sketchUcation

I have recently come across with a site SketchUp Texture maintained by Rosanna Mataloni. She keeps sharing stunning material some of which we also share here (linked to  her site of course, not "reposted").

These are 21 palm tree png images with transparent background.

It is well worth to browse the whole site however as there are many other, very nice materials you may be interested, too.

Today we have reached a total of 180,000 members on SketchUcation. Since the launch of the new site in late September, membership is not only constantly growing but growing at a speeding pace, currently somewhere between 7,300 and 7,500 new members joining a month.

If trends keep to be the same as for the last half a year, SketchUcation may even reach a quarter of a million members this year. Fingers crossed when the final count-down starts around December.

An extremely cool, new plugin (albeit still in beta phase) has been released by Renderiza (Rafael Rivera) lately. Canvas can Interactively paint groups and components in spray type manner. To use it:

Do you need to show a Shaderlight render to a client but you’re in the field? Want to check on the rendering status of a scene or animation? Forgot to download a render before you left the office? With the new and free Shaderlight Cloud Viewer, you can view SketchUp renders anywhere using an Apple or Android device. View completed scenes and animations, check on the status of in-progress renders, and download and display renders. The Shaderlight Cloud Viewer, combined with Shaderlight desktop software, will increase the effectiveness of your rendering workflow. Your high quality, photo-realistic scenes and animations are available anytime you need them.

"All we ever wanted was a way to model a building without huge complicated CAD software. So we created BuildEdge PLAN. With BuildEdge PLAN, you can be drawing parametrically connected models of buildings in a matter of minutes!" - says the developer. 

BuildEdge Plan 2.0 Beta was out there for interested users to test for quuite a while and the final release has also been available for a couple of weeks now.

Enter SketchFab's 3rd Sketchfast competition with $500 of cash prizes! You have time untill Monday noon (EST) to design and upload your best model of a NYC icon with the tag sketchfast3 on sketchfab.com.

It can be anything: a landmark, a cab, a policeman… Be creative! Most faved models will be the winners.

Sketchfab is a web service to publish and display interactive 3D models. No plugin required: upload your model, embed it, share it, done.

Podium Browser Paid category has well over 5,000 render ready original components that you can click and drop in to SketchUp to produce photo-realistic rendering very quickly. Content ranges from hundreds of light fixtures (with lights), living room furniture, dining room design components, sinks, baths, hundreds of 2D face me people, materials, 3D plants, faucets,etc. All are modeled with skill and crafted with Podium V2 properties. In March 2013, hundreds of bathroom and furniture components were added. In April we are focusing on 3D plants and trees.

Revizto converts Revit and SketchUp models into lightweight, interactive virtual environments with tools for simple collaboration. Revizto developers are committed to keeping Revizto up to date with the latest technology. Users of the new release, Revisto 1.1 can now take advantage of the new features in Windows 8 and Autodesk® Revit® 2014.

The developers are also looking for people interested in testing their new intermediate release of Revizto for SketchUp.

It was back in December 2012 when the developers of Thea Render actually took the decision to postpone releasing edition 1.2 for the second quarter of 2013.&nbsp. For them, edition 1.2 is a "milestone" release and this is why they didn't want to rush into it. But instead, they gave their best selves into developing something new that can define rendering in the years to come.

A new innovative approach was born: field mapping. What is it? how it works? why is it better? The developers will answer these questions very soon now with a tech announcement...

We teased you for the last few weeks showing you how we were installing plugins directly into SketchUp. Now we are pleased to announce that the SketchUcation Plugin Store is now available for the community!

There's lots of cool features we added over the last few months to help SketchUp users search for and install plugins that are part of SketchUcation folklore. Not only that, but installing is just a simple click, no more dragging and dropping files and folders.

To find out all the details about this new tool just follow the read more link below. You'll see why we are so excited about what make this tool awesome!