a plastically flexible and ‘sticky’ geometry model. Editing a model should be as simple as touching a face and pushing and pulling it into shape. The SketchUp Way was born.

Almost. The wonderfully creative pure plasticity of SketchUp modeling could really become a problem when models progressed beyond a basic level of detail. SketchUp also needed a way to build complexity up from the bottom, a way to make assemblies of component objects. Enter “Components.”

Components have become the best-used and most essential model organizing principle in every expert SketchUp users’ toolkit. Not only do components isolate geometry to keep it all from sticking together, but they give a simple way to think of a model as being composed of individual objects. Objects which represent something real.

Over the years, we’ve extended Components more than any other single feature in SketchUp. We’ve added tools to slice them, dice them, add parameters and configure them. We’ve built a huge 3D Warehouse full of them, free for you to use as you see fit. We’ve added features to help you count them, analyze them and add any kind of data you can imagine to them. And our developer partners have extended them even more- there are more than 80 extensions in the Extension Warehouse that depend on some aspect of components to do the magic that they do.

One thing we’ve noticed, though, is that all this great information and advanced capability that folks are adding to their models with components remains largely isolated inside their SketchUp models. What was missing (until now) was a way to add additional information to the model in some standardized way that would make it possible to share, analyze and extend it outside of SketchUp.

And so in SketchUp 2014 we’re introducing an open system of “Classification” that lets you build models made of components (make ‘em yourself or add them from 3D Warehouse) that contain information in a structured way. Actually, in any structured way that you want. Want to adopt an open standard? We’ve got you covered. Or maybe you’d rather go your own way? Works for us, too. We’re calling this simple combination of components and structured data “information modeling” and we think you’re going to use it a lot.

Classify groups and components and you’ll find that their types auto-populate into labels and LayOut callouts (just like group and component names. Export an .skp (or an .ifc) and send your classifications along with the rest of your model.

The most important thing about SketchUp’s information modeling is that it offers you an unrestricted way to represent not just what a design looks like but also more of what it actually is. And you can do it without giving up the fast, fluid and ‘free’ modeling behavior that you fell in love with about SketchUp in the first place.

To prove that this system works, we’ve built a special workflow around IFC— an open classification system for folks who are doing BIM in the construction industry. You can classify components in your models with IFC types, assign and edit relevant attributes to those components and then export the resulting models into the IFC format for use in other BIM tools.

But don’t stop at IFC. In SketchUp 2014, you’re free to use any published schema to classify components in your models. Interested in COBie? Import the official COBie schema from BuildingSmart. Or maybe you’re more interested in something like gbxml for green building, or CityGML for urban simulation. Or, you might just want to make your own classification system. We’ve got you covered however you want to work.

Simple, open, easy… but powerful. Now that’s the SketchUp Way.

Posted by John Bacus, SketchUp Product Management Director