Chapter 16. Ten Plugins, Extensions, and Resources Worth Getting

In This Chapter

  • Places to find more components

  • Scripts that make your life easier and add power to SketchUp

  • Software for making your SketchUp views look like photographs

  • Fun hardware add-ons

The really great thing about SketchUp's price is how much room it frees up in your budget for nifty add-ons. This chapter is a list of ten such nifty add-ons, along with a little bit of information about them and where you can go to find them. I've split them up into four categories, just to make things clearer: components, Ruby scripts, renderers, and hardware.

Components

Why make your own sofa when you can grab one from somewhere else? If the zillions of components that you can download from the Google 3D Warehouse aren't enough for you (see Chapter 5 for more information about this), the following sections provide some additional Web sites where you can buy what you need.

Form Fonts

Form Fonts (www.formfonts.com) is a Web site that sells components "all you can eat, buffet style." You pay a (surprisingly low) monthly fee, and you have access to thousands of high-quality models of just about anything you can think of. Form Fonts' international team of modelers even takes requests — if you need something that they don't have, they can probably make it if you ask nicely. In addition to components, Form Fonts also has tons of extra materials you can apply to your work, as well as a growing library of styles. Even if you're not interested ...

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