Visit to SketchUp Basecamp 2014

Trimble’s SketchUp Basecamp took place in Vail, Colorado this year and it was a treat for the eyes and the ears. Aside from the beautiful mountains, hearing about what’s to come from the SketchUp team was a delight, with new functionality in the model and extensions warehouse planned.

John Bacus, from Trimble showed how you could generate SketchUp models using 3D scanning data collected from Trimble scanners. With models being generated so quickly and easily, what effect will this have on visualising the results? We’ll have to wait and see.

There was an inspirational talk given by Nick Ierodiaconou of 00:// (Zero Zero), a London-based design practice. Co-founder of WikiHouse (http://www.wikihouse.cc/) and OpenDesk (https://www.opendesk.cc/), he showed how emergency housing or simple office furniture could be built using sheets of plywood, locally sourced CNC companies, and SketchUp. The message was a shift away from the large scale manufacturing by multinational companies, putting power in to people’s hands to create low cost, high-performance products.

The SketchUp platform is no stranger to rendering, boasting a large number of rendering “extensions” to suit the different needs of its diverse user-base. So in a land full of visualisation, how does Artisan fit in? Talking with people at the show highlighted the need for a simple, powerful solution that gets people what they want, a decent image of their design to show to others. There were some great demonstrations of photorealistic rendering with impressive results for those skilful enough to use them. Maybe next time we’ll take a slot to show how quickly you can make your model into a quality image without knowing the dark arts of rendering…