A new look for digital urban.. minimilistic or ‘we liked the old look’? Let us know…
Andy
Using the forthcoming panorama viewer for Google Earth it is possible to embed 360×180 degree panoramas inside of buildings and thus fly inside to look around. The movie illustrates this concept with the Tate Modern,
The viewer is almost ready to roll, we just need to find some time to write the tutorial and then upload the file to edit on our server…
Google has just released SketchUp Pro version 6. Sketchup is by far our favaourite peice of software to date and is the only design tool which we can clearly say is a joy to use. Version 6 has a numbe rof new features, including:
- Photo Match – Use photos to build accurate 3D models much more easily than starting from scratch.
- Styles – Personalize your model by creating your own Style with the new display settings, Sketchy Effects and Watermarks.
- Sketchy Effects – Renders edges to look as if they were drawn by hand. Choose from a variety of line strokes such as Graphite on Bond, Loose Marker and Shakey Pen.
- Watermarks – Place 2D images behind or in front of models.
- Fog – Adds atmospheric haze and a sense of depth to your model.
- 3D Text – Create signs and letters and choose from simple outlines, filled surfaces, and fully extruded 3D text.
You can learn more about the new features in SketchUp Pro 6 as well as taking a look at the new video tutorials. At the moment the SketchUp site seems to be offline but as soon its back we look forward to giving the new features a spin.
Going hand in hand with our love of city visualisation is visualisation of landscapes. The original Terragen package was one of the best and certainly cheapest (its free) landscape visualisation suites available, and they have now released a tech preview of version 2.
We are just about to download the new version and we will post some thoughts soon as we can, in the mean time its worth taking a look at the stunning images in the gallery and wondering how long those movie render times are go to be this time around.