ACEIZE

Google is having a Sketch Up contest to see who can create the best model of their college campus. The winner gets a free trip to Mountain View, CA to participate in 3D modeling workshop with some of the experts at Google. The judging panel is a very distinguished group of professionals from the gaming, graphics, and architectural communities. Entries are due June 1, 2007.

Yesterday I looked through a few of the entries for the contest, as well as some of the other figures uploaded to the '3D warehouse'. I was inspired by the amount of quality work and interesting junk already uploaded. It also struck me that Google appears to be the largest contributor of images to their online catalog. I suppose Sketch Up isn't the most popular feature of Google.

Since there is a competition going on, I figured that I would check out the program. I spent about half of my work day playing with Google's SketchUp 6.0. In my normal method of learning a computer program, I jumped right in and tried creating some pictures. In an abnormal turn of events, I was at a complete loss to use the program. Since it has been a solid 10 years since I have done any 3D modeling or CAD work, I think the real problem may have been a lack of reference to working in a 3D environment. After my initial failure, I spent about 2 1/2 hours watching the various tutorial clips available on the web. Overall, the tutorials were very good and informative (Highly recommended).

Then I got back to work. The program is not nearly as easy to use as they make it appear in the videos. I found it difficult to orient the camera position so that I could work on my image and still use the line inferencing. It was sort of annoying that I had to re-orient the camera as often as I did. I think part of this problem may be due to the fact that I was trying to create an object from nothing. The program seems much better geared for creating mock-ups of buildings from existing pictures for use with Google Earth. It's tough to say how much of this problem is part of the learning curve, and how much of the problem is inherent in 3D drawing programs.

Despite this little problem, the program was a ton of fun to use. I screwed around for a little while and made a little house, with a nice brick chimney. Then I made a mockup of my desk lamp.

I think this 3D warehouse / Sketch Up is definitely a project worth watching in the long term it has a lot of potential beyond Google Earth. Personally, I am going to try and model my house and then give a few more small objects a try.

Update
I went back through the program and created a 3D model of my house. It looks pretty good, but I imagine if I was to do it again I could do a better job. Some of the surfaces interact a little clumsily because of the ghetto way I constructed some parts of the house. With watching the videos and a few trials that were aborted early, I probably spent about 12 hours making this 3D model. I haven't been able to upload the image to Google Earth yet because the 3D warehouse that google runs seems to be acting a little funny with my mac. But lucky you, you can see a screen shot.