The winner of the latest Speed Modelling Challenge (#21 – “Multi tool”) was CaptainLS with his “office space Swiss army stapler”. Congrats to the winner – as well as all the other participants with their also cool entries!

The winner of the Speed Modelling Challenge #20 about Dr. Seuss was d12dozr (Marcus) with his excellent Circus Crane model. A well deserved prize – a copy of ProfileBuilder (worth $29) kindly offered by Whaat (Dale Martens).

Congrats Marcus and thanks Dale!

Whaat (Dale Martens), developer of several plugins, has just released a new version of his UV Tools plugin; UV Tools 0.2 Pro as a public beta. It is practically a quick export-import bridge between SketchUp and several other applications that can do better UV mapping.

As announced in the Competition Voting Topic, the winner of Speed Modelling Challenge #17 – “Video Games” is Pete Stoppel (aka “solo”) with this entry.

Congrats, well deserved yellow badge!

SCF Member Chris Glasier compiled and released his first video tutorial of a longer series of his cgScenes plugin. His vision of what he calls “superscenes” is becoming more apprehensible when watching his video (also embedded below).

“…What I am suggesting is we need something other than a paperwork metaphor as a focus for software design if we really want a paperless office. Scenes seem to exploit the whole range of communications offered by technology – 2D and 3D images, manipulation (orbiting and so on), animation, voice, video … backed up of course by digital machines to take care of the boring but essential bits – all-in-all superscenes“ says Chris. Please, visit his site for further details.

Other, related articles in The Daily CatchUp can be found here and related discussion topics can be followed here and here and he posted the plugin in this topic.

Here is an interesting discussion about WebDialogs which show differences between code in various browsers.

Rick Wilson has posted an update on the Organizer Script thread about its next update. Main new feature will be an “accommodation for plug-ins that have subfolders for required files”.

Here is an interesting post and discussion about Google Sketchup for machine design and interaction with a database.

SketchUcation Community member “Speaker” posted an excellent animation of Luxo in the classic Pixar Animation studios logo remade in SketchUp, animated with Sketchy Physics and finally rendered with Podium.

“I began this by finding a great high poly model of Luxo in the warehouse which I then remodelled and grouped so it was then about 8 times smaller in size and with many adjustments to allow me to move and rotate different parts of the model. After that I inserted an omni inside the bulb with some extra geometry to lead the light and added some transparency to the bulb itself (needed some time to figure out how to make this work because at different parts of the animation the transparency had to change, the reason is that at a certain angle of view the light will break from a different side of the face).

Next I made Luxo fully functional in SU physics and saved him at different positions that served as templates. Then I put them on a path that was divided in segments to match the desired fps rate and rotated Luxo’s head and the base plate for each copy (100 Mb file in the end ). The process was kind of similar for all the animation.

Brought the models in the “stage” with 8 omnis for a softer shadow and rendered them one by one. There were more than 250 frames in the end with an average rendering time of 3 minutes, with optimal presets and 1216 x 676 resolution.
The final step was to put all the frames in Sony Vegas studio and synchronise them with the audio track and add the signature” says “Speaker” (as if it were that simple and easy).

Read more (and see higher resolution images and video) in the forum topic.

“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 his H.M.C.S. Snowberry model (or similar).

Read more (and find further resources) on the challenge page.