Thanks Alvis and Damien

Thanks Eric, I was surprised at the light quality as well considering the lamp is pure white.

David, I have a 40 Watt incandescent in there now and its too hot, I think the plastic will melt if I leave it on for any length of time. I am looking for an LED bulb of similar output that will fit in its place, but so far the ones I have found are much larger diameter and don't fit.

Thanks, Massimo! Your gallery models always inspire me to do better.

mojtabata2001, I'm working on sourcing the components to offer them for sale at a reasonable price.

Thanks, Ben. Its definitely a hot topic recently, designers make movie props for sale prompting cease-and-desist orders from Hollywood...the technology is so powerful I hope its not outlawed to death.

Thanks, Lee...if I can do it, anyone can!

This is a project I'm finally happy to show ya'll, modeled entirely in Sketchup. I made an early version of this model for a 3D printing contest over a year ago. I didn't win the contest, and hit upon this better version after the contest was over, but the experience introduced me to the possibilities of 3D printing. I was hooked, and since then have designed and printed a dozen or so different models - some for myself, and some for clients that had an idea for a product but not the modeling skills necessary to make it.

For this lamp, I went to a local lamp store and bought the parts necessary to light it up, then designed the model to fit around that. From there, I ordered the lampshade from Shapeways, and 2 weeks later got to hold it in my hands...its such an exhilarating feeling to be able to touch something that was made directly from your model!

Anyway, enough blabbing - on to the goods:

First the Sketchup model - I spent countless hours fixing tiny holes, thanks Thomthom for Solid Inspector!

Then the 3D printed goodness:

It feels a little heavier than you might expect, and as a friend I showed it to said, it just invites itself to be played with. I'm amazed how true to the Sketchup model the final result is, every nuance, good or no so good, is represented.

Please comment, I'm curious to hear what you guys think about it!

I dunno, there are many different levels of modeling skill. Some people spend much more time preparing than others, so there is bound to be times when the winner may appear to have gone over time, but you can't tell how much prep work - sketching on paper, thinking about construction, and just modeling in general - went into the model.

One way to judge the winner is to look at their history of models posted to the forum...if they have a good gallery presence, then there is a good chance they didn't cheat. OTOH, if a newbie posts a fantastic model to a speed challenge, I'd suspect dishonesty.

I dothink that working that hard takes all the fun out of it though

Here's an example of an excellent modeler, KitoRaupp has many Sketchup tutorials on YouTube. In the one I linked to, I'll be darned if I could have got the same result in 15 minutes (without rubies) that he did in ~ 4 minutes...that's almost 4 times longer! Just sayin'.

How's this for an idea...perhaps frequent winners could make a video tutorial teaching us all how they work so fast? Like Eric did with his pinecone winner a while ago.

Very nice modeling, Alvis

I had a problem with M2 and plugins until I uninstalled and reinstalled Sketchup. If you go this route, backup your components, materials, and shortcuts first.

The boundingbox plugin is good for that, or measuring any irregular shaped object

...and Windowizer, for free

Search the forum for Thomthom's Cleanup plugin

Steve, just a thought...what about contacting the person selling your models, and tell him that you have more that he could sell, but those ones will need to be purchased from you. In other words, sell him a license to distribute the models for you. He'll do the work you don't want to - like promotion of models, converting to other formats, upload to other sites, etc, and pay you a one-time fee (or a percentage of each sold, but I don't know how you'd track that). That way you both gain. You could think of your models on the warehouse as a free sample of your models, and even say that in the description of the warehouse model.

This may be totally missing the reason you share you models, but could be a way to 'think outside the box'. Another option (similar to what TIG suggested) is just to do all that work yourself.

Nice, Bob.

It reminds me of the Milwaukee Art Museum, which also definitely belongs in this thread The architect, Santiago Calatrava, designed the 'wings' to actually move. They open in the morning(weather permitting), 'flap' once at noon, and close in the evening.

Thats great for Sketchup models, but probably won't help if the model is exported to OBJ or other file format, which is what often happens on Cornucopia3D or Turbosquid.

Ah, the Daily Catchup...I searched the forums before posting this to make sure I wasn't double posting, but I could have known you were on top of this already

That's great, Pete!

I agree, Miguel...or even better, an overlay banner on its logo since many of us come directly to the forums. This page tells how to add an overlay banner if the boss wants to.

Just found this infographic that explains the issue succinctly.
Edit: changed the annoyingly large image to a link

Wednesday, Jan 18 (tomorrow as of this post) many websites (Google, Wikipedia, reddit, among others) will protest the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) act that the entertainment industry is trying to push through Congress. Some sites will shut down completely, while others will post protest banners on their sites.

Is short, the bill is an effort to stop piracy by giving copyright owners the ability to shut down entire domain names without a court order because of one infringement. Under the proposed act, savvy users - and pirates - could still access the censored site via IP address, but who in the general public knows how to do that? ...yet many pirates would...

I try to stay out of politics, but I am opposed to this bill because many of the websites I visit daily are at risk. Take Shapeways for example - if a designer modeled a movie prop and offered it for sale on Shapeways (which does happen every so often), Hollywood could have the entire site shut down, including designers that are not at fault! As it is now, the Hollywood lawyers send a cease-and-desist letter to the designer threatening to sue, which usually works just as well to have the offending model removed.

I'm concerned that they'll get power-happy and the whole internet will suffer. I don't want to sound like Chicken Little here, but some of our members here at SCF like to model spaceships and other movie props, and I can see the lawyers coming after SCF for those "infringements" - even though SCF is not based in the U.S!

Here is a link to an organization opposing the bill, with info on how to contact state senators, which I have done. There is also info for concerned people not based in the US.

There is a nice writeup explaining the issue better here.

What do ya'll think about it?

I don't how well those programs work, but here's an excellent free service I use: http://www.cometdocs.com/

...no layers or anything, but it does do PDF to DWG, as well as MANY other conversions.

Google+ just released screensharing with its Hangouts feature. I don't believe you can control the other person's screen though.

Very cool, Elisei! I'm not a car modeler, but still like watching you make a car take shape

Glad it helped, Belaar! I'm always excited to see people using Sketchup for 3D printing.

Good thinking about using Curviloft to fix the tiny bit

I'm also familiar with printing from Shapeways, and the only thing I would suggest is to add a small radius to the top and bottom edges so the final model isn't sharp. It might be easier to do that before bending.

I made a couple comments in the attached model about the smoothing and making the model ready to send to Shapeways.

Finnished ring.skp