sketchUcation

Solid Iris have released set of 20 high quality HDRI Studio for Image Based Lighting to illuminate your models in Thea Render.

A simple drag and drop into Thea and you have your whole scene set for rendering awesome product shots.

With Thea Presto GPU rendering you'll have exquiste images in minutes.

Oh...and they are FREE for Licensed users.

Revizto lets you communicate visually to design and build projects faster. Revizto 1.3 for SketchUp (and Revit) has just been released!

Download a free 30-Day Trial now! Revizto 1.3 is available for Revit® and SketchUp® and includes 2Gb of free storage and collaboration space on the Revizto Workspace. Free Revizto Viewers for PC and Mac can be downloaded from the Revizto Store. Viewers for iPad and Android are available on iTunes and Google Play.

Cadalog, Inc., developer of popular SketchUp plug-ins like SU Podium V2 and Podium Browser, has released Viso3D Mac version to export SketchUp models for the iPad. Viso3D will export SketchUp faces and textures, add a lightmap and then provide the ability to view and navigate the 3D model on an iOs device. The lightmap will simulate SketchUp sun, shadows and indirect lighting. The Viso3D iPad app supports walk thrus, orbiting, panning, lines for edges and SketchUp scene positions.

Kerkythea just updated their site after months of interupted access. It has a whole new look and feel and the previously hard to find download links are all restored to their former glory.

Here at SketchUcation we are big supporters of Kekythea as it introduced free rendering solution for SketchUp users all around the world and paved the way for Thea Render.

You can check out the new site here.

SketchUcation PluginStore for Chrome Browser in now available for download in the Chrome Webstore.

Get instant notifications for new plugins and extensions as they are shared on SketchUcation.com.

Don't worry FireFox users will soon have there own version but for now all you Chrome users can keep up to date with the newest additions.

Everyone loves jazzy backgrounds for their desktops and mobile devices. Now you can have your very own SketchUp backgrounds to brighten up your Mac or PC. There are even versions for your iPhone 4s and iPhone 5 to give your mobile so extra SketchUp flava!.

With the trend for Flat UI these days we created some pseudo 3D icons based on the current SketchUp icon. Read on the get the download links.

Yesterday (August 6), Google announced that user generated 3D content for the official 3D Layer of Google Earth will soon (with October 1) be over. With this move, an era of over seven years will be over. Google acquired SketchUp in 2006 and immediately released a free version of the software in order to encourage modellers to populate Google Earth with 3D content. Later Building Maker was also added (this was stopped in June this year) and eventually 45 Degree 3D Imagery was also added - this latter one to finally replace 3D models made in either SketchUp or Building Maker.

The guys at Maxwell have just released Maxwell for SketchUp 2013. This latest release has some major updates but mostly it is under the hood to make it compliant with the latest release of SketchUp 2013.Along with the added support the the latest SketchUp release it is now distributed as an RBZ file for easier install, the color picker now has both RGB and HSV modes and added support for setting per-Channel output formats.

Industrial Light & Magic ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks have released their geometry caching format Alembic 1.5. The popular open source tool now includes new support for multi-threading which results in significant performance and efficiency improvements for all users.

Sharing files with embedded animations just got a lot easier.

NewTec Inc. has pre-released its new time-based application for sculpting and modifying animation caches in VFX and feature animation pipelines called ChronoScuplt.

ChronoSculpt is a powerful new stand-alone application that revolutionizes working with animation and dynamic simulation cache files from any application. ChronoSculpt also introduces a radical new geometry engine based on their “Hydra” technology which "allows the deformation and manipulation of 8 to 10 million polygon objects with ease."

Read on to see ChronoSculpt in action at SigGraph 2013.