sketchUcation

June update; 20 new 3D trees, 135 new 2D trees/plants, 50 new outdoor light fixtures, 70 furniture and interior items and more.

Podium Browser provides thousands of render ready components such as light fixtures, furnishings, plants and materials from a web server directly to SketchUp. The content will be downloaded directly into your model and is ready to be photo-realistically rendered by SU Podium. You simply click on a thumbnail in the Browser to drop content into your SketchUp model. When rendering with SU Podium, it will appear in your image as a photo-realistic object without any additional preparation.

Thea Presto is a new render engine that has been written bottom-up, from scratch, and runs entirely on your graphics card processor. The engine has been especially tuned for fast interactive rendering and pushes GPU computing to the limits, while keeping the high photorealistic quality of Thea Render.

Presto is a unique GPU engine and it is based on Nvidia CUDA, which means that a compatible graphic card is needed to run it. It also supports Multiple GPUs (for normal Darkroom rendering) and co-operative render­ing over the network. All the CUDA supporting cards can be used.

gTools is a suite of software tools which were developed to simplify the process of performing accurate energy analysis using Sketchup models. Our on-line gTools work together to provide you with an easy-to-use rapid workflow or can be used individually to achieve tasks.

There are many key features our toolset provides, such as the ability to autosurface models, and import/export the resultant gbXML which in turn supports interoperability with 3D tools such as Sketchup, Revit, Archicad etc. The gTools suite is OS, device and application-agnostic.

Thea Presto is a new engine for Thea Render, written from scratch, that uses the same characteristics and material/lighting system such as Thea itself. It is running entirely on the GPU and it is based on Nvidia CUDA video cards.

One thing that is impressive about Thea Presto is its interactiveness that makes it fun to work with. It is ideal for rendering quick stills and animations, particularly for product design and exteriors.

Find out more about Thea Presto's features below.

Chaos Group LLC in Baltimore, Maryland, USA is now hiring

SketchUp Modeling and Rendering Artist:
Chaos Group is looking for an experienced SketchUp modeler and rendering artist to join our team in Baltimore, Maryland. This person will test current development software, provide technical assistance, promote, demonstrate, and encourage V-Ray for SketchUp users to take full advantage of our software features.

Click here further information

The products of SU Podium; SU Podium V2 (with Podium Browser), Podium Walker, Viso3D, SU Animate and SU Walk now have installation version that support SketchUp 2013 for Windows and Mac.

If you have or are upgrading your SketchUp to SU 2013, go to the Free Trial page and download the plug-in and the version you need and reinstall. You will need to reactivate your license after installing for SketchUp 2013.

SU Podium will also release SU Podium Plus soon - which will be a free upgrade for all SU Podium V2 users.

After 3.5 years, tomorrow - June 1 - Building Maker is retiring, surrendering to the new, 45 degree imagery on Google Maps and Google Earth. Building Maker was introduced in October, 2009, and was first not very welcome by the geomodelling community as the automated process was fast but resulted in very poor models. Later, it was possible to re-import Building Maker models into SketchUp and finalize them there - a huge step forward to quality buildings. In SketchUp 8, Building Maker was already integrated into the software so one did not even need to leave SketchUp to access its features and immediately import the model for further tweaking.

Well, it was just a few months ago when we reached membership 180,000. Today we have reached 190,000 and membership is constantly growing at a speeding pace. The next milestone should be some time around late July with 200,000 members (although we usually experience a bit of drop during Summer). Anyway, we'll see.

Until then, let's get back to work to make the site even better and more appealing to "not-yet-members"!

Andrew Walters (AWPelion) is offering SketchUp training courses from his studio in the South Pelion region of Greece.

Andrew is a UK registered architect who's been using SketchUp for several years, In addition to using it for architectural design, he uses SketchUp to design boats, cars and for illustration purposes.

He aims to keep the courses on a one-to-one basis, or for small groups, although, given sufficient notice, he can accommodate larger groups at a local hotel that has conference facilities.

CGTextures reached a major milestone this week: there are now over 100,000 textures online! To celebrate the 100,000th texture all download quotas are doubled for the next 7 days (until the 5th of June). This means that a member with a free account can now download 30Mb a day! It's truly a lot of Mb's - although to be honest, I have never exceeded my daily quota with the lower downloads either.

CGTextures is one of the largest collection of textures on the Internet. Many textures are tiling while others are not but the great selection makes it a perfect place to find almost anything you need.