COVER STORY

On the starting of the year we found that the Google Model your Town Competition was going on. SketchUp users of all over the world of Cauquenes, Chile to Cape Town, South Africa to Suva City, Fiji to Alirajpur, Madhya Pradesh, India to Aberdeen, Scotland to Tallin, Estonia and Burlington came to model their town in 3D. The winner was Jorge De Albertis Bettocchi, a 38 year-old corporate business attorney, modeled the Barranco District of Lima in Peru among the five finalists. On the month of January, another great news came was that the cross media artist were using 3D warehouse for electronic performance. That was a definite benefit of SketchUp.

Before Winter Olympic had started you could take a virtual tour of the Game stadium, game village and other official venues of the Olympic on SketchUp. At the end of January, the Custom made Furniture Design Competition took place. On February 2010 they declared Jory Brigham of “Jory Brigham Unique Custom Furniture !!!!” winner. Google 3D Warehouse and Building Maker got some useful update at that time.

The February month started with an update of Google Earth to hide the 3D building. With some other events, the final maintenance release of SketchUp 6 Pro took place. Many 3D models of stadiums, cities were creating continuous madness among the SketchUp folks all over the world. On the March, Google organized Google Mapper/Modeler Summit in Zurich, Switzerland. Some of the most talented Mappers and Geo-Modelers came together in Zurich to celebrate their work and talk about how to make mapping and modeling better. Attendees came from all over the world (Peru, Mongolia, Germany, Ukraine, Taiwan and Tanzania to name a few places) and had lots of opinions on how to improve our programs.

3D Warehouse went social on April with the integration of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and many other social networking websites. Along with this more sharing options in it like Google Reader and Google Buzz were introduced. Various nice plug ins like Fullmer, Instant Roof, Fur Maker, Round Corner were introduced to give the flexibility and freedom to the creativity of SketchUp artist.

In between, Google announced Sketch a Space design competition collaborating with Project Easter Seal. That was an initiative to encourage autistic society. The winner of the competition was "The Ultimate Video Game Room" by John Paul Saikali.

Google also organized a training session for kitchen and bath designers to incorporate SketchUp in their work flow on the month of May. SketchUcation hold a nifty challenge ‘SketchUp to Piranesi Competition’ to celebrate the features of Piranesi plug in 2010. in July Google hosted first Google Geo Teacher Institute where particiant got hand on experience with SketchUp, Google Earth and Google Maps. With the upgrade web browser and the Google Earth Plugin can enjoy the 3D Earth experience directly in Google Maps.

SketchUp also introduced badge in the 3D Warehouse which helped to accomplish and establish the reputation of the SketchUp users in the community. A team of Googlers traveled to Peru and celebrated the winner (and community) of the Google International Model Your Town Competition there.

September was an eventful month for SketchUp. The grand event of the world of SketchUp took place in Boulder, Colorado – the three day long 3D Basecamp of Google SketchUp 2010. In this gala occasion SketchUp folks of all over the world and had a wonderful time. But the show stealer was the unveiling of SketchUp 8. With various new features like geo location modeling, color imagery, solid tools and many more SU 8 became the talk of the 3D town.

How can we forget that our very own SketchUp ur Space came out in that month? The SketchUp users of all over the world get a common place to discuss about their favorite subject – SketchUp. With time SketchUp released many other languages than Engilsh like  French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese and many more.

In the mean time Google announced the 3D Maze by Corre as the champion of Lamp Designing Challenge. SketchUp also arranged an online vote to choose the super modeler among the geo modeler of all over the world. SketchUp along with Ponoco arranged 3D Printing Challenge in the month of October. Ed Lewis was announced as the champion of this competition. Google Earth also launched its new version which has a great collaboration with SketchUp 8 in geo modeling.

Zeljko Zdravkovic announced as the super modeler for geo-modeling his hometown of Belgrade, Serbia. SketchUp and 3D Warehouse included in the Google Apps list which was a status of honor for our favorite designing tool.

Google SketchUp along with NOARD made an initiative to track Santa Clause all over the world. It was an event of fun which added extra glory in the holiday season. Various cities got its 3D life on Google Earth in SketchUp like Fredericton, Canada, Barcelona, Dortmund, Germany, New York City, Nashville, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Dallas, Lisbon, Stockholm, Cincinati, Madrid, Vienna, Athens, Venice, Rotterdam, Berlin, Stuttgart, Seville, Yokohama, Sendai, Saitama and Paris. In this way SketchUp completed an eventful year of its life.