Opening our doors to FREE training – Reflecting on the Excitech training event

I’m Alan Skipp, and I’m the Training Delivery Manager for Excitech. I tend to spend a lot of my time in the office, however, Excitech recently held a training event at our Bishopsgate, London training centre, where I had the pleasure of meet a few of our clients. During his event, Excitech provided a number of free sample training sessions and the opportunity to meet some of our trainers.

Bishopsgate is a terrific training centre in the heart of London and is very popular with our customers. Our aim was to showcase this centre, and more importantly some of our talented people who have been responsible for delivery so much technical knowledge over the years.

We provided twelve one-hour training presentations held in our two training rooms, covering eleven subject matters. At the heart of this were a number of CAD Training courses, including:

• Autodesk Revit Architecture - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/Autodesk-Revit-Architecture-Fundamentals
• Autodesk Revit Structure RC Detailing - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/RC-Detailing-with-Revit-Structure-2016
• Autodesk Revit MEP - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/Autodesk-Revit-MEP-Fundamentals
• Dynamo for Revit - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/Dynamo-Fundamentals-for-Autodesk-Revit
• Autodesk Civil 3D - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/AutoCAD-Civil-3D-Fundamentals
• Autodesk AutoCAD - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/AutoCAD-AutoCAD-LT-Essentials
• Navisworks - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/Autodesk-Navisworks-Essentials
• 3DS Max - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/Autodesk-3ds-Max-Fundamentals
• Infraworks - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/InfraWorks-for-Civil-Engineering
• Inventor - Sheet Metal Design - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/Autodesk-Inventor-Sheet-Metal-Design
• Inventor - Design Automation - https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training/Training-Courses/Inventor-Certified-User-Part-1

The Dynamo session was the most popular of the sessions, so much so that we ended up putting on two sessions. To provide the expertise, we had six trainers on hand, each an expert in their own subject area.

During the day, we also had an opportunity to learn a little more about our own customers, so took time to have a chat. It was great hearing about their individual industries and stories, and to learn about their thoughts on training as individuals and how their organisations see training. It was particularly heartening to learn that in many cases training is embedded as part of their company culture, and classroom training is still the preferred method for the majority of our clients. Furthermore, it was interesting to learn, that many view the “basic training” course as only part of the journey and not the destination, so most saw the value in furthering their skills through more advanced training.

I hope those who attended learnt something new and will visit us again for further training. We have some very talented people here at Excitech who can help our customers effectively use some amazing products and help them with their personal learning journey.

Interested in finding out more? Click here to find out more about our portfolio of CAD training courses which are available in our London centre or any of our other training centres. Or why not enquire about in-company CAD training which can be delivered at a location of your choice.

https://www.excitech.co.uk/Services/Training

Create Your Own Materials in SketchUp Pro

SketchUp Pro provides a wide range out of the box materials for some of the most common uses. However, in some cases you may have a need to create your own. The process is straight forward, all you need is an image file containing the pattern that you would like to repeat in the material.

The following workflow provides step-by-step instructions on how to create your own materials from an image and how to create a custom collection for them in SketchUp Pro:

Click on the highlighted icon to create a new material from the Materials section of the Default tray, as per the follows image.:

Select a name for your material, check the Use texture image option and browse to the image (supported file types below). At this point, take note that you also have the option to select the size of the image in the material. The image will be repeated to fit the entire space i.f it is applied to an area that is larger than these sizes. 

At this point, your newly created material will show in the Materials section of the Default tray, under the In model collection. If you save your model as a template (via File -> Save as template…), you can then use the custom material in any model that is created from that template.

If you want to access your materials from any model, regardless of the template, you can create a custom collection. In order to do this, you need to save your material as a Material file (*.skm).

The Save As dialog will open in the following path
C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp2019\SketchUp\Materials. Create a folder in this particular location with a name of your choosing for the collection and save the material file in that folder.

In order to add the collection, select Open or create a collection… from the Details button and pick the folder that you created for the collection in the previous step.

You can now access the collection from the drop-down menu, with all the materials that you saved in the folder.

If you would like to know more about SketchUp Pro and its full range of capabilities, please call your account manager on 01992 807444 or email marketing@excitech.co.uk.