About Fred Bartels and his creation

Fred Bartels is an educator, builder, artist, maker and a very old member of the SketchUp community. He became inspired by Seymour Papert and many other education visionaries and hope that the future of SketchUp in the classroom of SketchUp. Bartels has introduced SketchUp to his students Seventeen years ago and from that time he continuously trying to create some variations in the classes of SketchUp from its normal class studies and also Bartels hope that other educators will realize this soon and follow the same.

In this article we will go through the idea of Bartels in encouraging students for a better study with some new techniques. As Fred has been with SketchUp for a long time, he can describe his creations better way through SketchUp.

Fred’s 3D modeling story: Fred Bartels had a great interest in art and architecture and had done some photography courses in high school but could not pursue it in future as a profession. He generally produced art in a summarized way and loved to work with the house designs and often made outlet for his designed ideas. He started to teach in the computer programming classes when the computer and 3D design tools became available in most of the schools and taught about many programs and software. But all were not much good for the students still he found SketchUp at MacWorld 2002 and loved it. From then he has been providing lessons and IT supports to the students of K-12 schools.

Special things about SketchUp: According to Fred, SketchUp is a vast and most useful tool even in schools as it has various option that help the students to stay focused more on the designs and knowledge not using the tool only. Besides this, Fred tried to do much more things than only designing in computer graphics, SKetchUp can be used in math, science, history and language classes for better understanding. Students loved the idea and some of them tried to make some innovative work; such as Andrew Nathanson who had made a unique design work and had been invited to the SketchUp Basecamp 2008. There he got a chance to represent his design and also shared the method of using SketchUp in K-12 environment in schools.

The relationship between technology and education progress: According to Fred, he and other educators have a wish that computers will provides a rich ranged world for the students where they could both play and experiment over things and can get loads of information. It will be done in a way that would give them abbreviate concept and keep them interested and focused.

A great supporter of this idea was MIT’s Seymour Papert; he had thinking that computers can be used in education as in books like Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas and The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer Reprint Edition. SketchUp is just like that and with the 3D Warehouse students could get an available way for sharing their designs and get feedbacks on them. In schools or educational institutions, computer is generally used as an information presentation tool for providing only some information; though it is not enough as there are more things than normal information. It is good news that there are some new software like Maker Movement, Sketchup etc. that are providing various additional roles in teaching and learning.

Fred’s new models for students: Fred has a keen interest in art and architecture and has examined many building and design ideas, shared them in 3D Warehouse. After quitting his teaching he took a number of courses at Yestermorrow; which is a design or build school in Vermont and became capable to do some more creative works. He got appreciation for his works that he had shared in 3D Warehouse or SketchUcation that motivated him to do more experiments. Later he worked over 3D printing and made some small sculptures designed in SketchUp and programmable using LEDs controlled with Arduino microcontrollers etc.

Besides SketchUp, he also shared his designs in another site named Thingiverse and has some other ideas about making larger designs for future, SketchUp’s role in designs of Fred: After discovering SketchUp, Fred found to work with his ideas and designs in a vast and better platform that also provide him to explore the designs and make creative works on them. SketchUp has now become a part of his work as it is ever growing software that provides new things every time.



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Published By
Rajib Dey
www.sketchup4architect.com
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Client Communication: the key to better projects

Delivering SketchUp models to the clients through right communication is important for projects and Nick shows in his video. Communication doesn’t stand only about speaking to and hearing from people, but more than that it is about understanding the total message. A good communication depends on many things like the language will use, delivering message with the tone of respect, the feeling and the body language at the time of talking. These all play important roles in every communication process and can also deliver a confused and wrong message if they used in a wrong way.

In every organization, project manager has the main role of communicating with others such as clients, co-workers, advisors, dealers etc and also responsible to present the right message to the right person at the right time.

Communication is a symbol of the “transfer of information form one individual to another”. It is seen that the failure reason of the projects basically is the miscommunication, most of the project deliverers fail to clearly understand the vision and the project’s success criteria. This vision should be strongly communicated to each shareholder and team member and the whole team must be able to understand the total result for working together for a common goal.

A poor communication can certainly damage any project or relationship and break down the strength of the project. For a good communication one has to be knowledgeable about every detailed and updated thing about a project so that he could deliver the right information to the clients or shareholders.

It is not that this problem happens only in some cases or happens in certain time; it has become a regular problem and harming the growth of the projects. A right communication to all the shareholders in a clear and actual manner is the capital thing as it clears about the kind of the delivered messages.

When you are in the field of architecture or design, communication plays the most vital part in every project and through 3D communication tools it has become easier to communicate with various people over a project at a time. A rich communication with full of right knowledge and information makes a project more successful and in SktechUp it is also important.

SktechUp is not only a tool for modeling and designing it also known for its sharing capacity in 3D. Often designers make models and show the idea through the 3D communication system to their clients or other teammates as a presentation or for opinion. A good representation of the works of models, their designing, capacity and way of working will become the reasons of success and the bad one cause failure.

To improve the communication way Nick Sonder, a member of SketchUp team has guided everyone with his wonderful SketchUp models and LayOut documents. Nick himself is a brilliant commuter and makes a good communication with the clients throughout the whole process and with the help of his friend, Houzz he had organized design ideas and collaborated with others. He has some brilliant concepts and produced a video tutorial as guide for all.

Article Source: blog.sketchup.com



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Published By
Rajib Dey
www.sketchup4architect.com
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How to Create and Use SketchUp LayOut

Working with SketchUp LayOut allows you to maintain a smooth flow of designing. The options and features creatively carve out your designing instinct. When you open SketchUp LayOut, two dialog boxes will generally appear – Tip of the Day and Getting Started.

Getting Started Dialog box contains different templates of your LayOut document, and it comes up with options required for adding features and functions easily to your design. There is a template always on which a Layout is based. Storyboards and title blocks are also there in LayOut. Other than this, you can also prepare a layout adding your preferences.

SketchUp lets you customize every detail in template so that you can enjoy a spontaneous designing. After choosing a template, you can modify features like paper size, margins, and units. Once you modify every necessary detail in the template, you save it giving a particular name of your file.

Choosing a template: For every new LayOut document, you need to select a template from the Getting Started dialog box. There are options like graph paper, plain paper and story board that assist in you choosing the right one. You can also change the template later while designing from the template setting box. The list below mentions details of the content.

Select a default template: there are three categories carrying templates with different measurement and looks. Under the ‘New’ tab in the Getting Started dialog box, you will get options:

• Paper: common paper sized templates are listed in the category. You can easily get letter landscape or A4 size as per your requirement. Papers have portrait or landscape orientations and they have also come up with grid paper and plain paper options.
• Storyboard: if you are designing for a storyboard, you can get three preset boxes for defining the functions like angles, features and views of a 3D model.
• Titleblock: there are several titleblock types to choose from. Common style includes modern, rounded, simple and traditional forms.

Select your own template: My Template option helps you work on your preferred template option. The template that you create is the foundation of your LayOut project.

Open an existing document: this feature brings many advantages for your designing purpose. You can easily open an existing document in LayOut.

Paper Setting: Modification is a common step after creating your LayOut. The Document Setup dialog box contains the needed options allowing you to make new changes as per your designing concept.

Paper Setting: In the document setting dialog box, you find options that help you change the document area you are working on. The most common paper setting is done by modifying an area’s size, orientation, margins, colors, and rendering quality. Below is an introduction of the features in a paper setting dialog box.

• To customize the setting, you can insert the value of width and height of the paper. There are two options available for the shape – landscape and portrait. The color swatch option will take you to the color picker where you can choose color that is required for your document. For getting color printouts or PDFs of your design, you must select the Print Paper Color Checkbox.
• To change margins of your document, you need to select the margin check box. By default, margins are not visible in the document. Input the values for left, right, top and button margins.
• You can also opt for the high rendering resolution with choosing high, low or medium resolution quality for your design. Both input and output resolution can be adjusted in SketchUp.

Unit Setting: Unit setting helps you in measuring the design in your preferred unit. To modify the units of your design, you need to click File and choose the Document Setup option. Select Units for changing the measurement.

Save LayOut Document: Save LayOut document before you add loaded works to it. The LayOut saving follows steps the same as you do to save other files (File > Save or File>Save As).

The content offers you an insight of the LayOut option in SketchUp. You can create any documents using the above-mentioned steps. You must visit help.sketchup.com for more information.

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Published By

Rajib Dey

www.sketchup4architect.com

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How to create a home plan for 3 storied villa in skethup

In this sketchup video, you will learn how to create 7.5x9 m size home plan with four bed rooms in sketchup. SAM-ARCHITECT has modeled this 3 storied villa with sketchup.

Sketchup is good for designing home plan as it can generate either schematic or full construction documents easily. Sketchup can be used to measure the area of any room.

In Sketchup there are various useful tools like pencil tool, push and pull tool, section plane tool etc. to generate customized objects with a high level of detail. The plan of a house can be produced in a 3D view or a 2D view.

To learn the complete process, watch the following video tutorial.

Read more

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Published By
Rajib Dey
www.sketchup4architect.com

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