The Sketchup work used by Trimble in its publicity for the release of Sketchup 2014 has captured my attention since I first saw it (see attachment). Anyone know who the artist is? For being completely monochrome, there is so much richness and life in the visualization.

Mostly, I want to know where all those people came from. Those in the fore- and mid-ground look like 3D people. I'm guessing that's the case because of the way they catch/cast shadows. However, maybe they're 2D with line work and shadows added in post-processing. I've searched high and low through the 3D warehouse for such people to populate my Sketchup screen shot visualizations. I've all looked through Form Font too. No luck.

In a pinch, when there is no time to render, such entourage would bring a straight from Sketchup screen shot (with minor post-processing) to life.

Thanks.

@jean lemire said:

Hi Megapod, hi folks.

It looks like you want to make a spiral stair.

A plugin will make this faster but, if you want to learn the basics with SU native tools, try doing a radial array first and then move each copy up or down a regular amount for each move.

One trick here:

1 - Do one copy. After rotating it and moving it, you have 2 instances.

2 - Repeat step 1 using the two instances, doubling the angle and the vertical move. Now you have 4 instances.

3 - Repeat using the 4 instances, now you have 8.

Etc.

By the way, if you use circles with 24 segments (the default value) and want one step every 15° (that's 24 steps for a complete revolution), the base angle will be 15°. You can use the trick above up to when you get 8 instances, using 15°, 30° and 60° as the rotation angles. For the last step, you use 120° and 2 copies to get 3 instances of the group of 8. After moving the 2 copies to proper heigth, you now have a complete revolution of 360°. If you need more revolutions, simply copy the whole thing up as many times as you want.

To control the vertical move, you can use a vertical line that cover the full heigth and then divide it by as many steps as you require (24 in my example).

If you want a different number of steps, use a base circle with the appropriate number of segments and divide the vetical line accordingly.

Just ideas.

Thanks Jean. Well I had to resort to the old fashioned manual approach in the end, but had been hoping there was a plug-in to expedite things. Much appreciated!

I am using the rotate tool to array an object around a point in one specified increment, but also need for each of the copies to step down consecutively in the z-axis. Any ideas? Any plug-ins? Thanks!

wonder if this will help:

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=25362#p217663