While we have abundant educational materials and tutorials about SketchUp, there are not too many on LayOut, the accompanying application for SketchUp Pro since version 6. Bonnie Roskes has now released a comprehensive guide to LayOut as an electronic (PDF) book at 3DVinci. Hopefully it will be a useful guide for those only now learning LayOut as well as for more experienced users.
Starting next month (she hopes), Bonnie will be offering a new service: SketchUp Projects of the Month. Each month, subscribers will receive three projects geared toward teachers and students. One project each month will be math-related. Details on how to sign up will be forthcoming – sign up for the mailing list (at the end of her post linked below) if you want to be notified.
“Bonnie dedicates her work to teaching kids, teachers, and design pros how to use SketchUp. She is a former bridge engineer, a mom to five kids, and an amateur violinist. Her goal is to get everyone to think, visualize, and create in 3D. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her family.”
Read the whole interview on “The Capital Region Society for Technology in Education” website and see Bonnie’s blog.
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a model can generate a thousand pictures, a single construction model can easily illustrate even the most complicated assembly. This makes a three-dimensional model a critical resource in competitive construction communications.”
Read more about the ideas behind 3D construction documentation in the interesting article in the Insitebuilders blog.
3DVinci has released Bonnie Roskes’ fourth book of the ModelMetricks Intermediate series, in which you will learn how to find models for just just about anything you want in Google’s 3D Warehouse. You’ll also learn how to place SketchUp models in exact locations in Google Earth, and create Google Earth tours. View chapter details and read more on the book’s page. or in Bonnie’s blog.
This week “The Daily CatchUp” interviewed Paul Lee of Viewsion Google SketchUp Authorised Training Centre.
TDC: What made you become interested in SketchUp training?
Paul: I learned CAD the hard way (by asking everyone in the drawing office to help me) years ago and later had an opportunity to teach it. CAD courses didn’t at all prepare candidates for the workplace, and learning was a haphazard experience. I wanted to improve teaching in this area, and saw the opportunity this presented. I wrote a detailed CAD course in 2002 in a local Vocational school but got little support to continue it so it died.
In 2005 a colleague introduced me to SketchUp. The more I learned about the program, the more I became interested in it. I started this SketchUp training venture with a partner in 2008, (www.viewsion.ie) and its going pretty well so far, despite the recession.
TDC: What does Viewsion do that’s special?
Paul: Alongside the standard SketchUp courses we have produced the world’s first course for the production of CAD-free construction drawings using only SketchUp and Layout. We deliver this course worldwide through live instructor-led online training. (You can find our Youtube video under the “sketchupireland” banner.) We have also provided specialist training to landscape designers, building contractors, film set designers, and engineering / architecture professionals.
TDC: Where do you see SketchUp going in the future?
Paul: In general terms that’s anybody’s guess, but it’s definitely on an upward and ever expanding trajectory. On one level, we see SketchUp becoming a serious BIM tool, ultimately replacing CAD. Most fields (possibly every field) of design will be very much affected by this technology. Open-source is key. The fact that anyone can write code for this is driving SU’s evolution at a phenomenal pace. Take for example Fredoscale and 1001bit tools. SketchUp’s own Dynamic Components are a massive step in the BIM direction.
The possibilities for product marketing through 3d Warehouse are something which have not yet taken hold of the commercial imagination. This will be a very exciting area to watch into the future. However, companies such as Velux and Kolbe Windows have made some progress in this area, which is encouraging.
TDC: What other areas interest you?
Paul: We aim to pursue the Google Earth modelling of our locality (Cork City) as well as country-wide. This will help to grow tourism in the country as well as being a great resource for ordinary people, local government, etc. We have been working on some models for upload to 3d warehouse that will be helpful to architects engineers and students locally and worldwide. Such models would include regulatory requirements for things like disabled toilets, staircases, windows etc. We are very interested in production of dynamic components for commercial use such as window manufacturers, concrete products etc. Secondary schools education (or K-12 institutions as they are called in the States) is another area that interests us greatly as we feel that SketchUp is the perfect tool for many areas: technical drawing, architectural / construction studies, woodworking, graphic design and tutorials just to name a few. We aim to get kids interested by running a competition this Autumn to model Project Spectrum- We will be providing free SU training to people involved with autism groups (please get in touch if interested – info@viewsion.ie)
Energy analysis from SketchUp models is an area of huge interest and though we don’t yet have experience in this area, we are very keen to get to grips with it. Cost analysis using SketchUp is something that we are pursuing for a client at the moment.
TDC: What is Beyoncé’s phone number?
Paul: I cannot reveal that information as I feel this would be a betrayal of her trust.
Aidan says; “I need your help. I’m traveling to Tokyo next week to give a speech for 1000 Japanese primary and secondary school teachers. I want to show them some examples of interesting things people are doing with SketchUp in K-12 education. I know there’s a ton of math, history, geography, architecture and other great stuff out there, but I don’t meet enough teachers in person to collect it myself.”
Hm… Must be an interesting trip though quite challenging.
If you have any materials to share with him, read more and contact him here.
“The Whirlpool Corporation Design+Development Group (D+DG) is now offering an additional continuing education unit (CEU) course as part of its curriculum for industry architects. As the first appliance manufacturer to be honored with the AIA Continuing Education System (CES) Award for Excellence, the D+DG continually provides architects and designers with innovative and collaborative education.
Whirlpool Corporation offers seven additional CEU courses, including: Sustainable Design Practices for Kitchens, Systems for Homes and Lumber for Wood Framed Construction (podcast); Two Faces of Sustainability Passive and Active Systems in Residential Design and Use of Fly Ash in Concrete (podcast); White Goods: The Design Landscape and Sustainability (podcast); 3-D Designing with Google SketchUp (podcast); Built-in Kitchen Trends: The Design Landscape; Principles of Universal Design in Housing and Home Appliances; and Appliances & The Green Home.”
Read more (and find out about registration) on the Whirlpool site.
Barbara and Dennis Fukai are the people “behind” Insitebuilders, a small press specializing in books for the design and construction industry. All of their construction books are written as graphic narratives using a combination of three-dimensional illustrations, interactive 3D construction models, short videos, captioned text, and interactive media. Their goal is to keep their construction books simple. The objective is to make complex construction information quick to read and easy to understand. To accomplish this they use very accurate 3D construction models built with Google SketchUp. The Daily CatchUp asked Dennis about his reasons for using SketchUp for this purpose.
TDC: What do you see as the real value of SketchUp?
Dennis: I think Brad Schell, the founder of SketchUp, said it best on the cover of our book “Building SIMPLE: Building an Information Model.” To paraphrase, he saw 3D modeling as the best way for everyone to share the ideas, designs, and dreams we all have floating around in our heads. For Brad, everyone, the “professional architect, builder, mom and pop remodeling a kitchen, or a kid designing the next space station…” has an idea that needs to be expressed. In short, his dream was to bring 3D to the masses, and that’s exactly what he did.
What has always amazed me about SketchUp is its intuitive feel. It seems like the tools are right where they should be, they operate almost exactly how one would expect them to, and the program anticipates the little things necessary to make 3D modeling easy for everyone. In fact, the pure genius of SketchUp, is that some how the original @Last team was able to get all of these ideas coded into a simple program that seems to just expand and grow from within its own user base.
And what is truly amazing is that in all our books, with thousands of pieces in hundreds of assemblies, we have yet to find the limit of what even the early versions of SketchUp can do. There is no way any of this is an accident, and I continue to admire how inventive and instinctive that early vision remains in probably the most useful product out there for construction modeling.
TDC: Why use SketchUp for construction modeling?
Dennis: Though it’s a great design tool, SketchUp is more than a pretty face. It also has an important role to play as an information and communications tool for manufacturing, construction, and property development. In fact, its real value is not that it can simply illustrate objects in 3D, but that it can also very quickly model and communicate “time” as an erection sequence, simulated field assembly, or a preconstruction process. (See Dennis’s blog: http://insitebuilders.wordpress.com)
We use our books to show how SketchUp can be an effective tool to visually communicate the means and methods of an assembly as a series of distinct events or activities. This is especially important in risk management, but it is equally important in discussing change orders and clarifications because it sets up a visual understanding of a problem from a common point of view.
The result is an increasingly collaborative approach to construction, where owners, designers, and constructors are all able to animate concerns in 3D, illustrate project production over time, test alternative approaches to an assembly, and evaluate schedules and costs as a logical sequence of activities in order to find the best values for a project.
TDC: How is construction modeling different in SketchUp?
Dennis: The speed and intuitive feel of SketchUp makes it easy for almost anyone to build a construction model. The trick is using the Outliner in combination with strict control over the organization of the pieces of the total construction. Layer controls, Groups and Components help, but the basic idea is to maintain distinct clusters of objects as a controlled collection of nested construction assemblies.
Fortunately, almost all estimates and schedules in construction are organized in a work breakdown structure (WBS). This means the WBS quickly provides an over all framework for the pieces of the construction model, including three standard levels of subassemblies, sequences, and the supporting labor and equipment used to actually build almost any complex construction project.
The organizational methods we use for the construction models in our books have evolved with the changes to SketchUp over the years. This means that our readers not only interact with the animated details of complex construction in 3D, but they can also follow through with those assemblies using the hands-on project based tutorials included with every book.
TDC: Thank you, Dennis, for these “insights” and finally here are some exciting (though low resolution) samples from Insitebuilder’s recent projects:
Due to a rising demand Bonnie Roskes, well know author of several books on SketchUp for kids, is releasing pdf versions of two of her books. “My goal is to get everyone to think, visualize, and create in 3D. You’re never too old or too young…”
