Hello everyone,

Today something exiting and extraordinary for all fanatic of Sketchup and especially for those who love to build organic and non-linear structures.

This plugin will throw you from your seat !!! 😉

Soap Skin & Bubble

You can download it here: Software download page

It allows you to span membrane-like surfaces between any kind of edges* in closed loop and then…
BLOW THEM UP !!!

*some restrictions apply: Lines can not overlap!

There are 6 buttons in a toolbar:

1. Skin – allow you to create a surface (look below how).
2. X/Y – allows you to stress the surface between X or Y direction.
3. Bub – allows you to blow up a surface in both directions.
4. Play – allow you to resume modification process after Stop.
5. Stop – allow you to stop  live modification process.
6. Help – it’s a link to a developer website.

I created small tutorial explaining how to create a surface:

 and an explanation what impact have X/Y Ratio on the membrane:

It’s definitely an inexhaustible source of ideas for creative people. Moreover after you create a structure, after you play with it, you can modify it with other Sketchup tools and plugins and still be able again to blow it or tense it up!

Here you can see how behaves a previous surface after inflating it, moving half of it and deleting some faces:

TIP: You can blow up a surface using ether positive (+) or negative (-) values. Positive values will blow up a surface from a back side of faces. Negative from it front side.
What will happened when reverse normals only on a part of a created surface?

EXPERIMENT!!! 🙂