SketchUp: The New England Aquarium

April Phelps is a LEED-accredited designer who works at the New England Aquarium creating new exhibits and enhancing existing ones. Boston’s New England Aquarium is one of the many non-profit organizations to which we’ve granted SketchUp Pro licenses as part of the SketchUp for Nonprofits program.

SketchUp Pro has been a big help to us in the New England Aquarium Design Department. The Aquarium was founded in 1969 and attracts over 1.3 million visitors a year to our waterfront location. Recently the Aquarium’s capital improvement plan called for a complete renovation of our changing exhibits space, and we decided to part with the Aquarium’s traditional design aesthetic and embark on a new path.

Families touching the rays in our new shark and ray touch tank exhibit

 

The newly completed exhibit we designed in SketchUp Pro is called The Trust Family Foundation Shark and Ray Touch Tank. It features sharks and rays in a mangrove-themed tank surrounded by shallow edges and viewing windows, allowing visitors to experience a close encounter with these animals.

The exhibit presents these incredible species in a way that highlights their importance in a healthy ocean ecosystem. It also emphasizes the value of conserving essential coastal habitats, such as mangroves and lagoons. During evening hours the new space is also used as an event venue for private functions.

View from the entrance of the shark and ray touch tank. On top is our design phase
rendering; below is an opening day photograph.

 

The Aquarium provides unique challenges for designers. We have a variety of internal clients with different needs, and we need a modeling program that works quickly and accurately to convey our ideas. SketchUp’s quick modeling capabilities provided me the extra time needed to explore multiple design options on this project.

SketchUp also enabled our design team to give everyone at the Aquarium a sense of the new exhibit’s aesthetics quickly and easily. In addition to quickly creating renderings, we imported actual material samples into our models. This allowed staff and visitors to get a sense of scale and of how significant the interaction with animals would be.

View from inside the exhibit towards the Lagoon and Cassiopeia tanks. Above is
our design phase rendering; below is an opening day photograph.

 

Our traditional design aesthetic for the Main Building is to make the visitor feel like they are submerged underwater, looking through portals to all the fish. The new exhibit needed to be airy and bright, allowing visitors to feel that they are no longer submerged but at the beach level interacting with the animals. To achieve this we revealed the once covered up skylights and installed a significant amount of energy efficient lighting. With natural and artificial lighting we simulated the feeling of wading around a beach touching sharks and rays.

View of The Trust Family Foundation Shark and Ray Touch Tank Gift Shop. The top image is our design phase rendering; below it is an opening day photograph.

 

This “no surprises” methodology allowed us to receive design input from different departments quickly. Given our very tight schedule and lack of resources, it proved to be most helpful. We’re excited to continue to use SketchUp Pro on future projects and renovations at the New England Aquarium.

SketchUp: 3D modeling party in Serbia

Supermodeler Zeljko Zdravkovic, known as zexland on the 3D Warehouse, recently hosted a modeling party in Belgrade, Serbia. A modeling party is a workshop/conference hybrid designed to bring people from around the community to learn about geo-modeling and make models of a specific area. Zeljko invited both experienced modelers and soon-to-be modelers from cities all around Serbia: Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, Arandjelovac, Pančevo, Paraćin, Zaječar, Obrenovac, Valjevo, Bačka Palanka, Kosovska Mitrovica, Ćuprija and Jagodina!

People from all around Serbia attended the event in Belgrade.
 


 
Two other talented modelers also made the trek from their respective homelands to share their modeling insights with the group, Bruno Redureau from France (3DCité) and Mano Papanikolaou from Greece (}-M@No->).

The first day of the event was spent covering the basics, but the real fun started on the second day when we took a tour of the city and specifically of Skadarlija, the bohemian district of Belgrade. Here you find many small shops and restaurants on the cobblestone streets are made up of watermelon-sized rocks. We took photos of the area to use later to create photo textures for future models.

Ironically, Bruno from France was the first to complete a model in Skadarlija! (“Restaurant Zlatni Bokal”)

Stevan Suklovacki from Belgrade takes the lead, however, with two models already created!(“Stambeni objekat u Skadarskoj ulici” & “Zgrada u Skadarskoj ulici”)

In addition to learning modeling techniques and asking questions, the group shared stories with each other about their own geo-modeling projects, all the while sampling delicious Serbian finger-food. Fellow Serbians were able to meet one another in person, and put a face to a 3D Warehouse name.

Ready to model!

Srdjan Vidakovic, an avid Google Map Maker and Panoramio user, helped document the second day’s activities. View more photos of the event and watch Belgrade grow in 3D.

If you’re interested in having a modeling event in your town too, find out how and email us at yourworldin3d@google.com.

Google Creativity: Join us at Maker Faire

 


 
 
Creativity at Google isn’t just limited to the time we spend in front of our keyboards—many of us are also enthusiastic about making things with our hands. At our Google Workshops, for example, employees have the chance to use sophisticated tools and machines to physically prototype their ideas. The Street View trike and several components of our self-driving cars were built in these workshops. It’s also not unheard of for Googlers to build their own zip-lines, perform crazy experiments with giant lenses and just get plain silly.

This weekend, we hope to bring this spirit of creativity and experimentation to attendees of Maker Faire Bay Area, whose mission is to “celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset.”

Our own Maker Faire theme is simple: “Dream, design, build. Repeat.” At the event, we’ll demonstrate how Google technologies, like SketchUp and the Android Accessory Development Kit (ADK), can help you take your project from idea to object.

Design of our booth made in SketchUp

In keeping with the DIY vibe, our booth was constructed three full-size recycled shipping containers and outfitted with big screen TVs, 3D printers, CNC cutters and, most importantly—robots! Folks from the Google SketchUp team and the newly-formed Cloud Robotics team will be on hand to walk you through the steps of of designing, fabricating, building and programming your own robot.

SKPR Bot

Our booth will also have demos, games, giveaways, hands-on activities for both kids and adults and talks from folks like MAKE Editor-in-Chief Mark Frauenfelder. And to top it off, we’ll open Maker Faire each morning with an Android-powered weather balloon launch at 10:00 am PDT (weather permitting).

See our Google at Maker Faire site for a full schedule of Google events, and make sure to follow @sketchup on Twitter for updates throughout the weekend.