In today’s “Spotlight”, The Daily CatchUp has interviewed Goh Chun Hee, author of 1001bit tools
TDC: Please remind us about 1001bit tools. What is it?
Goh: 1001bit tools is a collection of ruby plugins for Google Sketchup dedicated for architectural works.
My idea of an ideal design process is to start designing spaces and forms in 3d, visualize, [...]

Twilight Render is a fully integrated rendering solution for Google SketchUp.
With Twilight, it’s now possible to render photo-realistic images inside Google SketchUp!  Render with biased and unbiased methods on an unlimited number of processors.  And while Twilight is rendering in the background, continue working in and saving your SketchUp models.
Twilight offers physically accurate materials, photometric [...]

Recently I have stumbled upon this great site/blog Granny Art. I was amazed by the quality of the work seen there but also the amount of totally royalty free materials (png files about anything you can imagine with alpha transparency) Helga Stolzenwald is so generously sharing with the World.
Please, visit her site and be amazed; [...]

Thea Render has just announced the call for “her” first, public beta testing. “The time has come that users can join us in a closed-beta phase and make a full test of the application and the plugins. We really believe that beta testing is an invaluable process not only for ironing out the application, but [...]

“If you have a model that’s too complex for our systems to handle or there’s some other issue preventing the model from getting reviewed or going live, you will now find a “Processing issues” icon attached to the model… You’ll be able to tell at a glance which of your models have been accepted, which [...]

Indigo 2.2.1 Beta is out according to the Indiogo site. Beside new features and tweaks in the UI, (in some circumstances) it can be even twice as fast in rendering than before.
Read more in the announcement.

“This challenge is all about making 3D Real Naval Battleships. Your battleship can be Historic or New but real naval & of any nation. We only need outer details of battleship model. Make as details as possible. Textures use is allowed.” I really wonder what would happen if SCF member “silver_shadow” (Jacques Cleghorn) participated with [...]

The winner of the “Speed Modelling Challenge #15” (Bridges)  is Bruce (aka “modelhead”). Congrats to the winner; a well deserved “trophy” although admittedly in a very tight competition.

Alejandro Vasquez has posted a short but possibly very useful tutorial about his workflow from SketchUp to Blender via Collada (zipped in the kmz export from both Google SketchUp Free and Pro).
See the tutorial here but when you are there, don’t forget to visit his website, too – it’s well worth a good look!

A BETA version of ARsights v1.1 for MAC has been released by Inglobe Technologies.
ARSights is the web-based project by Inglobe that allows Google Earth users to visualize many GE 3D models in Augmented Reality. The current release is meant to receive feedback from MAC OS X 10.5 users. You can find the MAC version here.