Google Sketchup and Google Earth
I discovered Google Sketchup about a week ago and I had a little time this weekend to learn how to use it. I wanted to make a copy stand with two photoflood lights, a camera on a tripod, and an easel with a drawing on it. I imported some basic models, but I couldn’t find a photoflood light so I made one by cutting a sphere in half and tacking on a cylander in the back and placing a lightbulb in the center. I thought it would be neat to do a fly-by animation. The free version of Sketchup does not have an animation feature. So, I placed the model in Google Earth and used SnapZ Pro to do a screen capture as I manually zoomed in and out. I edited the movie in iMovie and converted it to Flash with the Flash Video encoder.
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