Google Demo Slam is a little piece of tech we put together to help people wrap their heads around all the cool/useful stuff that Google offers. It’s the perfect way to wake up after stuffing yourself with Thanksgiving turkey.
Here’s a SketchUp Demo Slam by DIY filmmaker Erik Beck of Indy Mogul:
Want to join in? Make your own Demo Slam and help us spread the SketchUp love.
There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you—I pointed to this work in the introduction to our SketchUpdate newsletter a few months ago, but I’ve never mentioned it on this blog. A glaring omission, I realize.
ixlrlxi (I don’t even know his real name) is a Russian concept artist who likes to model retro-futuristic-looking vehicles in SketchUp and render them with V-Ray. They are, in a word, mouth-watering. Here’s a sample of what you’ll see when you do yourself a favor and visit this thread on conceptart.org:
Scroll to the bottom of the thread for an amazing tutorial about ixlrlxi’s process.
Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist
This past summer, Supermodeler Arkadiusz Pawlowski (a.k.a. Arek, a.k.a. aroo) decided to hold a SketchUp workshop for students at the Nicolas Copernicus University of Toruń. He partnered with fellow Toruń alumni Radoslaw Golba to teach the course. I asked him a few questions about the experience:
Arek alongside the workshop participantsWhy did you decide to hold a workshop?
It was like an impulse I had on my way back from the 2010 Google Mapper and Modeler Summit held in Zurich. I came to the conclusion that it would be a good thing to organize classes for students to teach them what I knew about geo-modeling with SketchUp.
So the purpose of the workshop was to teach students how to geo-model?
Yes, but I also wanted to increase the students’ knowledge of modeling tools and have them practice visualizing objects in a digital 3D form. I encouraged them to work independently and to further develop the skills that they could use beyond geo-modeling.
Workshop in sessionWhat was the schedule like for the workshop?
Since most of the students had never used SketchUp before, the first day of the workshop was used to let them familiarize themselves with the program. On the second day, students went out to collect photographs of selected buildings, and then later edited the images to make textures for the model. The third day of the workshop was for actually modeling the buildings in SketchUp and then texturing them with the previous day’s photos. All of the complete models are in a collection on the 3D Warehouse.
The workshop was also supported by the Department of Cartography, Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems of University of Toruń, who handed out certificates to participants at the end of the workshop… and Google provided t-shirts. 🙂
Workshop participants sporting awesome Google shirtsSee more photos of Arek’s workshop, and download the placemarks of all the buildings created in the workshop, then view the models in Google Earth.
