Google's 3d program now available !

its not blender…but its fun to play with :]

try it out :]

Downloading, but it’ll be awhile! ~20megs on dialup. :frowning:

Interesting…

BgDM

yeah, its VERY light weight…but still, you can stick your models online and/or stick them on google earth ! (i dare you to model your city block…)

I have followed this program for a while, but I was inundated with 3d stuff plus it was too much for me ($495). I downloaded it, but you can only export as an image. It imports quite a bit. Now, someone needs to write a Google earth (.kmz) importer for Blender! I know the full version was scriptable in Ruby. Thanks for the heads up.

Rob

Looks like a nice little app. for building houses and structures for the free version, but if you want terrain and export though so you can import in Blender you still need the pro version.

Yea, I wonder who set the price point? It’s nifty and it’s just so damn cute, but for what it does Google is basically giving the Lite version away to stop non-meshy people from spending $14.95 for 3D Garden Architect or Home Designer Pro Gold Plus or whatever from the bargin bin at your local computer store…

But for $500? Uh… no damn way. I could get Rhino and Flamingo student editions for $195 and still have $100 to actually get my new smiley face design physically made in steel off a CNC mill.

I actually know people who use sketchup professionally.

And this is far before google bought it.

Alltaken

well, i don’t think it would be for mac if google hadn’t bought it. i have used this program once before, its pretty cool.

what gives you the idea that it wasn’t available for mac before it was purchased by google?

What confuses me (and angers me too) is that Google heavily promotes open source/free software and they are anti-microsoft, but the continue making all their software for windows only. Sometimes mac, but they simply refuse to make their software either for linux/unix or open source so that someone else can port it to other platforms.

Otherwise, it looks nifty but I can’t try it yet as windows refuses to recognize my video card (and won’t use vesa or standard vga) during the install.

Got around to playing with it after the long download. I don’t see much of a use at all for it when it comes to organics… but for houses and simple cad, it has promise. I like that the basic mouse actions are the same as blender’s.

I made a simple building in SketchUp Free and exported it as a Google Earth file myfile.kmz. I changed the file extension to .zip so that windows would associate it to be unzipped. I extracted the file: myfile.kml. It is basically an xml type file with a lot of SketchUP stuff in it, but it’s ascii and parsable (sp?). Does anyone know if it would be possible to parse this via an import script in Blender? It would be a great way to use this program to augment Blender. Also, it has a Ruby console and Ruby API to make it more powerful if you don’t want to buy the Pro version. My two cents.

Rob

I found an export to kml script, but I would like to use SketchUp to create stuff and then import into Blender. Maybe next week I’ll work on a kml to obj python import script for Blender, OR check out the Ruby API and see if I can create in right in the free SketchUp version as menu item. Hmm.

Rob

Pro version’s crop. Very unserious.

This program is so darned amazing! I love it. Its a great tool for game level layout. I plan on trying to use this tool: http://ogle.eyebeamresearch.org/ to extract model data for other uses. I can’t wait to show it to my technically inept dad who will dig the heck out of it.

Sketchup started on the Mac ( or atleast it’s been available for about 2-3 years). Steve Jobs demoed it during one of his keynotes at a Macworld or something in 2003. Not sure why the the Mac version of the freebie is delayed, tho

Googled or not, SketchUp is a GREAT pice of software, so great that after showing atrial version to a couple of people, they went so crazy about it that they bought the license!!!

This thing is AMAZING. :eek:

After watching video tutorials for 5 minutes, and playing fo 15 minutes i modelled a quite nice house. Sure i could do the same thimg in blender, but:

  1. It would take me much longer to model.
  2. Blender has no useful dimensions support, and i would end with scaling boxes and typing stuff, and then snapping, moving, rotating…
  3. Learning blender up to a point where i could to all this would take a week.

I only wished it would be possible to render this in some bigger format, than the screen resolution.

Hope somebody makes an export script to Blender. :slight_smile: