catchup edition 4

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SKETCHUP LAYOUT STYLEBUILDER EARTH Catchup EDITION 4 SKETCHUCATION COMMUNITY NEWS Lumion Update / Keyframe Animation / Interior Design / Boo’s Clues / Gadgets / Useful Apps / Featured Member / Be3D Mouse

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Page 1: CatchUp Edition 4

SKETCHUP LAYOUT STYLEBUILDER EARTH

CatchupEDITION 4

SKETCHUCATION COMMUNITY NEWS

Lum

ion U

pdat

e /

Key

fram

e Anim

ation

/

Inte

rior D

esign

/

Boo’s

Clue

s /

Ga

dget

s /

Us

eful A

pps

/

Feat

ured

Mem

ber

/ B

e3D

Mou

se

Page 3: CatchUp Edition 4

On the cover: Clapper courtesy of Rich O’Brien

Editor: Richard O’Brien

Management

Mike Lucey - Managing Director

Csaba Pozsarko - Training Director

Octavian Chis- Technical Director

Richard O’Brien - Quality Director

Moderators

Pete Stoppel

Chris Fullmer

Dave Richards

Eric Lay

TIG

Thomas Thomassen

Jean Lemire

Jim Foltz

Eeva

Edson Mahfuz

Majid

Contributors

Eric Lay

Mike Lucey

Andrew Gowland

Adriana Granados

Csaba Pozsarko

Dennis Fukai

Richard O’Brien

Connect with us

Page 4: CatchUp Edition 4

BOO’S CLUESlambada table

• To start create a couple of reference

planes with lines to represent equal

angles. Use either the circle or

polygon tool with 8 segments.

• With exact dimensions not known,

approximations have to be used.

Create a leg between the two

reference planes centered on the

axis, this is important.

• Then rotate the leg about the center

of the reference plane by 22.5° to

align the leg at a segments center.

• In this step use the move tool, hover

over the leg component and used the

plus sign to rotate the leg about the

center by 22.5 degrees.

Page 5: CatchUp Edition 4

BOO’S CLUESlambada table

• Next remove exactly half of the leg,

leaving it open (not closing in the face)

as seen in this image.

• Now mirror the component on

axis using the TIG’s Mirror.rb

Plugin.

• Explode both leg ends and make

them a single component. Push/Pull

the bottom ends so they both match

up at a single point.

• Now edit the leg component and

intersect everything inside and

erase the unwanted geometry.

This will leave a “V” shaped shell

of sorts.

Page 6: CatchUp Edition 4

BOO’S CLUESlambada table

• Finally, to finish out the leg assembly

geometry create an intersect plane

between the front and back points as

shown here.

• Then intersect the geometry and

erase the unwanted geometry

leaving two simple triangles at the

base of the leg assembly.

• Copy the leg assembly about the

center of the reference plane using

the rotate tool. Hold down Ctrl

(Windows) and copy/rotate 3x.

• Now copy all four leg assemblies up

above the ones below.

Page 7: CatchUp Edition 4

BOO’S CLUESlambada table

• Mirror the top four leg assemblies in

the vertical direction so they are facing

upwards.

• Rotate the top four leg assemblies by

45 degrees and lower (or raise) them to

match up with the lower ones.

• Edit one of the leg assembly components

and run the Subdivide and Smooth

command in the Artisan Tool set. This

example used 3 iterations to make a very

smooth mesh.

• Edit the leg assembly component and

add a “foot” for stabilization at the floor

and holding the glass table top. Make

sure it extends past the bottom of the

leg just a bit, 1/16” in this example.

Page 8: CatchUp Edition 4

BOO’S CLUESlambada table

• Now select all 8 of the leg assembly

components and scale them about the

Blue axis center to touch both the top and

bottom reference planes.

• Finally, delete the

reference planes,

color the legs as you

see fit and add a

glass top.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED....

Artisan Subdivide and Smooth

Mirror

FredoScale

RoundCorner

Page 10: CatchUp Edition 4

Some of you may be familiar ruby guru Regular Polygon and his range of bespoke plugins from ‘Ellipse’ to ‘Sierpinski Tetrahedron’ . But one particular plugin caught my eye recently so I decided to make use of the 10 day trial to see how it measured up against it’s rivals.

‘Keyframe Animation’ is Regular Polygon’s only commercial script and currently at version 1.4.1. Priced at an introductory $19 you can download via his blog here.

It requires Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OS X 10.4+ to run and Google SketchUp 7 or 8 Pro/Free. It’s packaged as an installer so no fiddling around with shifting files and folders into your plugins folder. Once installed it adds a toolbar and some extra features in the plugins menu.

The toolbar itself performs the bulk of the tasks with the menu items allowing for further refinement to your animations. Nothing particulary groundbreaking so far but like alot of plugins it’s got hidden treasures!

So what exactly do these buttons do? Well, simply put, they allow you to move and rotate objects using native tools and record that transformation. You can then play your animation and, as if by magic, see your objects go through a series of movements. It really is very easy to get to grips with.

Let’s take a look at a typical workflow for some basic animations. First up you’ll need to create some scenes. Once created you can select your ‘Group/Component’ and record it’s position via the toolbar button. Select your next scene and move or rotate your object and record it’s position again. You can repeat this over numerous scenes and objects.

Having everything ready you can now initiate the animation as you you would with any SketchUp scenes. You might be wondering what the purpose of the ‘Play’ and ‘Stop’ icons on the toolbar are for? Well these actually turn off and on Keyframe Animation. With it set to ‘off ’ you see no objects move when you play the animation. A handy feature if you just want to tweak camera locations between scenes.

What is worth noting is how these animation transformations actually work. If you move an object between scenes then the movement occurs in a straight line between point ‘a’ and point ‘b’. If you rotate an object between scenes then the rotation is in the direction of the smaller angle. For instance, you can’t rotate an object 200° because the smaller is 160°.

Under the ‘Plugins’ menu you can tweak further your animated objects via ‘Transition Times’.

This allows you to set the time that each object will take to move or rotate between scenes. But by entering a negative value, as shown above, will use the default transition time that can be set under Model Info. It gives you very subtle control over each transformation and helps you build much better sequences.

KEYFRAME ANIMATIONreview

Page 11: CatchUp Edition 4

Download Here

To build on the level of control you can also set the ‘Delay Time’ for each scene. For example, I could have an object move upwards between scene 1 and scene 2 but delay it’s animation for a defined time. So I’m basically pausing the scene transitions and stopping the animation momentarily.

As you can tell so far this is all very easy to get to grips with. In minutes you’ve objects moving and rotating and changing the speed and start time at which these happen.

Next up, is getting your animations exported. ‘Keyframe Animation’ has a very powerful feature called ‘Tweens’. For those, unfamiliar with the term ‘tween’, it’s basically ‘in between frames’ . Because SketchUp doesn’t export animations Regular Polygon has tackled this issue by looking at each

transformation and creating a series of scenes between each. These ‘tweens’ are based on the Frames Per Second you input, so the higher the FPS the higher amount of scenes created.

It’s a clever way of handling the export to video conundrum. Also creating ‘tweens’ results in a separate .skp file being created that is suffixed with ‘.tweens’ so as not the interfere with your own file.

Obviously, having lots of transformations occuring over a longish period at a high frame rate will result in a hell of a lot of tween scenes! So do your homework beforehand and work in manageable batches. You can always compile these exported videos in something like Virtual Dub afterwards.

There are other animation plug-ins out there...

• Mover• Proper Animation

But neither compile everything under one roof. It’s clear that Mover blazed the trail for ‘Keyframe Animation’. But this is the complete article giving you great control and output.

It’s a great addition to SketchUp and I’m sure users and clients would benefit from seeing their projects come to life before their eyes. It’s fun and easy to use yet extremely powerful. It’s also compatible with Twilight Render so you can get that Photorealistic output easily and quickly.

Overall, it’s a blockbuster!by Rich O’Brien

KEYFRAME ANIMATIONreview

Page 12: CatchUp Edition 4

Recently I was having dinner in a nice Italian restaurant with a neo-classic decoration. A few walls had shell niches that exhibited wonderful sculptures. These niches were exedras - a semicircular recess inside the wall.

The word Niche derives from the Latin nidus or nest. The Italian nicchio for a sea-shell may also be involved, as the traditional decoration for the top of a niche is a scallop shell. I recall a nice piece of art of Filippo Lippi - Madonna - where the trompe-l’oeil niche frames her.

I thought it could be a very good example to apply the Extrude tools plugin developed by TIG. You will also need another plugin by Rick Wilson called Weld available from Smustard. com.

Once you have downloaded both tools follow the instructions how to install them. These tools are a must-to-have for interior designers.

After analyzing the geometry I decided that the option to use was “Extrude Edges by Rails.” I had organic forms with double curvature, the front arcs and two curved paths converging at the rear of the exedra.

Draw two 12 segment semi-circles, with a 2’ diameter, as shown

above. Use SketchUp’s inferencing to align to the ground plane

and to the Z-axis.

Draw a third arc using the same setting but offset by 2” .

INTERIOR DESIGNhow to create a shell niche

Page 13: CatchUp Edition 4

Explode the inner arc and then divide a segment into 6

segments using the right-click ‘Divide’ command

Divide the lower semi-circle in half and the upper semi-circle

as above using the line tool.

INTERIOR DESIGNhow to create a shell niche

Page 14: CatchUp Edition 4

Using the arc tool, draw 3 curves similar to what you can see

here. The divided segment can be used as a guide to centre the

outer arc and align the inner arcs.

With the select tool, select the lower radius. Then using the

rotate tool +CTRL make a copy and position as seen here.

INTERIOR DESIGNhow to create a shell niche

Page 15: CatchUp Edition 4

Select your new radius and copy it as before using the rotate

tool.

Using the circle tool, draw a 24 segment circle at the centre and

inference the endpoint you see here

INTERIOR DESIGNhow to create a shell niche

Page 16: CatchUp Edition 4

Using the arc tool, make a small arc and move a copy along the

red axis to intersect the rails.

Delete all unwanted geometry leaving behind what you see

here. This will form the base on which we’ll assemble the shell

niche.

INTERIOR DESIGNhow to create a shell niche

Page 17: CatchUp Edition 4

Using Rick Wilson’s Weld plugin, weld the three arcs into one

curve.

Using TIG’s Extrude Edges by Rails plugin, select the curves as

above to form the first part of our shell niche. In the dialogue

boxes that appear choose to Reverse Faces, Erase Co-Planar

Edges, smoth Edges and Erase Original Curves.

INTERIOR DESIGNhow to create a shell niche

Page 18: CatchUp Edition 4

Now array copies of this using the rotate tool as before. If file

size is important then turn the group into a component before

arraying.

Finally, intersect your shell with the upper arc and delete any

unwanted geometry. Here you can see the remaining parts

before final assembly. The centre wedge was arrayed to create

a decorative fan.

INTERIOR DESIGNhow to create a shell niche

Page 19: CatchUp Edition 4

Here’s the final assembled model with extra details to frame

the scene. The Follow Me tool helped create the molding and

the 3DWarehouse provided the ‘David’ statue.

A quick a simple technique like this can make your interior

design projects standout! by Adriana Granados

INTERIOR DESIGNhow to create a shell niche

Page 20: CatchUp Edition 4

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

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FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 22: CatchUp Edition 4

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 23: CatchUp Edition 4

I was introduced to SketchUp back at version 3, having worked with a few ordinary 2d and 3d programmes (autosketch, turbocad 3d, bryce, drawing express etc.) I found SketchUp’s ease of use very gratifying. Since then I have managed to use SketchUp occasionally in my professional career, producing arch-viz and pre-viz for various projects. It wasn’t until I was made redundant and decided to go self-employed that I decided to try and integrate it into my work more often.

Self-employment (and the inevitable gaps in work which come from the first few years of a startup) allowed me to experiment, expand my skills and learn SketchUp. My discovery of Kerkythea as a free rendering solution coincided with this, suddenly what I was creating became a different beast. It took a few failed attempts to start to understand Kerkythea, but I used three personal projects as training.

The first was an image I created for inclusion in the Society of Architectural Illustrators quarterly newsletter. I took an old sketchup model of a barn extension and started prepping it for Kerkythea. It took several weeks, on and off, to get the final image

right. The Kerkythea forums were an invaluable source of advice and help. The second image was purely about creating realism, So I created a very simple model of a glass and spent an age in Kerkythea and on the forums, perfecting the lighting and materials. eventually getting an image I was happy with. The third image was the Steampunk raygun, again lots of advice on the kerkythea forums helped me to get it to a point I was relatively happy with.

A steampunk mobile phone is something I’ve had in my head for a while, but it wasn’t until I finished the raygun that I decided to have a crack at it. I didn’t want this to be usual steampunk fare with cogs and visible mechanisms though. I felt this should be more a Victorian realisation of a mobile phone, which could be treated as an heirloom and a fob watch.

I started with the dimensions of my phone at the time, a Nokia N95 8GB weighing in at 45mm x 95mm, and proceeded to create a clamshell design which opened on the longest edge. I created a box and used the ‘bevel edges’ plugin to give all the edges a rounded look.

“each image rendered for about 24 hours....my PC is quite old!”

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 24: CatchUp Edition 4

Fig.2 Anisotropic Layer

Very early on, I started doing some material tests in Kerkythea. I wanted to see if I could create a silver material which looked aged, tarnished and imperfect. I started with the Silver found in the metals_ashikhmin_mlt library found at the kerkythea website (fig. 1). This is a perfectly flat and reflective material which looks unrealistic in these circumstances. There were three different elements that I knew this material would need in order to make it more realistic.

Fig.1 Assigning metal material in Kerkythea

• The silver should be tarnished with uneven reflections• The surface should be very slightly uneven• The surface should be covered with micro scratchesNothing was done to the Anisotropic layer (fig.2), the tarnished look was achieved using the windy procedural texture in the specular slot of the Matte/Phong layer (fig.3).

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 25: CatchUp Edition 4

Fig.4

Fig.3 Matte/Phong Layer

In order to achieve the slightly undulating surface I used the windy procedural again, this time scaled slightly larger with a minimal strength, I wanted this to be barely noticeable, giving the metal the appearance of not being perfectly flat (fig.4).

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 26: CatchUp Edition 4

For the micro scratches I started with a base image of some scratched metal, and manipulated it in GIMP, making it more monochrome, and seamlessly tiling it to ensure no edge repeats (fig.5).

This was then put in bump slot 2. and made relatively strong and scaled (fig.6) appropriately within Kerkythea to give the desired effect.

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 27: CatchUp Edition 4

All the engravings were produced by using this material and adding a suitable black and white image to the third bump slot, or by adding a normal map generated in GIMP from a suitable image. I have as a result of this early work, a library of 10 different silver materials.

The construction of the model in SketchUp highlighted at least one limitation of the programme, and its one that I kept bumping up against. I work in millimetres and this is quite a small model, there are quite a lot of details less than a millimetre apart. When Sketchup got below a millimetre, it started misbehaving, for example it doesn’t seem top be able to draw circles with a diameter of less than 0.5mm nor can it connect 2 lines less than 0.2mm apart. This was particularly apparent when creating the letters on the keyboard. Eventually, on the problematic issues, I had to create larger letters and scale them down.

This problem was apparent when using the bevel edges tool and on the smaller circle and cylinder based parts, so it did influence how I put things together. The speaker grill, for example, was a labour of love. Creating holes in a slight dome of this size was not easy, and the end result is not perfect. I had experimented with bump mapping the holes, unfortunately the dome would not be mapped by any method (including the various UVtools plugins that are out there, and I tried them all!).

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 28: CatchUp Edition 4

The ruler was a relatively late edition, as I realised there was nothing to act as a reference object. the texture for this was sourced at cgtextures.com and I’m quite pleased with the resulting material, not too shiny, a little bump and thats about it.

In terms of material and textures, I tried to keep the materials in Sketchup very simple, ensuring that all the materials were separate and colour coded and/or named in a descriptive manner to allow better handling in Kerkythea. All the engravings and any image based textures were mapped in Sketchup, to ensure accurate positioning. Anything unnecessary was purged from the drawing.

One of the primary reasons this has turned out so well had been the use of a high quality lightprobe in Kerkythea. I experimented with many different lightprobes. All of the native kerkythea globals came out too pixilated for my tastes in this scene, so I ended up at the HDRlabs sIBL archive, a collection of very high

quaility lightprobes, and eventually settled on ‘VAN Kleef 3’ by Bob Groothuis which, as an internal image of a period shop, provides exactly the right amount of light for the scene.

Each scene has its own camera settings and I use www.dofmaster.com to help get the depth of field blur right, especially of the closeup images.

I use the Kerkythea preset called Metropolis Light Transport for virtually all my renders, on this occasion I use the BPT variant, which produces better caustics. I must have had the light settings just right, because the noise produced in this render setting cleared up really quickly.

In total I let each of the six images in this series render for about 24 hours (my PC is quite old, with only a dual core processor) in total it was rendering for nearly a whole week! In total I worked on this project in my spare time for over 6 months. Its been emotional!

Kerkythea Echo 2008 is a freeware photorealistic studio rendering application from Ioannis Pantazopoulos. It currently supports all OS platforms with the latest release candidate supporting Windows 64bit systems.It integrates with SketchUp, 3DS Max, Gmax and Blender and supports .obj, .3ds and .xml file types.

Whilst developement of Kerkythea continues it’s developers are now concentrated on it’s commercial offspring called Thea. Thea’s much more powerful than it’s older brother and has recently come out of public beta where it’s started to acquire as sizeable following.

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 29: CatchUp Edition 4

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 30: CatchUp Edition 4

‘a Victorian realisation of a mobile phone, which could be treated as an heirloom and a fob watch’

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 31: CatchUp Edition 4

FEATURED MEMBERandrew gowland

Page 34: CatchUp Edition 4

For this edition of Catchup I would like to introduce Sketcher by Neatberry. Being a Mac user I was becoming increasing jealous of those great looking pencil, watercolour and oil effect renders that that Window users were generating with PhotoSketcher, unfortunately it was only available on the Windows platform.

However when I discovered Sketcher this jealousy vanished! By the way Sketcher is a dual platform application.

The first thing that impressed me was that there was no learning curve at all. It was simply a matter of launching the app and dropping the original image into the main preview (canvas) window and then create what I needed with the parameters (control) panel.

The preview window contains a full size preview of the image you are working on and update of style happen quite fast. The parameters panel contains the sliders and options needed to edit the look of the image.

Sketcher has four main filters that can be applied and some extra ‘hybrids’, combinations of some of the main filters! First impressions might be that the filter options are limited, but with the use of the the ‘tweaking’ sliders its quite possible to fine tune the final output image to meet your exact needs.

In order to give an idea of what can be achieved I have tested the ‘Silver Shadows’ image which features on the SketchUcation Gallery.

As you can see from the output opposite it’s an excellent means of adding some spice to your presentations. Definitely an app you need in your Mac arsenal!

by Mike Lucey

USEFUL APPSsketcher

Page 35: CatchUp Edition 4

USEFUL APPSsketcher

Page 36: CatchUp Edition 4

Lumion 3D Service Pack 2 Build 4-6 Since our last CatchUp issue, Act3D has released a new version of Lumion 3D, a feature rich GPU geared rendering engine. Some of the new features are:

• UI improvements for the Movie camera • Removed clip speed and clip beginning/end effects • Trees now have alpha transparency when rendering final quality movies or images • When selecting objects they are filtered by object types • New installer which works for both 32 and 64 bit OS• Tweaked ranges of some of the sliders • Tweaked naming throughout the program • Fresnel reflection now uses Schlick’s approximation • UI tweaks for move object effect • Added key frame capability to more effects • Several changes to DOF to improve usability • Memory improvements for selecting objects • Imported models can now have PSD textures • You now have to provide a name before saving • Effect thumbnails replaced by text labels • Press shift when placing items for random scale • Press Ctrl when placing items for multiple items at once • New effect for changing the camera clip distance • “Baking” process which optimises rendering performance for many identical objects is

now alot faster and uses far less memory• New “Show Layer” effect with keyframes has been added, so that you can show the different

stages of the construction of a building in a single clip• Edge smoothing in movies has been dramatically improved thanks to a new “Smooth Edges”

effect replacing the old “MLAA” effect• Added new Palm trees, corals, lilys and grass objects to the ‘Tree Pack’

Another good news for those who wish to evaluate Lumion3D before buying is that instead of the previous, rather limited “Demo” version, now there is a (so called) “Free” version available.

Lumion free is a version of Lumion for non commercial use or evaluation. The content library and output options are limited but you can save 720p movies and save your project. Certainly it does not boast with all the features of the full Basic and especially Ultimate Lumion 3D versions but it is apparently feature rich enough to try. You can read more on the actual specifications here.

PRODUCT UPDATElumion3d

Page 37: CatchUp Edition 4

Act-3D has also announced the 2011 Lumion Movie Competition

The prizes

1st prize: 10,000 US Dollar and a free Lumion 2.0 Ultimate license

2nd prize: 2,000 US Dollar and a free Lumion 2.0 Ultimate license

3nd prize: 1,000 US Dollar and a free Lumion 2.0 Ultimate license

Movie requirements

Create a movie using Lumion (Free, Basic or Ultimate are all allowed). You are allowed to use editing software to enhance the output of Lumion. Any subject for your movie is allowed should be in 720p MP4 format.

How to participate

• Send download link of your movie in 720p MP4 format to [email protected]

Competition ends November 1, 2011 – make sure your send your email before this date.

• Make sure you include name/company name in your email.

• Make sure you have read the rules above.

• By sending Lumion3D an email, you participate in the competition, accepting the rules of this competition.

Read more details about the competition and further conditions on the Lumion3D site click the image below.

by Csaba Poszarko

PRODUCT UPDATElumion3d

Page 38: CatchUp Edition 4

In this edition of Mayor Mike’s Gadgets I’m going to bring you up to speed on LEXIP’s 3DM-Pro mouse. This is definitely not a gadget as I feel its not a novelty in the slightest! It might even be the ‘missing link’ in the 3D computer design process. When I first learned of the 3DM-Pro I had one of those ‘I didn’t know I needed one until I saw it’ experiences but again I often get those!

I have now had the opportunity to test out the LEXIP 3DM-Pro and find it to be a well designed and constructed mouse. Even the packaging it came in was well thought out with no plastic covers that required a knife or scissors to open. The package lid even had a magnetic closer, nice touch! The 3DM-Pro mouse is being described by Lexip as the world’s first 3D mouse and I would have to agree with them. I have tried out 3DConnexion’s Navigator with SketchUp in the past and while it worked fine, I found having to take my hand off it and onto the keyboard disrupted work-flow. I rarely use it these days tending to stick with the mouse alone for all SketchUp work.

To me the 3DM-Pro mouse combines the features of 3DConnexion’s Navigator and a quality mouse. It’s a strange feeling when first grasped and to become familiar and really productive with the device takes a little time. I would recommend using it for browser navigation and other simple ‘non pressure’ activities first in order to get used to simple movements and then slowing build confidence and expertise in SketchUp navigation, creation and editing.

Some technical data and I quote from Lexip’s Press Release.The 3D mouse “3DM-Pro” accelerates the entire design, development, creation processes and revolutionizes navigation in 3D environments.Unlike traditional mice limited to two axis movements, this 3D mouse allows the user to navigate easily and intuitively in 3 dimensions using all 6 degrees of freedom (3 translations and 3 rotations) : just press down the body of the 3DM-Pro mouse forward or backward, to the right or left or use the joystick, to simultaneously pan, zoom and rotate your 3D model or environmentCombining characteristics of a classic mouse and 3D manipulation, the 3D mouse facilitates the 3D workflow. From drawing, to sketch, to part, to assembly, no need to constantly shift between navigation and editing. The 3DM-Pro does it all in a simple and smooth way.Including plug-in for all major 3D software (SketchUp, 3dsmax, Solidworks, Rhino, Nova …) the 3D mouse is the ultimate tool for professionals. By reducing the number of complex and repetitive gestures (use of both hands, keyboard shortcuts and mouse combinations …) the 3DM-Pro higher both productivity and work comfort.’

MAYOR MIKE’S GADGETlexip 3dm pro

Page 39: CatchUp Edition 4

MAYOR MIKE’S GADGETlexip 3dm pro

The specifications are as follows,

• 6DOF motion controller and analog stick for unparalleled level of control • Plug-in for SketchUp®, Solidworks®, Catia®, 3ds Max® and many more 3D applications • 3200 dpi laser for precise drawing and editing • 7 programmable buttons for optimal personalization of 3D applications • Non-slip rubber clicking scroll-wheel • Ergonomic shape for comfortable working experience • Soft touch and non-slip rubber sides for greater comfort

Drivers have to be downloaded from the Lexip Pro site and currently there are no Mac drivers but I am assured these will be available shortly. Also, the Lexip site has some video showing the 3DM-Pro in action and don’t forget the ‘click’ the USA flag (top left corner) for the English text that is unless you speak fluent French.

Finally the price! Its not cheap but good value I think at €199 plus local taxes. This falls in with the price structure of current navigator products. We will be doing a more in-depth review on the 3DM-Pro with SketchUp in the next edition of Catchup.

by Mike Lucey

Page 42: CatchUp Edition 4

Install formwork and rebar for the pier and continuous footing before placing the concrete.

Components added for visual scale and staging

Resize the component with the

Scale tool*

Scale to a stock lumber dimension for estimating

Set the axis and rotation arm with the Rotate tool

Key-in the angle as you rotate the compo-

nent

Toggle Ctrl and

Move to po-sition form-

work

Plumbline locates the

corner of the foundation

wall

Stringlines are a wire-frame rig to place compo-

nents

Use a plumb line to position the component

Add lum-ber from a component library

All the formwork is scaled from

the same component

Edit model base to paint

bottom of the excava-tion white

Footing formwork

spreads be-yond face of

wall**

CONSTRUCTION MODELING - Step 3

*Scaling is much faster for con-struction modeling because it does not affect similar components in the model

**Click here to view the wall sec-tion detail along this wall

FOOTNOTES

Green Scale about Opposite Point

Page 43: CatchUp Edition 4

Set spacing with first copy, then input multiplier

Footprint of the foun-dation wall above the

footing

Right click the tempo-rary line to

divide

Components have built-in handles for alignment

Add a stock rebar from the compo-nent library

Use handles to position

rebar on the divided line

Key in segments to locate rebar

in the footing

Scale and Move-copy the rebar in the footing

Add bent re-bar from the component

library

Add J-bar component and array copy with Move tool

Nested pieces orga-nized in the

Outliner

Using the edge of

formwork to size the concrete

Use Rectangle

tool to place concrete in

forms

Push-pull the rectangle to the bot-tom of the

form

U-TUBE Videos from our books.

Scaling ComponentsRebar LayoutJ-bar Arrays

Endpoint

On Green Axis

Edge in Component

Page 44: CatchUp Edition 4

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