Soap Skin & Bubble, Tensile Structures for Sketchup

Archdaily has a post regarding how the sketchup does the flexible form, for instance, before, we can actually only use sketch up to build simple form, but NOW...Tensile-structures has launched a plug-in associated with sketchup that enable the program to build a better and flexible form as samples below.

You can go the their website to download the sketch up plug-in for free! and also the video tutorials and demonstration all are available in YOUTUBE.

Tensile Structures for Sketchup (image © http://www.tensile-structures.de)

Soap Skin & Bubble (image © http://www.tensile-structures.de)

Podium 1.5 working in Sketch Up

image © Christ Haseldonckx, a.k.a.‘biebel’

SU Podium is a photo-realistic rendering plug-in for Google SketchUp 6. Now, you can run a TRUE photo-realistic effect rendering program from your sketch up model without going through too many complex processes.

"Podium runs completely inside Google SketchUp from start to finish. It uses SketchUp features such as textures, background colors, groups and shadows to achieve impressive results. Podium is intuitive to SketchUp users."

Here are a free evaluation version to download and play with it, no expiry. Some more this version is exactly the same as commercial version just only the smaller outputs (320x120, 500x500 image resolution). Before doing anything, let's browse through the video tutorial for your better familiar with the program.

Sketch up in light and shadow

You can even have a better Sketchup animation with the V-Ray plugin support. V-Ray is a rendering plug-in that enables Sketch-Up users to have a performance enhancements for producing an outstanding image quality. The renders using these V-Ray technique can appear more photo-realistic to the human eye, as actual lighting effects are more realistically emulated.

This is the sample of how the Sketchup output associated with V-Ray.