Polantis - 3D catalog technology - free models..

Just found this interesting site called Polantis. They have a selection of 3D models with various manufacturers models too. You need to register with them but the models are all free and in a selection of different file formats. Check it out and see what you think of them...see here.

FormFonts© Render Ready (TM) Content Now Available...

orm Fonts© and Twilight Render Photorealistic Plugin for SketchUp have just announced that they are getting together to provide you with content that is 'Render Ready '. What a cool idea! This is what they say....
"Render Ready content has the materials pre-set for you. When you insert the Render ReadyTM content from Form Fonts©, you can simply hit the render button with Twilight Render... no fuss!"
Check out the full new Front Page Story here 

This will certainly simplify the process and speed our work flow up without to much effort! Great idea guys...

With the impending release of Photoshop CS5 check this new feature out..

Check this article out by Mike Jennings of PC Pro, on the new Content-Aware Fill feature in the up and coming Photoshop CS5. Look at the video first to see it in action.


What a time saver and pretty impressive...see the full article here

IES Light Tutorial with 3ds Max workflow...useful lesson

Atul Dravid teaches you how to use IES files in your scenes. You need to have a basic understanding of 3ds Max workflow and at least one IES file with you to complete this tutorial.

 Basic Scene Layout

You can see the full tutorial here, and it may help you in understanding the concept of using IES lights in one of our other lighting tutorials you can see here called IES Light Tutorial using V-Ray for SketchUp by  Nomeradona.

Twilight Render announces its latest release ver 1.3

TwilightRender announced their latest version of the rendering plugin for Google SketchUp, providing new tools for selecting and positioning lights, automatic image saving, better animation and much more!  See here.

Another great tutorial by Architect and Author Jim Leggitt

Drawing Aerial Perspectives With SketchUp - This tutorial demonstrates the way to draw a quick aerial perspective from a site plan. What Jim does is construct a simple SketchUp massing model, establish an aerial view and then trace the perspective from a print of the scene. See the full tutorial here...

New Tutorial - 'The River Runs Through It' by Jacques Cleghorn

 

Another new tutorial by Jacques Cleghorn 'The River Runs Through It ' In this model Jacques pushes SketchUp to the limit again. Jacques says " It was a really amazing modeling adventure and to Google the developers, I hope you guys see this and realize there are some people out there that use  SketchUp for more than just block modeling, please allow more poly models into your new releases and for those who have just started work using SketchUp, hang in there, this is an amazing program ! "   Full tutorial here, you won't be disappointed!

Thea Render is finally available - Monday night or Tuesday early hours..

"Now, the exact launch time will be Monday night or even Tuesday early hours, GT time. So, if you are impatient (or live in... Australia), it is better to check around Tuesday noon" states Ioannis Pantazopoulos, Thea developer. Its been two years in development and now you will be able to test and evaluate their beta version and see what they have been up to all this time. They say  "you won't be disappointed". Here is the homepage and we should be able to get our hands on it shortly!

Design 3D and 2D floor plans using your browser..

Why not try Autodesk's Project Dragonfly? Looks interesting for 2D printouts and the exported drawings are compatible with Autocad 2007 and higher. Might be worth looking at. There is no software download as well and its free...nice
See here...

3DVIA..whats it all about?

'Whether you're a game developer, industry professional or simply a 3D enthusiast, turn any concept into lifelike 3D fast and easy with 3DVIA's product offerings. Find the software that best fits your needs in our suite of consumer and professional products'..that is what they are saying. Seems to be a host of great looking free 3D software that can pretty much do anything...must check this out, and you folks do the same and comment here ASAP!  Here is the link to their site...there seems to be everything you can imagine.

Another great tutorial by our friend Nomeradona...IES Lights

The latest version of V-ray for SketchUp (ver. 1.48.66) has the new added feature of IES Lights and Spotlights. V-Ray works within the SketchUp environment allowing users to be able to efficiently incorporate the task of rendering within their current workflow. In this simple tutorial Nomeradona shows you how to set up three basic pin lights to achieve some convincing and effective lighting in your image.

Final Image 

See the full tutorial here and learn some some new ideas and tricks..

New Tutorial - SketchUp >TwilightRender > Photoshop!

We have a new tutorial by Ibon Enriquez, an architectural student from San Sebastian in northern Spain. This unique detailed tutorial will get from the basic SketchUp model to a great final rendered image. Software used is Google SketchUp, TwilightRender and Photoshop.

From Basic 3D Model

 

To This Final Image

Don't miss out on this great tutorial, see the full text and images here....

New update for Maxwell Render v2 available now!

Loads of new features and bug fixes for all you Maxwell users..see here!

pushpullbar are back in business!!

After some time of reorganizing and updating their site 'pushpullbar' are back with us and online. You will notice too that they are no longer called pushpullbar2 either and have reverted back to their original name. The frontpage looks great and very refreshing and we look forward to more of their great content.

Well done guys! Don't miss out..visit the new pushpullbar site here...

Some down time today...

We experienced some down time today on SketchUpArtists, due to increased traffic ( good complaint!) and we had to reset things to cater for this. All seems well now and we are up and running again. So we would like to this opportunity apologize for the inconvenience to our regular visitors and readers of SketchUpArtists. We will keep monitoring the situation over the next few hours, but hopefully it should be fine now..

The second official 2.5 testing build of Blender is released

Blender 2.5 Alpha 2 is the second official 2.5 testing build from the Blender Foundation and has just been released. Read more and get the free download here...

List of free and inexpensive CAD software

A list of free and cheap cad software put together by Peter Eland. As Peter says.."This page is devoted to free or cheap Computer Aided Design software. It ain't pretty, but I hope it's useful!"...  We certainly think it is. See the list here.