Artisan has been out for awhile now (since Feb. How positive has the reaction been so far to this current release of Artisan? People may not realize that probably over 50% of the work on a commercial plug-in (at least for me) is all of the extra testing, optimizing, and user interface tweaking that goes into it. I did not count the number of hours I put into it but it would definitely be measured in the 100’s and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was over 1000 hours (not including the time that was spent on the original SDS plug-in) There were months when I did not work on it at all but then there would be long stretches where I would work on it 4-5 hours each day. What amount of work actually goes into developing a commercial plug-in, like Artisan?Īrtisan was in development for about two years during my spare time. A name like ‘Artisan’ is also not specific to a certain feature of the plug-in which allows me to add any type of feature to it without having to change the name again. The name ‘Artisan’ means ‘craftsman’ and reflects the user’s new freedom to create models in SketchUp that may not have been possible before inside of SketchUp. I felt that ‘Subdivide and Smooth 2’ was a bit too long and did not really capture the essence of the plug-in. I had considered making the sculpting and soft transformation tools as separate plug-ins from the subdivision tools but I found that all of these tools complemented each other so well that it just made sense to make it all into one package.
SKETCHUP ARTISAN CODE
I was able to re-use a lot of the subdivision code from SDS, although in Artisan, I optimized and enhanced every original feature that was included in SDS and added lots of new features including sculpting, soft selection, soft move, soft rotation, polygon reduction and make planar. When I began work on Artisan, it became apparent that this plug-in would become much more than just a subdivision plug-in. In addition, I found creative ways to solve problems and add cool features even though my programming knowledge was quite limited.Īrtisan is actually the follow-up to my popular plug-in, “Subdivide and Smooth” (SDS) which is still available at. With SkIndigo, I am very proud of the sophisticated user interface that was developed using Ruby and HTML Web-dialogs. They are features that I myself always wanted to see in SketchUp and it feels great to have implemented so many of these in one plug-in package. Many of the features in Artisan are long-standing feature requests that will likely never be implemented into the SketchUp core application. With Artisan, I am most proud of the ability it gives to SketchUp users to freely model in ways that the native tool set does not allow. I am most proud of Artisan (commercial) and SkIndigo (free).
SKETCHUP ARTISAN FREE
Which of your plug-ins are you most proud of, both free and commercial? Now, I have written about nine plugins altogether. However, once I got into it, I was hooked. It was quite a challenge since I had no knowledge of Ruby or the SketchUp API at the time, plus, I had very little formal programming education (something that still holds me back to this day). Therefore, I decided to try writing an exporter myself (which of course became SkIndigo). I immediately loved both of these applications but there was no way to render from SketchUp to Indigo. At the time, I was toying with the idea of starting a visualization side business and I stumbled onto SketchUp and Indigo Renderer. I started my first plug-in, SkIndigo, in 2005. How long have you been developing and writing SketchUp plug-ins for?
Writing plug-ins has allowed me to continue my programming interest in a fun and relaxing way where I have the freedom to develop whatever I want. I probably started programming around the age of 8 or 9 but (for some weird reason) I decided not to pursue it in college. When did you first become interested in writing plug-ins?Ī big part of me always wanted to become a computer programmer. I have a degree in Civil Engineering and was a Structural Engineer for about 8 years up until May 2011 after which I decided to pursue a new career in the 3D visualization industry and also devote more time to writing SketchUp plug-ins. Please introduce yourself and tell us bit about yourself and your background?Ĭurrently, I live in a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada called Hepburn.
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