At £30 a copy, you really have to want the book!

Apparently, the bookies already have her as favourite to win.

I loathe these "reality" talent shows with a passion, but my wife adores them. I did catch most of her performance though, walking in to the room just after she started singing having preferred to do the washing-up rather than watch the show.

She is good, but it is such a shame that to get any further she has to endure the indignity of the rest of this circus

@linea said:

3DW does raise a question about what is deemed as commercial use. I'm probably about to show my own naivety here. Can entourage in an image be classed as commercial, as you could argue that you are not actually selling those components? For instance, an architect visualises a building. The visual contains trees, people, cars and furniture from 3DW (I know Formfonts is different because FF are just renting you the model, is that right Alan?). But the architect is commercially selling the building design, not the entourage. Grey area? Even if its totally black and white I don't think it would be worth anyone's time and money to try to sue over it.

I'm pretty sure that this is clear, at least here in the UK. If the building is obviously the main subject of the visualisation, then using the entourage is not breaching commercial usage terms. If the entourage itself is the subject of the visualisation, then commercial usage terms will have been breached (depending on the licence itself of course.)

3DW entourage is not commercial, but I suspect that a similar situation would prevail if you really wanted to pusue this through the courts, but you probably weaken your case by posting on the 3DW.

In the case of the watch, the site is Canadian (though I first thought it was asian from the parent company name), so I would imagine similar laws pertain.

Seriously though, a polite approach to the guy may be all that is required, so try that first. Offer him a link in exchange from your own site if you have one. Links help improve web search rankings, so you'd both benefit.

I fully agree with you on the professional courtesy aspect.

I am currently re-working my own web and am using a number of 2D, 3D and animation examples of work that I did for a range of architects, facilities managers and interior designers.

In all cases I have asked for permission to use the material and have provided proper credit to the designer. The proper courtesy, I believe. When I post the web site, I will also contact them for a reaction and will respect requests for changes before I do a formal launch.

@gaieus said:

Not at all -as this sentence is also in the TOS of the Warehouse:

"end users may not aggregate the Content obtained from the 3D Warehouse for redistribution, and may not use or distribute Content obtained from the 3D Warehouse in a mapping or geographic application or service without Google’s prior authorization."
Unfortunately there's no "legal" way for John to do anything as a render of the watch is a "derivative" work of his model and he has granted rights to Google and all its end users to use his model for that.

As I understand it, making an alteration to a model of any kind classes the altered model as "derivative". The derivative work would then fall outside the Google restrictions, so the person doing the alteration can then do anything they want with those models - including charging for copies.

Of course, I'm no lawyer (and copyright law is a legal minefield) but there are plenty of people prepared to exploit ambiguity (legal loopholes) and the work of others for their own profit.

The whole Google Warehouse copyright thing is a real concern.

I applaud the intention - allowing anyone to freely use and modify models in their own scenes - but the door is open for the models to be taken and used commercially.

I read somewhere recently on website that one quick way to make model collections for sale is to download the models from Google Warehouse, make a small alteration to each model, then sell them as your own and without crediting or compensating the original author. Apparently, as the Google Warehouse license is written, this is perfectly legal.

I won't be putting many of my models in the Warehouse.

I quite like these renders, apart from the mixed perspective on the background across the water ... and the people.

I understand why people are included in renders in this style - I used the technique myself until the fateful day that my wife looked at a render and said "is it haunted?"

What!?

"Well", she said, "why are there all those ghosts?"

We forget that the untrained eye does not see the same that we do. And most people will be viewing renders with an untrained eye. Since she made those comments, I have several architects and interior designers ask me not to use this style of people as they find that most people are distracted by the figures and focus on the curious representation rather than on the scene itself.

Just something to keep in mind.

Informatix have announced a monthly prize draw to run until further notice. Just download a demo copy of Piranesi to be in with a chance of winning a licensed copy.

404 - File or directory not found.

(www.piranesi.co.uk)

Just a thought. Why not have a forum section where people could promote themselves? That way, anyone who did not want to be bothered by such rampant commercialism could ignore that section all together. The only additional rule required would be that the commercial aspect must have some relationship to Sketchup (i.e. selling entourage would be OK, but selling cars would not!)

Perhaps the posts in this section could be automatically deleted after a sufficient period (6 months?)

And maybe only members who have made a meaningful contribution to SCF would be allowed to post there.

Granted, but you have no shoes and socks.

I wish for some work.

All the best for a grim looking 2009 everybody. Here's hoping to a much brighter future, somewhen.

MicroGDS has many Sketchup like features. It is a full blown CAD app with fully integrated 3D, but some of the tools are very similar.

For example, MicroGDS had an equivalent to PushPull long before Sketchup was even just an idea. It goes by the less catchy name of Face>Move. Entities are structures much like groups and components too, called objects, instances and assemblies in MicroGDS. MicroGDS handles much more complex models and has photo-realistic rendering built-in (using the Lightworks engine.)

It is by the same people responsible for Piranesi.

Check out http://www.informatix.co.uk

... they broke ruby. All ruby scripts will need to be re-coded from scratch. (Which of course means SU7 will have LESS functionality than SU6 with all those wonderful scripts.

@unknownuser said:

One of the new features will be called Nibble, This feature will progressively Eat away at your model until eventually there is nothing left. The process can be controlled and the amount of nibble and the rate of nibble and when to stop the nibble are user controlled.

I also heard that they were thinking of features called "lick" and "suck" until the marketing people thought about the slogan ...

@aadbuild said:

This is just a guess, but I am pretty sure Aidan has a new Sketchup book coming out in the next couple of months, and if history repeats than SU7 comes out within a week of its launch.

Publication date pushed back to March 2009. Read in to that what you will ...

http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470277394.html

Congratulations - and thank you for sharing.

@marian said:

What a bunch of crap, everyone knows that the end of the world will come in 2012 when the Earth will run out of Mayan dates, i'm soooo scared....
Boy..people are dumb..

Actually, I hear that the real experiments won't start until October.

And, some scientists are saying that it will be four years (2012) before the catastrophic effects are felt.

....I too am really, really scared.

Absolutely stunning, stuff. Clearly a labour of love. I am VERY impressed.

Last summer, I decided to try life without a car. I'm self-employed and had contrived to arrange my working commitments so that I could handle the majority from my home office. Should have been a doddle.

Far from it. I stuck it out as long as I cold, but public transport here in the North of England is absolutely dire. Unreliable, infrequent, filthy, uncomfortable, inadequate, overcrowded, inconvenient, expensive. I could go on, but suffice to say that I recently took delivery of a new car, almost a year to the day after I gave up my previous vehicle.

It is wonderful to have the freedom and control over my ability to get anywhere, any time, at MY convenience.