Coastal Concepts now provides a service placing your building/s into Google Earth, allowing them to be viewed by millions of people all over the world. This amazing marketing tool allows people to zoom in on Google Earth and see your building in 3D, fly around it, check out the views, then click on the building itself to read a blurb about it and link to your website. This is 3D advertising that can reach people on the other side of the world who are just looking round in your neck of the woods or using Google earth to plan thier holiday there.

Imagine your Hotel is in Auckland, someone can fly in on Google Earth and see your Hotel in 3D. They can read reviews by people that have stayed there and link through to your website.

We are currently placing buildings owned by The Eastland Group in Gisborne, New Zealand, into Google Earth. This will lift the profile of thier commercial premises and help put them on the map (literally).

Here is a shot of the first building at 2 Crawford Road:

We now allow you to see what an alteration to a particular building might look like based on photographic information.

We use the latest graphical manipulation tools to achieve this, allowing you and your clients to decide on features before engaging in full architectural work or the actual building process itself. Get it looking the way you want before you start.

These before and after images show the joining of two, previously seperate, buildings. The client was able to tweak details so that when building commences, they will know exactly what they want and can be confident they will get it.

Before:

After:

You can now get the Coastal Concepts Blog direct to your reader via our RSS feed

This will allow you to recieve updates about whats happening at Coastal Concepts, what developments are being made in our services, and lots of other issues relevant to the 3D modeling and presentation world.

Flick me an email if you have any issues

If you haven't used RSS feeds before, check out this video. And then get with the program!

Okay okay, so I'm a bit late, but the blog is up and running now so better late than never, and what better subject to begin on than the introduction of Google Sketchup 7.1

With many new features its good to see SU 7.1 making some steps in what many will agree is the right direction.

Some of the things we appreciate most about SU 7.1 here at Coastal Concepts are:

• the ability to render models more efficiently, making it easier to orbit and work on big models with less computing power.
• A raft of small modifications have been made to make general drawing quicker, and even more intuitive.
• You can now obtain textures directly from Google Street View

As well as this, the previously under-tooled and under intuitive Layout has been given a raft of useful additions to make it more user friendly and intuitive, its finally becoming a necessary part of the work flow.

Some excellent tools have been added for sharing and collaboration:

• Sketchup now his import/export features for the COLLADA 3D file format
• Generating reports, which allows you to obtain a spreadsheet of all the components in your model and their attributes, has been improved too.
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Many additions have been made which you can read about on Google's official site here

For a full breakdown of the changes click here

Here is a good video on youtube showing the changes:

I'm not going to go through and repeat what Google has already said about SU7.1 so click the links above to learn more.

Sketchup is an amazing tool and we believe it has the potential to be a world beater given the right tools and improvement so it is a breath of fresh air to see Google taking more steps in the right direction.

We see the improvements as positive and are extremely glad that .dxf and .dwg support has been continued in SU pro. ATTENTION GOOGLE: Please do not remove this feature.

This may be a perceptual falacy but it seems that SU 7.1 has more 'stall time' when rendering big models. It seems to render faster than before for a period of time, and then consume all processing power for about ten seconds at a time, causing it to temporarily stall, halting work. Has anyone else noticed this or am I losing my mind? Contact me if you have an opinion either way.

Regards,

Ash

Welcome to the Coastal Concepts blog!

Here we will keep you updated on what is happening at Coastal Concepts and discuss relevant issues in the 3D and visualisation arenas.
 

Keep your eyes on here to find out the latest goings on!

Ash