Rajib is the guy that seems to have been running it from day 1. There were/are a few other people who seem to be involved too.
They do post a lot of links, but they don't know what they are talking about, at all. It appears they are doing human powered spam to drive as much traffic to them as possible. I welcome them to come out and explain themselves, but somehow I don't think that will happen because they are a shady, fly by night SEO company.
Agreed, they clearly have no idea what they are doing. Unfortunately that's part of what makes the internet great, anyone can post anything. I'm fine with ineptitude, I can ignore it. Just don't steal content.
Can you imagine what a first time SketchUp user things when they Google for help and they land on that page first? They probably think SketchUp is dodgy. I hope they're landing here first.
Hey folks, you may have seen "Sketchup ur space" and "Sketchup 4 architect" posing around the internet with different SketchUp tutorials.
For a long time they incessantly bugged me (and others) about writing for them. I was contacted by email, my website, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. I considered doing it until I looked into their website and general operation.
Their website looks to be from the late 90's, plastered in ads and coated with questionable grammar. Forgiving that, if you look further you will see that they really don't appear to have any understanding of SketchUp, or our community at all. They just aggregate content from other users. (More on that in a minute)
So, as many of you may know, I have a blog that covers digital fabrication and SketchUp. I also write professionally for magazines. When I write for a magazine, I get paid. When I write for the community I am happy to donate my time. When I asked what these guys paid for content, they refused to pay. I politely told them that I would be interested in working for free.
I thought that was going to be the end of it. Since then, they have taken to continuing to spam me. They've posted content on my Facebook pages without permission (links to their content)
The last straw for me was when they flat out stole articles from my blog. They took them word for word and reposted them to their site with no attribution. The worst part is that some of the posts were written by another member of the community. After repeated requests, phone calls and emails to them, they finally removed the content.
I am posting this here as a warning to folks out there in the community: These guys appear to have a lot of content from the community, I suspect a lot of it is stolen. They also have pictures of members represented as "contributors" to the community. I would question if these were used with permission or not.
Upon further Google sleuthing I discovered that these guys are run by this company: http://www.jobs2india.com/. This appears to be some sort of SEO (read: spam) company. It appears they are mining our community for traffic numbers so they can sell targeted ads, they aren't giving back at all.
So, go to their sites, check their feeds and make sure your content isn't being stolen. What you want to do about it is up to you, I don't think it's right.
I know Sketchup can do it, the Google Earth Terrain import quality is perfect, I just can spend the time importing hundreds of tiny little land plots. It's unfortunate because in older versions of Sketchup you could bring in way larger swaths of terrain at once.
That would be super cool, but what I am really trying to figure out is not how I can do this, but how people teaching can make these in class with their students. If there was a way that I could do it easily in Sketchup I'd be able to accomplish that goal....
So I am trying to find a good workflow to mill 3D terrain models on my Handibot CNC, like this one:
I know you can grab Google Earth terrain in Sketchup, but you can only grab tiny squares at a time. I am trying to do multiple states at once. There doesn't seem to be a way to automate the import of GE terrain....
That being the case, I found a way that you can get color heightmaps from Google Maps, like this one:
What I'd like to do is have Sketchup automatically create terrain based on an image like that. Each color is a particular elevation (red is the highest, blue the lowest)
This is going to be used in a classroom so students can learn about their local geography.
If anyone has a good workflow for something like this, I'd greatly appreciate it. Once I get a terrain model, getting it into milling is easy....
That is quite impressive! Thanks again, I've learned something new!
Incredible! How did you do that? With Artisan tools, or did you just break that arc I made up into triangle somehow?
I'll give it a try with the knife tool. If anyone wants to take a crack at it, here's the model:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/g66rfmkzrlprlc0/Justin%20Reduced.skp
Well, unfortunately that is a 3D scan that I can't do again... That was my first thought though.
So here's a challenge: Does anyone have any ideas for repairing this had brim? I've tried with Artisan tools and I haven't had much luck....
That sort of works... It looks like it only gets components at the top level though.... What I'd love to be able to do is have something that saves out all components in sub folders with the name of their parent component...
Does anyone know of a way that you can mass save all the components in a model?
I've got a very large model that is made entirely of components that I need to save out as separate files over and over again... I know I can right click each one and click "Save As" but we're talking about 100s of files. I'd also have to do it each time I update the main model.
It would be nice to be able to filter the files based on their names too...
I've look around for different plugins and I haven't found anything just yet....
I think that may just work.... Thank you sir!
Hey all, I have a large model that is made up of a ton of components:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qsj8ci6zwmjkyih/Alex%20Shed%204.skp
There are anywhere from 2-hundreds of copies of each component in the model. What I would like to do is isolate one instance of each component so that I can save them out and mill them on a CNC machine.
I could do this manually, but it would be a pretty long process, even on this small model. Does anyone know if there is a way to do this? I poked around for a plugin but I didn't find anything....
That would be AMAZING if it did that. A plugin that did that would have a lot of use outside of just what I am doing here, for just about any CNC'd part out of wood that needs clearance this plugin would be useful. You tell me how many cases of cookies you want and your address 
Alright, I tried that, and it didn't work as well as I would have liked. When I explode the component, often times the vectors aren't registered on the face where I exploded then. A lot of times I need to "cut" them and "paste in place" them to get them to divide up the face for a push pull.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Using the guide lines would be great because I could just mass delete them after I am done editing the model. This should work pretty darn well!
That's not a bad idea actually... I might have to try that. Not as automatic as I would have liked, but I think it will work.