Thanks all, for such nice comments!

It's been a long time since I've submitted something to the forum...here's a new model I made and rendered in Kerkythea.

I can't find a "trading post" on the forum so I hope this is a good category to post this!

I'm looking for an inexpensive desktop PC, around $300, that I can take to work to play around with SketchUp and Kerkythea on my lunch hour.

Please PM me if you live in the US and have something that you would like to sell. I'm in northeast Ohio.

I'm obviously not looking for a high power machine at this price, just something that will run both of these programs fairly decently without driving me crazy like the situation I have now: an old Systemax with an Intel Celeron 2.80 GHz processor, 1.25 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 256 MB video card. You can imagine what it's like...

I've looked at Ebay and Craigslist and all that, but I figure it would be even better to find an old PC from an actual SketchUp user that can give me an idea of how well it will run these two programs.

Thanks!

Love it! I'm old enough to remember these "things" - there was one in my town that was painted pink and had the doors removed. GREAT model and I really enjoyed reading the descriptions too!

It's a little hard to see...can you add some textures or show edges?

Have any of you taught SketchUp in a college-level or adult education environment?

I live within 15 miles of both a community college and a vocational school, neither of which offers any type of training in simple computer modeling, and I've been thinking about putting together a syllabus and proposing a basic-to-intermediate-level course in SketchUp to them.

Just wondering if anyone has done this, and if so, what was your experience?

Is it even worthwhile? There are so many on-line resources to learn SU that I'm wondering if anyone would pay money to take a class to learn it.

Would I need permission from Trimble to teach SketchUp?

I think that I could put together a really nice program....I've taught classes in blue-print reading, statistical process control, and other subjects as part of my former job in Quality Assurance and found it to be a lot of fun. I love SU and it would be great to introduce it to more people (and make a little pocket money at the same time)!

Seems like this topic should have come up before but I can't seem to find much in my searching...

WOW! I did not know that trick. Very handy! Thanks guys!

Here's a link to a nice video by one of my favorite SketchUp artists, 600V, showing his process for modeling a car using Artisan.

I was going to try and follow along, but already, at the very beginning, I am totally stumped by a really cool and cute move that he is beginning to make right here at about 1:49 minutes into the video:

I would love to have one of you look at this and tell me how he is able to grab this edge and move it like he does to quickly make the beveled plane that he ends up with here:

My mind is blown!

@jpalm32 said:

Real nice.
Is the ground part of Background/HRD or texture?

The ground and background on the last one is an equirectangular panorama that I grabbed from Flickr.

You can find a bunch of them here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gadl/sets/72157604695660345/?page=5
They make great backgrounds. In Kerkythea you can load them into the Spherical Sky.

Of course, Kerkythea doesn't display a ground shadow on a spherical background so you have to render some shadows on a surface and and do some photoshop work.

Thanks for all the nice comments!

I had fun making this and playing around with different styles.
Comments and criticism are welcome!

Awesome texturing...totally believable!

very nice!

I made a model and render of my Schwinn unicycle awhile ago and posted it in a couple places.

Kinda funny to see that someone is using it on Ebay to sell their uni.
Maybe this is an unexplored venue for commission work!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/20-Schwinn-Unicycle-NEW-/171016536305?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27d16140f1

<screenshot>

**Please note : The first picture in this listing is not the actual cycle as I have never put it together and it is still in the box.

really nice job!

Actually, yes! There was a caretaker nearby and I told her what happened...I was mostly worried about some animal choking on it, as I remember there were some flamingos down in the habitat too, so she found someone to go down and retrieve it and we got it back!

ha ha...not what I expected. Great model and render!

I'll never forget the time when I took our family to the zoo and my young daughter spit out her "binky" down into into the lion pit and we watched as one of them got up and lumbered over to check it out and nose it around. My daughter was hysterical "My Binky! He's going to eat my Binky! Go get it daddy!"

Yeah...right!

Nice job! I think it would look better if you had used an HDRI probe for illumination, esp if you can get a bit of light reflection off the glass.

Here are some nice HDRI probes that you can download from DeviantArt and load into Kerkythea's spherical sky:

(zbyg.deviantart.com)

very nice!