Monday, March 29, 2010

Bing Maps: Wow

Bing Maps is making some really incredible advances with augmented reality. Check out this video by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at TED Talks.

(Thanks to Niall Martin of Compu b in Cork City for sending the link)



Before you check out this next video on "Photosynth" make sure you have newspapers spread out around the room to clean up after your mind explodes...



Some people question the usefulness of this technology.. That fact is even more mind-boggling.. This technology could make Google Earth modelling easier by allowing photos to be synthesised... Some lessons there for Google... ;)

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Keeping your model on the straight and narrow.

Have you ever been frustrated with SketchUp enough to call it all sorts of names you couldn't repeat in polite company? Go on, admit it... We've all been there.

One of the biggest problems people come across is when you are doing a model that needs to be straight, right angled (orthogonal) like a building or product etc. It is so easy to draw a line out of place and end up with a model that looks right but the push-pull tool just won't work for you. SketchUp is quite unforgiving when the lines are not straight or co-planar.

A great way of pre-empting this problem is to use the "colour by axis" line setting in the Styles browser.

From SketchUp Tips


Save this setting in a Style (call it "axis" style and save this in your drawing template- better again, save this style into a scene called "axis" that has the "include in animation" button switched off.... This turns the scene button into a kind of reset button for the axis.)