Surprisingly Useful: Choosing a Color Scheme for your Home

We are in the midst of getting the exterior of our house painted before the winter comes. Choosing a color scheme for the outside of your house is a 5-10 year commitment so we paid a "colorist" (a supposed color expert) to tell us what color our house should be. To be honest, I don't really mind what color our house is as long as my wife is happy which she certainly wasn't when I get test samples of the suggested colors and painted small patches of the side of our house. So much for the expert; we were going to have to work it out for ourselves but we both had trouble envisaging what any specific color set was going to look like on our house.

I already had a partial model of our house in SketchUp but I had been modeling from the inside out so it didn't yet have any outside details (or roofs). Last night I spent a couple of hours adding enough detail to allow my wife to see what various color schemes might look like. Using PhotoShop to analyze the RGB values of online paint chips we could then apply the paint to our virtual house and get a good idea of what they might look like. We think we're going with blues rather than the trendy mauves the colorist had suggested. At least we now know what the house will look like and all without getting paint drips on my jeans.

Surprisingly Useful: Movie Prop Replicas

For 5 years around the turn of the Millennium I had an obsession with movie prop replicas. At the time I was a huge Star Wars nut and the urge started with wanting a screen accurate copy of Luke's lightsaber hilt. If you dug around on the net there was some information about the raw materials were used to make this kind of prop and how to find the parts you needed to build your own - this was in the days before you could just order an official, screen accurate prop from Amazon.com - the quest for parts was half the fun.

It turns out there was a large, underground (since the hobby is on the fringe of copyright violation) community of prop enthusiasts. In the end, as official licencing moved in on our geek preserve, the community fractured and viciously fell out with each other. I'm sure it's still out there but it put me off forum communities for a long time - by the time I left people were as rude to each other as big-brother contestants.

But back to the plot. In its hay-day, we shared information with each other including, in many cases, construction plans. Before embarking on any project I used to like to create my own plans and diagrams which I shared via a Geocities site: - they tell us Geocities is going away but you can still get to my old site for the moment.

In those pre-SketchUp days I used a 2D program I got from Office Depot for a few dollars called DeltaCad. It wasn't especially complicated but I got pretty good using it and it took me back to my favorite subject in high-school, long before technical design was something you did on a computer; technical drawing with T-squares and French Curves. I used to enjoy making the plans more than making the props so when I started to play with SketchUp it was only natural that I should model some of these objects. Highly detailed construction plans already existed and it was a fun learning experience to model some of these complex structures using that information.

I doubt I'll do back to prop-building as a hobby (it is expensive and very time consuming) so my half-built Ghost Busters Proton Pack may remain boxed up in my basement for many years to come. However, if I do ever try to complete it the SketchUp model I made with each structure on a separate layer will provide a complete build plan. Then again, building the SketchUp model itself scratched the prop itch and was just as fulfilling as building the model for real. Now I've shared it on the 3D warehouse people should be able to benefit from my work in perpetuity and as new details emerge the plans the model too can evolve. I only wish such a resource existed when I was an active builder, although, my wife is glad it didn't or our house may have been full of geeky Daleks and Sci-Fi blasters - at least I can keep my models these days hidden on my hard drive when visitors come over.

Surprisingly Useful: Will The Plasma TV Fit In Our Car?

When my well-to-do friend wanted to upgrade his 50" plasma TV from 720 to 1080 (my eyes can't be that refined - I still can't see the difference) he offered me his old one for a fifth of the retail price. How could I pass it up? My only issue was how to get it home.

This was more than a year ago when my SketchUp skills were developing and rudimentary. But better modelers than me generously share their models on the 3D warehouse. A few minutes searching located a detailed model of my wife's old car (there was no way a 50" plasma TV would fit in my two-seater roadster, although, I did move an Ikea desk with it that was bigger than the whole cockpit but that's a whole different story that still frightens me when I think about it). A few minutes more on the warehouse and I had a generic flat screen TV that I could scale to the exact measurements listed on the Pioneer web site.

Even with my basics skills I could then virtually check that the TV would fit in the car before I turned up at my friend's house in real life with the confidence that I had the tools for the job.

SketchUp proved its value again for answering a real world issue quickly and effectively.

Surprisingly Useful: Designing a Gallery Wall

I love to find practical uses for SketchUp in my own, non-designery life. On short notice my wife got asked to exhibit some of her photography for one night at a gallery event. She was having trouble visualizing how different sized and styles of frames and mats would look together so I knocked up a quick model to help her. In the end we narrowed it down to white or black gallery style frames which is what this simple animation shows. It really helped her get past a mental block in the planning stage and last night we hung the real thing - let me tell you, it takes a lot longer to print, mat, frame and hang 10 photographs in real life than it does in SketchUp.

It did get me thinking though, as our walls at home are a little bare despite us having quite a lot of affordable art stashed away in closets this same idea could easily be applied to the model of our home. It could settle years long arguments between my wife and myself about what looks good where without having to put a ton of holes in the walls.