Animate your SketchUp models

In the past five years since Google purchased SketchUp (and then made it free), we’ve seen it receive a ton of improvements. Last fall saw the release of SketchUp 8, which added a bunch of great new features, and last month they released another update that provided SpaceNavigator support and a very helpful bug fix.

Despite all of that, there is still one feature missing that users are wanting — animation. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to animate your models from within SketchUp? Thanks to developer MorisDov and his “Proper Animation” plugin, now you can!

Check out the video below for a brief sample:

The plugin works by allowing you to create various positions for your model, and then those model moves to those various positions, creating the animation. It’s a very useful plugin, and I’m sure many SketchUp modelers will be thankful to MorisDov for creating it.

To get started, head over to his site, read this SketchUcation thread, or head over to the Google SketchUp Blog for a nice walk-through.

Have you tried this plug-in yet? What do you think of it?

SketchUp 8: Full Building Maker Integration

We have just fallen in love with Google SketchUp all over again, we are slightly late to the table on this one but Google Building Maker is now fully integrated into SketchUp 8. It has the genius ofCanoma with the addition of all the editing functions that come with SketchUp and its free:

Combine this with the free version of Unity and you have a very powerful toolset. Talking of which, we have just downloaded Unity 3.0 to further develop our agent based modelling exhibition space, its good to be back….

Building Maker: 109 cities and counting

Today’s Google Building Maker imagery update is our last one for 2010 – you can now use our purpose-built geo-modeling tool in any of 109 cities around the world. We’ve just released imagery for:

  • Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
  • Oslo, Norway
  • The Hague, The Netherlands
San Antonio, Texas is one of the newest additions to Building Maker.

We also greatly expanded the coverage areas for San Diego, California and Portland, Oregon. And in case you missed the update two weeks ago, we also released imagery for:

  • San Antonio, Texas
  • Tucson, Arizona
  • Norfolk, Virginia
  • Salt Lake City, Utah
Norfolk, Virginia is itchin’ to be modeled.

Still waiting for your city to be added to Building Maker? You can request it; in the meantime, try modeling in one of these new cities to help get them on the 3D map.