Misha's Blog

I am collaborating on a public art project with 3 other artists. It has been a struggle, but the goal is worth it: a mobile sauna that will keep us going through the winter. As another Syracuse winter circles the runway for a soon-to-be landing, we keeping our Kickstarter campaign going strong in order to make the deadline of January 2nd and to reach our funding goal. But the winter is coming, and we are forced to work on the sauna before we get our funding. Google SketchUp is helping us achieve our goal by letting us quickly try out different internal layouts.

Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing policy means that we won’t get any of our pledged funding if we don’t reach our full goal. Despite this, we have no choice but hope for the best and work on the sauna anyway because the winter is coming! We’ve used up our modest grant from SU’s VPA, and are going into personal dept in order to at least protect what we’ve done so far from the rapacious winter. We built the outer shell on top of our trailer, and will soon be able to fire our stove to keep warm during construction. In order to communicate to our supporters the imminent mobile sauna experience, we decided to create a 3D sketch of what the internal space will be like. Incidentally, a very successful kickstarter campaign called PrintrBot discusses Google SketchUp as an accessible modeling tool, and I decided to try it.

I installed the free version of the program, and spent about an hour watching the 4 introductory how-to videos (here is part 1). Google SketchUp has a lot of really nice snapping behavior allowing me to easily align edges of objects. Google SketchUp is smart: in the middle of drawing and edge I can hover over other edges to find their mid-points, and then Google SketchUp generates guide-lines on the fly. The program provides an easy interface to Google’s 3D Warehouse which allowed me to download a variety of human models and play with different configurations of internal sauna seating. Trying out different combinations of seating arrangements was straight forward, and every team member’s ideas could be quickly tried out. In the end, we went with the most colorful example for our Kickstarter update.