@dale said:

My wife and I were staying up 4 Mile Canyon at Boulder Mountain Lodge. It was a beautiful setting, with a long history. I have been trying to find out if it was affected by the fire, but no luck so far. WE are really saddened, as they were wonderful folks who ran the lodge.

I was in just north of there on Monday, in Lefthand Canyon, and ash was coming down from the sky like light snow.

I believe Fourmile is on the other side of the ridge in this photo, that I took from Route 36 that afternoon.

Wife and kids will be traveling with me, but I will try to stop by before going out to dinner with my Boulder relatives.

I'll remove the identical image from the meet&greet thread.

@chris fullmer said:

Oh Lewis, you are such a charmer when you want to be

That's why I decided to take up fencing.

(It's actually a pity that there is no fencing style involving two-handed broadswords...an epee may not prove sufficient for particularly charming incidents.)

Actually, Mike, I got rid of the EEE-pc after the batteries died a year ago and proved as expensive to replace as buying a new one. Now I have the inevitable Core7 16" monster Sony...at least it will handle decent-sized files.

It's actually the dry season, in a dryer than normal year in Boulder now (I have an aunt who has lived in Boulder 40 years now -- spoke with her about this last night). Probably won't be a long storm, if one comes, but it could be violent.

It's a neat part of the world, if you haven't been there. The mountains rise up out of the Great Plains with no almost transition, right there.

Bring a camera and drive up into Rocky Mountain National Park, if you have an extra day. It's really nice.

@mike lucey said:

That's a good idea .... turning eye sores into art

This beat me for a competition, the BSA Unbuilt, that I won in 2009 to somewhat less publicity. You can see my unsuccessful 2010 entry here:

http://lewiswadsworth.net/lw4/2010/06/19/design/wol/

(It's not modeled in SketchUp.)

Thomas Shine overlapped me a year at YSOA. He is possibly one of the few architecture students from the school that who had a worse time there, I suspect, than I did. His final studio project's design (so the story goes) was stolen by a principal of a certain very powerful architecture firm, and used as the basis for the new World Trade Center tower. Shine was courageous enough to sue for copyright violation, despite (this is my memory of student gossip, I want to clarify) the risk that he would find himself blackballed in the profession.

The case makes for interesting reading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/arts/design/28bern.html

The certain-very-powerful firm settled.

Although I would have preferred to win the BSA Unbuilt again, I am happy to see that Thomas Shine and his firm are prospering after all that.

@davidboulder said:

+1 on interest in learning about adding lights with IES in Shaderlight.

Be sure to talk to him before he is arrested for throttling me. Apparently my review of the application at PPB2, which prompted the quoted note, really bothered the company.

http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/showthread.php?12906-Shader-light-for-Google-Sketchup

@unknownuser said:

So laptops. I see they recommend bringing your laptop but I am wondering how useful it would be to have one there. I don't own one BTW.

It would be nice to hear from those of you who have been to past Basecamps.

At this time of year in Boulder, daytime temperatures can be in excess of 90F (though likely less), with humidity of 10% or so, and nighttimes can drop into the low 50's or high 40's. Bring a jacket. It got cold at the last Basecamp in Boulder, the night of the party, which was held outside.

I brought my laptop to both basecamps, and used them in both.

Note that it also permits animation (or at least parented "control" of SketchUp models):

http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/docs/sketchupmodels.html

So this is why Google wanted SketchUp? To jumpstart the actualization of their Snowcrashfantasies?

A friend brought this to my attention...this project is used extensively to illustrate some new 3DS Max Design 2010 features in a Youtube video:

[flash=480,295:3e3kzyzd]http://www.youtube.com/v/J4tDM0D2BW8&hl=en&fs=1[/flash:3e3kzyzd]

The rendered viewport with shadows and lighting (theirlighting--added by someone else in Max, as I certainly didn't plan those down-lights on the sides of the building) is very impressive, and I wish I could justify buying a copy of the program, especially since they are advertising it with my work!

They don't mention at any time in the video that I modeled this version of the Stormhouse in something else than 3DS Max, though...an interesting omission! As I noted in the original thread on this project, it has successively has been drawn by hand and modeled in Blender, Rhino, and finally SU 6, and only belatedly imported into Max for rendering.