I was reading Google’s Sketchup Blog recently and came across some interesting news. Google is planning on having a 2010 3d Basecamp.
3D Basecamp 2008 was integral in my training on Google Sketchup. I taught myself the program completely from playing around and watching Youtube videos. Recorded videos from 3D Basecamp 2008 allowed me to see someone using the program live and demonstrated skills and techniques not readily available. Whenever I teach a Sketchup class I tell all my students to immediately go to the 3d Basecamp website and watch the videos. There are over ten and they are all over an hour. The benefit I say is that it will answer plenty of questions you have and bring up things you didn’t even think of.
Sketchup has so many shortcuts and multiple ways to accomplish one task. 3d Basecamp helped streamline my process. This first Basecamp was aimed at more of the beginning side. 3d Basecamp 2010 is aimed more at the Sketchup Power users. There is an application for attending! I actually had to send the registration team an example of something that I modeled.
Sketchup Blog describes “This time, we’d like to welcome SketchUp experts – ninjas, gurus, fanatics, la crème de la crème – to join us. We want to see what will happen when everyone in attendance is a SketchUp master.” They are hoping for an “unconference” in which there is tons of user participation and discussion.
I applied. After closely reading the guidelines of the application I failed. I was supposed to send a link to an Image’s direct URL. I sent them to one image on my Flickr page. Oh well. The conference is in Boulder, CO. I live in Washington, DC. Also it is the first 3 days of September. I am getting married August 21st. A lot of variables that don’t add up.
Either way I am sure Google will be recording these sessions for future use and learning goodness. I hope to see some really great tricks that I can incorporate into my workflow. For those that are interested in the 2008 library of knowledge go here.
Google Sketchup is a big portion of my life. I use it every day at work and has gotten me to the position I am in. I am certainly an advocate of the program and I hope that more people open their eyes to how powerful it is.
If you are up for the challenge and want to go to the conference, applications start here
I read a really fun post over at Gamesradar entitled, “The Top 7 Historical Figures Defamed by Video Games.” Most of the references were obscure or really bizzare. A lot were Asian warlords. Go ahead and check it out. It got me thinking about the time I wasted playing the game Caesar in Elementary School. I have a feeling this was a really key moment for me in starting to like Ancient History.
I was brought onto this game after I had mastered Sim City. I had created the ultimate city and was now ready for a new challenge. Let’s create a city in Ancient Rome. I had a blast. I wasted countless hours developing the ultimate city state. With a little help from some online gaming websites I had figured out the perfect formula.
Soon I branched out to other games like Sid Meier’s Civilization. I am currently working with Rob Cloutier, a 3d designer who worked on the game. Please visit his website www.3dhistory.com to see some of his work. He’s very talented. Civilization took the history angle to a new level. Now I was starting multiple cities and managing entire military campaigns. Beneath the framework of fun, a lot of educational building blocks came into place. You had to elevate from the stone age to the bronze age, by discovering certain aspects of science. You could only progress in your building by collecting more natural resources. Pretty tremendous all around.
Eventually you can find a way to reshape a lot of the historical landscape. I actually conquered the planet Earth with the United States. It was pretty awesome. USA! USA! USA!
Shawn Graham at Electric Archaeology has taken this to a new level. Many of these games allow for modification of your own campaigns. Shawn has added campaigns to Civilization IV and Caesar IV and began using them as teaching tools for his students. He believes that he can edit parameters of the game to help teach his students different aspects of Roman History.
“I want to use Caesar IV as a simulation to explore Roman economics. The idea is, I’ll get my students to play this scenario, and in playing it, it highlight/contrast game mechanics with the current understanding of how the Roman economy works (if you think modern economic thought is dry, you ain’t seen nuthin’ till you’ve read the ancient version… gaming economics ought to be way more fun for my students!)”
As great as it is to use Video Games to teach history, it is also fun to just ride around cause havoc. My friend Doyle just bought Red Dead Redemption. The game is Grand Theft Auto set in the Wild West. I played for about 10 minutes and was immediately hooked. Correlating with all 3d history, video games give us not only a chance to see the past, but to interact with it. Due to the lowering attention span of our youth and the increasing amount of technology in schools, I would not be surprised to see video games being used as a teaching tool 10 years from now. Educational games are already out there, let’s just bridge the gap.
All of this has gotten me wanting to play some games. I am going to dust off my copy of Age of Empires!
Check out that picture. That is from the Sistine Chapel Virtual Tour. I found this while reading the The History Blog and might I say this is spectacular. Created by a team from the University of Villanova, they had 2 years and unprecedented access. From tons of pictures and painstaking effort an amazing 3d recreation of the Sistine Chapel is in front us of
Honestly I have never seen the inside of the chapel. I have never been to Europe and really all I have seen is the picture God reaching out, ya know the famous part at the top of the building. I try to prop up 3d History in the realm of recreation. This is what is so amazing about sites like this. This is history that is still available for us to see today. If somehow war was to hit Italy and this building would be destroyed, that would be an ungodly tragedy.
Being Catholic myself, some people try to say that you shouldn’t need huge buildings and fancy churches to worship God. Oddly enough though, stepping foot in buildings like this you really can sense the presence. The high ceilings and the beautiful artwork puts your mind in a different place. I am set to be married this summer at the Basilica in Baltimore. The Basilica has some beautiful domes that were actually designed by Latrobe. Not being a Gothic style cathedral it really is going to add something spectacular to the ceremony.
Buildings like this should be able to be preserved forever. Thanks to projects like this by the team from Villanova this is one more piece of history we can hopefully save.
This is certainly one of the places everyone needs to see, but for now the 3d tour can make due.
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This is a video from a collection of 3d Renders created by Bernard Frischer and the Rome Reborn Project at the University of Virginia. This is just a taste. I am going to create a whole feature on this project in the near future.
For a little more information on the man himself, he was interviewed for a podcast over at Educause
Just wanted to show everyone the progress coming along on my recreation of Temple II at Tikal. This project should be finished by the end of the week and a full post will run through my whole work flow. Thanks again to CyArk for all cloud point data and support
Dr. Shawn Graham from the University of Manitoba was kind of enough to feature me as a guest blogger over at his website Electric Archaeology. I wrote about my experience getting into the world of 3d History and my personal background. Most of the post is gleaned from my About Me Section. Hopefully I can post again over on his site as I develop more original content. Tikal Temple II is shortly around the corner
Shawn Graham is a Registered Professional Archaeologist in North America, and was a Member of the Institute for Archaeologists (formerly, Institute of Field Archaeologists) in the UK from 2004-2009. Check him out at http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com
His site feature a lot of his personal research. One of my favorite things is that he uses modifications of computer games to teach his classes. Pretty wild.
Check out my post in his feature “New Talent Tuesdays”
Another great addition to Google Earth has been published. Following in the footsteps of the Ancient Rome layer in Google Earth; Google has released the newest layer to their 3d Building Section of Google Earth. Although this is how the monuments look today, you still can get a great idea of the what these magnificent monuments looked like in full 3d. You can explore the Parthenon, Herodeion Theater, and the entire Acropolis.
As much as I am aspiring to add buildings of my own to Google Earth. Additions along these lines are great examples to aspire to. Although now it seems as though one more thing has been taken! First the entire city of Rome, circa 320 AD, now the Acropolis. For more visual exploration of this site, check out Acropolis360, a fully 360 degree panoramic tour of the site
