Creating Spaceship Orbiter using Sketchup

This time, I will present a step by step illustration on how to create a spaceship Orbitter using Google Sketchup. Sketchup can be downloaded from Sketchup.google.com and this is an Immersive Education course taught at Boston College (ImmersiveEducation.org).

First, I created a cylinder.

Using the Autofold tool, I made the top pointy.

I thought creating a triangle and merging it into the tower would make the wings.

By rotating the tiangle a little and using the move tool, I successfully embraced the wings into the cylinder.

I changed the camera angles to make sure everything was measured accurately, and used the rotate tool to make everything perpendicular to each other.

I drew four circles on the bottrom, and used the pull tool to pull them out.

For the third wing (center wing) I just used the pencil tool and drew directly on the surface of the cylinder.

Once the base was complete, I used the offset tool to decorate the spaceship.

Once all the patterns were engraved, I used the paint tool to color them.

Just to make things took more appealing, I drew a flaming pettern on the bottom, and colored it.

By using the Match Photo tool, I imported a picture of space, and played around with the angle to create a cool effect.

Google Sketchup Pt.2

Today, I would like to go through the "familiar with sketchup" portion of the tutorials listed on Google Sketchup's main web page. (http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en_uk/training/videos/familiar_with_gsu.html).
This is an Immersive Education course taught at Boston College, (ImmersiveEducation.org), and the software for sketchup can be downloaded at sketchup.google.com.


First section is farily easy, one can easily copy structures by holding CTRL while moving the object.
This could be done multiple times on arrays.

Using the rotate function allows one to create copies in a circular pattern.

Mirrorring sturctures can be done by using the scale tool. Simply copy an object, and scale is to the other side, until the value shows -1.

Layer is a useful tool that allows one to eliminate some walls TEMPORARILY. It can be done by opening the layers tool and assigning names to the walls. Once this is done, one can simply check or uncheck boxes to see or remove the walls.

Inferencing is done by hovering the mouse on certain edges for over 2 seconds, to acheve more accurate measurements.

Autofold is done by holding alt and pulling out the inner patterns.

Intersecting structures and thn separating then create a whole new figure.

Lastly, the match photo tool can be used to import an image, set as the background, so one could easily mimic the buildings or any other objects depicted on the image.

Educational Spacewalk Simulations STS-125

The Spacewalk Simulations STS-125 can be downloaded from here. Also, I would like to mention that this is an Immersive Education course taught at Boston College (ImmersiveEducation.org). Using his program, we can act as the members of the STS astronaut team, in order to perform the given task. The missions are usually having to find certain objects in the game, and the objects are shown on the right side of the screen. As the screen shots illustrate, many different points of views can be taken in order to aid the mission, and choices between AV1 and AV2 are also present. Using the mouse, exploring the space is almost as easy as that of Second Life, and the light tool is useful when exploring dimmer areas. Different ships have different missions, which gives the users an urge to explore the space further. Overall, this program was an outstanding example of using 3D to help educating visually.