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.

“To figure out the hight of a building you can use a combination of “Match Photo” in SketchUp and Google Earth imagery. After you have traced the photo in SketchUp, import Google Earth imagery. Measure the length of the building on Google Earth. Rescale the model using this length. You will now have a better estimation of the height.”

Watch video tutorial by concept3D

SketchUcation Community Forums member “•BTM” has plunged into ruby scripting and immediately came out with an amazing plugin; “Point Merger”, which allows users to merge endpoints with each other or to nearest edges within a given distance. It will definitely be very useful for cleaning up “messy” meshes.

Read more or watch his demonstration video below.

Made from the excellent model of our “Historic English Buildings” modeller, Tom Harvey, SketchUcation Community Forums member “Speaker” has posted a beautiful animation compiled partly from Google Earth, partly from Podium results. Visit the topic here or watch the video below:

A cool walkthrough video was posted in the SketchUcation Community Forums Gallery by “bertb”. It is indeed amazing what you can do real time in SketchUp with LightUp after it has rendered your scene. Watch the video:

Earlier this week, Google released tens of thousands of new 3D buildings in Japan. Major Japanese cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto have joined the growing list of cities and towns prominently displayed in Google Earth’s 3D buildings layer.

Read more.

We posted about ” SketchUp Basics – Trunk Lid Pt. 1″ a week ago. This video tutorial is Part 2 of the series and is at least as well worked out as  the previous one.

Thewoodwhisperer.com posted this very nicely presented video tutorial. Highly recommended for Woodworkers.

SketchUpVideo, Google SketchUp’s YouTube Channel, posted a new video about two days ago. The video was recorded by Peter Saal (we recognized his voice), one of the developers of the Dynamic Components feature in Google SketchUp 7. See the video at YouTube here, or watch it right here on TDC.