‘Every year again’ Merry Christmas to All of You here! !

Hi All
First Advent - Just in time for the start of the 2024 Christmas season, I wish you all a wonderful Christmas season with this nutcracker and have a good time...
[completely done with native SketchUp 2023 Pro / the hair and beard are made with Make Fur Plugin / only the walnut is taken from the 3D Warehouse: https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/.../898798a4-6a88.../Walnut
The image shown is also native SkethUp export, but overlaid with an Enscape render to get a slight sheen to the surfaces and edited in Affinity Photo 2]
Best!!

...a little Friday afternoon exercise [Victor Mousetrap]

Hi All
A small just for fun animation, made with Fredo6's Animator plugin.
Although I always struggle with the incredible amount of options and buttons of this plugin from Fredo6 I love this tool. My simple and certainly a bit silly example should motivate other users to consider using this plugin because it´s potential is so huge. It's also a good example of what SketchUp, with the right plugin of course, is capable of...
[SketchUp 2023 + Fredo6's Animator plugin, the video is made with a front-view scene without perspective. Image editing is done with Affinity Photo 2, Video edit is made with CapCut (which in this case only meant to merge 330 JPGs and add some sound mp3s), link to Fredo6´s Animator Plugin on Sketchucation]

Please Watch Video

Best

Hi All
I don't even know how many car parks I've posted here over the years – so, here we go again
I love this particular task – the scenes are always clearly defined, naturally limited by the outer walls. This almost reduces the effort to zero in most cases for the often very tedious task of creating scenic backgrounds. As a rule, these types of buildings are very similar. So if you have a certain repertoire of the components and assets typically required here, and if there is also a certain and usually given building grid, you can make rapid progress, regardless of whether there are only 300 parking spaces or 3000.
Nowadays, I focus only on specific features of each project, such as the nature of the entry and exit car ramps or the special drive-in or drive-out situations, but no longer on the actual size of the facility.

[SkUp2025 Pro / Enscape / Affinity Photo]

Hi
This Green-Wall-system is based on facade anchors and wires stretched between them. Somehow quite similar to any real actual planting method later on this model-visu approach results in a vegetation system that inevitably has to be achieved by using a linear helix-spline-curve based generation method rather than any surface filling method.
I first tried to use 3D plant models, but they were unsuitable due to the sheer amount of geometry. Instead, I used about 5 small fast and sloppy done test-PNG images to imitate the plants.

[SkUp2023/ Random Tools by Alex Schreyer/ Helix along Curve by 3Dalbertsoft/ Scale and Rotate Multiple by Chris Fullmer (which btw is a tool I love!)/ Enscape/ Affinity Photo2]
(the pictures below show my initial approach, which I am very happy with so far.)

Hi All

It's incredible that an absurdly high number of distributions of one single PNG component, created with wonderful parametric plugins, ultimately resulted in what I think is a rather attractive Advent Wreath.

[SkUp 2023 Pro / Plugins: Radnom Tools, Helix along Curve, Scale and Rotate multiple / Enscape Render / Affinity Photo 2]

Yes, it's still a bit early for Christmas decorations, but since I'm going to a very nice St. Martin's market near me today, which somehow marks the start of Advent for me, I'm taking this as an opportunity to post this as my obligatory Christmas doodle this year.

Best!

Hello everyone, just to let you know,
I have just released my third plugin, ‘EasyOffset’.
It is another very simple offset tool that joins the ranks of existing offset tools that I also use all the time.
EasyOffset creates offsets for one or more selected faces: outward by entering a positive numerical value or inward by entering a negative numerical value – nothing more, nothing less, robust and fast, no smart features or multiple offsets at the same time. Not necessarily the reinventing the the wheel , but again free and still good enough to share here and for me the first time I had ever created an icon bar.
Like my other plugins, it was developed over the last few months based on my everyday tasks.

SketchUp Plugins | PluginStore | SketchUcation

SketchUp Plugin and Extension Store by SketchUcation provides free downloads of hundreds of SketchUp extensions and plugins

(sketchucation.com)

...the completely absurd car rampage through Roadrunner Canyon continues! (because it's so much fun)

Hi all
Yesterday I actually managed to release my very first SketchUp plugin
"ViewportBuster".
Eventually it became what I wanted, what I needed and what I was able to achieve at all it passed the guidelines of the SketchUp Extension Store and especially I am happy to share my tool as one possible PNG-exporting solution with this community, especially because my previous used plugin solution came from this place here!

https://sketchucation.com/plugin/2902-viewportbuster
ViewportBuster is available as a free plugin.

The target group for this Plugin are those who rely, like me, on a cross-team but nevertheless synchronised image data export out from native SketchUp.
ViewportBuster is the small PNG exporter tool that can support all those across workplaces of different people and their individual UI setups and the correspondingly always different viewports to ensure an always predictable and consistent identical PNG export result which can even be automated to a certain extent by using individually editable presets.
Such a standardisation and synchronisation of export image data can be advantageous for everyone, but especially for those who work in larger teams and feed their image data into any downstream and equally automated production process. This could be pre-configured layout tools (e.g. InDesign) or web applications etc...
(I have released ViewportBuster for Windows versions only - simply for lack of any Mac test environment)
For me this was a pretty long, exhausting but also interesting and inspiring journey and I have not only learned a lot but above all had a lot of fun!

@alexpacio2013 said:

@HornOxx For the first question, try this plugin that distributes components along a path, both in a distributed manner and with spacing. Additionally, you can also rotate and resize the objects during distribution.
---> robo spacing tool

WUNDERBAR !!!
An absolutely fantastic recommendation, Alexpacio — and on top of that, a tool I’ve never come across anywhere before. I’m already looking forward to exploring its capabilities beyond the mundane task I’m currently working on.

Best!

Hi All - I need recommendations for two plugins.

#1 Is there a tool that can evenly distribute any randomly given number of groups (or components) between the first and last component?
#2 Is there a physics tool (similar to Sketchy Physics) that works with SkUp 2025 or later?

@Rich-O-Brien said:

I've zero knowledge of CapCut but are Effects only exposed to paid versions?

️
...as is the case with many free software versions, CapCut Free comes with a limited range of effects (transitions, text effects, etc.). The features that are only available in the Pro version are clearly marked as such.
Regardless, CapCut Free can rightly be called a full-featured app because everything you need is included.
Personally, I love this because it avoids that unbearable “PowerPoint” urge—so common among many users—to make everything fly, scroll, or dissolve in some silly way! —Here, too, the rule applies: Less is usually more!

...the completely absurd car rampage through Roadrunner Canyon continues! (because it's so much fun)

...I figured as much, since I couldn't reproduce your error message from the previous post.
Less is more, but don't worry—even the free features are still way too extensive
(By the way, if you want animated text, you don't have to use any pre-made text-templates — just use a simple standard text and animate it with keyframes instead.)

Thanks, Jo-Ke! Yes, that's exactly the look I was going for.
(the rough sketch provided by SkUp itself was extremely helpful for the preparation in GPT 5.5)

I created the canyon myself and rendered some sketchy lines. The very simple car model and the rock scaled and distributed within the canyon are taken from the 3D Warehouse.
Afterward, I used ChatGPT-5.5 to render my SkUp image again and intentionally overlaid the AI-result somewhat roughly in Affinity Photo on top of my SkUp-render and I’m happy with this result.

...I'm back from a little trip.
Congratulations on this successful test video edit. You've really incorporated quite a lot of CapCut tricks into it

@ntxdave

Too bad—your video is private, so I can't view it. But I'm glad to hear you're making progress.

️hi!
Hoping this kind of slideshow is what you had in mind.
Within CapCut I placed two photos one after the other on one track (over(or is it above?) my green background-track). This upper photo-track starts with a “pause” where only the background remains visible. Then comes the first photo, which is scaled and positioned randomly. As soon as it ends, there is another short pause. Now image #2 follows. Here, I’ve even added a fade-in and fade-out effect. Image #2 is also scaled and placed somewhat randomly...
(I’m including the YouTube link “How To Fade In and Fade Out” here)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qUwKCe846E
By the way: when you add your text track, the individual text elements are edited almost exactly the same way as the other video content you've placed.
As I mentioned earlier, I avoid overly flashy effects—the kind that have always annoyed me, even in PowerPoint
Of course, the photos can also fill the entire screen. If you “lock” this state with a keyframe, then enlarge the photo to x times its original size, and set another keyframe a few seconds later, the finished video will give the impression that you're zooming deep into the image....