Google Showcasing SketchUp Designer Creations

• November 4th 2011

by Shilpi Paul

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SketchUp is a 3D modeling tool that has been helping architects, city planners and even potters visualize everything from entire cities to coffee cups for the past decade. The way it works is that users map out a two-dimensional outline of their concept and then use SketchUp’s “push/pull” tools to expand the image into three dimensions. Two million people use it every week and for residential real estate fanatics, the program can help you design a house, a kitchen or even the perfect dining table.

Now, Google is trying to showcase SketchUp users who have actually created what their design illustrates. The massive search engine, which markets the program and offers a free version called Google SketchUp, is calling out to professionals and amateurs to submit their initial design and final product for their Make Ideas Real project.

From Google SketchUp’s blog:

Use this form to tell us your SketchUp story. Send us an image of a SketchUp model with an accompanying photograph that shows your completed project. Anything goes for subject matter; architecture, archeology, industrial design, construction, woodworking, personal fabrication, model railroading, mousetrap design — as long as SketchUp helped you make it, we want to see it. Professionals, semi-professionals and proud amateurs are all welcome.

You can find thousands of models created by SketchUp users on Google’s 3D warehouse, but the contest designers will create a more browsable online showcase to show the transition from idea to reality. In the warehouse, users can place models at the appropriate location on Google Earth and hopefully they’ll do the same for the Make Ideas Real project.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/google_wants_to_showcase_sketchup_designs/4511.