Alex brings Brad from Antics Technologies into the studio to discuss how Antics 3D animation software can interface with SketchUp to bring your models to life.  If you know us, you know that we love case studies, and this episode is no different.  Production Designer Dave Blass narrates how SketchUp and Antics have transformed his profession and, more specifically, how it saved his life while he was designing the set for Bravo's "Shear Genius".

Diving into the granite bedrock below Part 1's model, Mike animates the fracture events that make geothermal energy extraction possible.  He visualizes spreadsheet data as a series of 3D point clouds representing the chronological development of these micro-fissures.  To do this, Mike uses a Ruby script from the Ruby Library Depot and a little bit more voodoo magic.Learn to import and visualize spreadsheet data in SketchUp.

Mike taps Sketchup to answer Google.org's call for animated models of the drilling and harvesting of geothermal energy.  Starting with just the geographic coordinates and .pdf files of the drilling rig, he outlines their transformation into a 3D model uploaded to Google Earth.  To be fair, he also used some voodoo.