Update
My bilingual site (sort of) is now ready. Have a look and comment:
http://www.arqui3d.com

I had to try...

Not sure about that one. Better try a SketchUcation Panama Hat.

@andybot said:

... thus - for best accuracy, draw it in ACAD and import into sketchup

Amen. Trimble, if you're reading this, we need actual arcs and curves in SketchUp.

Well, this is not going to cover watermarks, but for textures in materials you can always export your model as DAE. This way you end up with a folder full of textures and you can see which ones are the fatter in terms of KB.

Unfortunately I don't know of a way to find textures by filename inside a SketchUp file. You'll have to visually scan your model in search of the offending texture.

BTW, I use Goldilocks with a camera far, far away, as this way it won't list textures that are too big for a particular view, but textures that are too big in general.

Note that Goldilocks only finds textures too big in pixels... not too big in file size.

Just curious to know what other 3D modelers you're using to get your work done. Not experimenting or playing around, but real work.

How much does it cost?
How do you work from CAD drawings?
How do you apply textures and render?
Do you find its workflow efficient?
Can it import/export to SketchUp, and how clean are the results?
Could you post samples of your work with it?

Very nice. You have just highlighted the main advantage of working with a separate render app.

@mike lucey said:

I was becoming a little bored of late and this is livening things up.

This explains the flame-bait threads started in the Corner Bar...

Well, there's also DraftSight if you need construction documents. It's free and less cluttered than AutoCAD, plus it handles DWG files as its default format.

@kwistenbiebel said:

For example , a simple door component (a 'family' in Revit) has all the 3D information to the detail, making a file super heavy after a while.

Then Autodesk needs to take a page from videogame development and adopt Dynamic Level Of Detail (aka "LOD"). The closer you get, the more detail is there. Lumion uses this for vegetation.

I find it interesting that this paradigm persists... that construction documents need to be just floor plans, sections and elevations, and that to convey "depth" you need to spend hours using different thickness in lines... thicker for walls closer to you, thinner for those far away. What a waste of time. In reality, this information is more efficiently conveyed by using shadows in said sections/elevation, and by complementing them with sketchy-style perspectives. And SketchUp excels at this. Sure, you can manually add hatched shadows to your CAD drawing, but it's gonna take time.

It's 2012, people... plotters with restrictive physical pens no longer exist. Color printing is cheap. Gray scale printing is even cheaper. There's no need to be restrained by those old paradigms when creating construction documents.

"The friendly place for your Trimble SketchUp needs" sounds odd. Better make it
"The friendly place for you SketchUp nerds"

Are you working for the Mafia or for an Antivirus company? Both offer "protection".

Just one recommendation for the team:

K.I.S.S.
Keep It Simple, Sir.

I'll condense my feelings in a single phrase:

I'm worried because Trimble does not seem to be about design at all, but only boring engineering stuff like GPS and such.

@mark h. said:

Trimble is committed to investing in SketchUp and expanding its development in multiple directions.

I certainly hope you won't do this:

[flash=853,505:3l0lcs8j]http://www.youtube.com/v/EUXnJraKM3k&fs=1[/flash:3l0lcs8j]

Well, it turned out to be kind of a bait-and-switch. Bluehost "free" Weebly turned out to be limited to only 6 pages, and to remove this limit you must pay an extra 9 bucks/month. So I'm going with WordPress... But tomorrow. I need sleep.

So I decided to follow the advice of Csaba, Rich and Kim and create a WordPress site, instead of listening to Pilou and go with Weebly. So I signed up for BlueHost, which is recommended by WordPress. And you won't believe what I found after loggin in... How ironic. (Bluehost is cheaper than Weebly Pro)
I'll continue tomorrow, it's 2:22am here.

EDIT: I ended up watching the video. Now I'm seriously tempted by Weebly. Maybe can just use a folder for the English version and create manual links between corresponding pages. After all, my site will be less than ten pages in each language, so a fully automagic system seems overkill.

Pilou, I will write the content myself both in Spanish and English. Of course I'll have it checked by a native English speaker.

@frederik said:

It can be made so that when you click the flag, it will take you to the corresponding page you're on, but in another language... This is not how I made it, and I don't see the point making it like this...?

Perfect! That's exactly what I need, and it's also Google's recommendation:

@unknownuser said:

Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click.

301 Moved

(support.google.com)

Thank you again for sharing your knowledge.

Kim: Qtranslate looks good. However, in your example (CSMedia Productions) clicking on a language button didn't take me to the corresponding page in the other language... it just took me to the home page. Maybe Qtranslate does not play well with the Cleanex theme? BTW, thanks to ThemeForest I discovered AudioJungle and VideoHive... fantastic find!

Csaba: What do you mean with "multisite installations"? If it means having to configure everything just once and having the same settings and theme applied at once to two folders (for example, http://arqui3d.com/ and http://arqui3d.com/en/) , I'm in.

Pilou: It looked really nice, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to support multi-language.

Rich: Cool, my usual wordpress workflow with themes has been "Simplify the **** out of it!". However, I think I'm going to settle for a theme that is already simple, instead of a framework + theme made for said framework... To reduce the number of "breakable" things (Multilanguage + Thesis + Theme...)