SketchUp: U.S. Green Building Council’s headquarters

 

You could call our friends at Igloo Studios “multi-taskers”. While they mainly concentrate on creating products and plugins for designers and architects, they also have a podcast, a SketchUp training program and a popular book.

Their latest project is a virtual tour of the U.S. Green Building Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Note: you’ll need the Google Earth plugin installed to view).

This project is cool for lots of reasons. For starters, USGBC’s 75,000-square-foot facility is loaded with efficient and innovative green features that have earned the building a LEED Platinum rating. Professionals regularly tour the USGBC for real-world examples of successful green practices.

 

However, not everyone has the luxury of being able to visit Washington DC, so Igloo Studios built this one-of-a-kind Google Earth tour of the building. Using a custom instance of the Google Earth plugin and building product catalogs from the 3D Warehouse, Igloo was able to create a tour of both the exterior and interior of the building! 

As you navigate through the 3D building, you’ll notice it’s jam-packed with other goodies like a guided audio tour, photos and embedded videos. You can even click on the building’s materials and products to learn more about the green tech used in its construction.Once you finish the tour, you can launch a test that will earn you the same continuing education credits that you would get for taking the live tour.

And the coolest feature of all: if you find a building product during the tour that might be useful in one of your projects, you can download it directly into your SketchUp design!

 

Learn about building materials and then bring them into your model 

If you’re interested in learning more about how your products or buildings can be visualized in this way.

Massive artwork in Google Earth

 

Over the past 13 years sculptor Andrew Rogers, with the help of over 6,700 volunteers, has created 47 structures in 13 different countries.

 

rhythms.jpg 

The structures are large enough to be seen using Google Earth, which is why Andrew put together a Google Earth tour to show them all off. You can download the tour here and see all of his great works of art. One great feature of the tour is that it is designed to automatically switch to historical imagery when it provides a better view of the art work, showing each piece off in the best possible imagery.

Google Earth: Le Tour de France

The 2011 Tour de France has recently gotten underway, and Cycling the Alps has built some fun tools to help you see the conditions that the riders are up against.

We’ve shown you some of their work in the past, such as the great games that they added to the site earlier this year. Now they’ve combined that technology with the Tour de France and the result is quite cool.

paris.jpg

They’ve gone through and created 3D tours, Streetview tours, profiles and games for every leg of the race. It’s quite an impressive list. Here are a few of the highlights to look for:

Stage 8

There are two stages in the Massif Central which are going to be very challenging, including the last two climbs in this stage: Col de la croix Saint Robert and Super-Besse Sancy.

Stage 12

In the Pyrenees and the climbs of this stage are epic. The Tourmalet is the most famous one but Luz-Ardiden gets a lot of attention in the media as well.

Stage 14

Stage 14 in the Pyrenees is probably the most difficult stage in the race, with six significant climbs.

Stage 18

This years tour is celebrating 100 years of high mountain stages, and every race featured a climb of the Col du Galibier. This year they’ll be climbing the pass two times; once from each side. In stage 18 they will even finish on the Galibier. This is the highest stage finish in the history of the Tour de France.

Stage 19

The next day they will climb the Col du Galibier from the other side, and all three climbs on the 19th stage are legendary.

There’s an amazing amount of info on this site about the Tour, and the games make it fun to ride around on each stage. Congrats to the CTA team for putting this all together.