The Guest Speaker of this year's Basecamp was Bre Pettis of MakerBot who has developed a 3D Printer which interfaces with SketchUp to create plastic prototypes and plastic parts directly from SketchUp models.

The story of how they developed was fascinating, and he brought along several MakerBots which we got to try out on Tuesday,

We had been looking forward to the reports and discussions with John Bacus of SketchUp, and Bryn Fosberg of Trimble, and we weren't disappointed. They told us what was new in SketchUp, what was in planning for the short term, and about the reasoning behind the recent Trimble purchase.

They reassured us that SketchUp would keep the qualities what we like about it, while adding new features for the future - mostly focusing on making things even better for Ruby Developers like ourselves, and also working to bring SketchUp into the world of other Trimble products.

We are encouraged to continue working with SketchUp and Trimble and continue to see a great fit for our products.

Render Plus and IRender nXt were invited to be on the panel of providers of Rendering Add-ons for SketchUp. Each Rendering Add-on was asked to present their special features. For IRender nXt we talked about Fractal Trees , Lighting Channels , the new Background Wizard , and our Post Processing Features .

None of the other panel members included similar features in their presentations, and the audience comments about our Lighting Channels and other features were very encouraging..

And finally we presented ideas on attributes and reporting from SketchUp models - both using SpaceDesign, and together with our partner BimUP with whom we are creating special modelling and reporting capabilities for the Construction Marketplace.

There was much talk among the participants about BIM and about adding additional information to SketchUp models to make the smart and ready for calculations, reporting, etc.

Overall a great event. Much of the thanks has to go to Aiden Chopra, John Bacus, and Tommy, (who was always running around making things work properly), for putting on this event, and giving us all a chance to learn more about SketchUp and meet each other face to face.