This summer I decided to teach myself SketchUp (by Google) by making a model of the town clock in Santa Cruz to add to Google Earth’s 3d buildings layer.  I went out and on a nice day and took about 80 photos from every angle and of every surface.  I went through each photo until I found the best view of each surface, then I meticulously edited it in photoshop and made perfect textures for all of them.  I started modeling and finished the entire top half.  Then I got busy…  Summer was quickly coming to an end and I had to tragically push it back into my started but never finished folder.  Now, 6 months or so since I started, Winter break provided the bit of free time I needed to finish it up.  And so, I present to the world (which doesn’t care has been waiting patiently): the Santa Cruz Clock Tower.

The model is available in the Google SketchUp 3d Warehouse by clicking here.  From there, it can be downloaded into SketchUp or viewed in Google Earth.  It’s currently in the approval process for the Google Earth 3d buildings layer, and if it gets approved, it will automatically show up in Google Earth for everyone (who has the 3d buildings turned on).

UPDATE: Google has now generated a “3D View” of the model that you can rotate with javascript on the Warehouse page.

Today, while I was supposed to be studying for my AP tests, I found all sorts of ways to distract myself:  watching TV, playing Super Smash Bros Brawl (unlocked every character & map and beat every event this weekend), and making fonts.

For the first one, I wrote out the alphabet and some characters, scanned them in, vectorized them, and made a font (using FontCreator).  It took a few hours, but it actually looks kind of cool.

This year in Latin, we wrote a fable, translated it into Latin, learned blackletter calligraphy, and are currently writing and illustrating it.  I found a sheet of paper in my backpack that I had been practicing calligraphy on (copying a random Latin passage), scanned it in, cut out the best of each letter, and made it into a font.  I actually really like how this one turned out.  Oh, and before you think, "ipfum? he is in Latin right?" know that it’s called a long, medial, or descending s, is often used in place of a short s everywhere other than the end of a word in blackletter calligraphy, and happens to also appear in the United States Bill of Rights.

Finally, for the last one, I just kind of threw something together from my cursive (which as you will see, is not very attractive).  This one was tricky, because all the letters have to attach to each other, so I had to modify all of the letters after vectorization so they would fit together with all the others.

If you want to download one of these, just leave a comment stating what you want to use it for, and I’ll mail it to you (as a TrueType font).  I’m not trying to moderate them or anything (I’ll let anyone who wants one take it), I just want to know what (if anything) people want them for.