Unwittingly about four years ago I woke up to be an Internet celebrity. I discovered that an idea I had previously left up for review on a SketchUp Gallery forum had grown to be the largest thread on the site. It was about a non-photo real visualization technique -people were actually calling it in my honor "the Dennis Method", and now I was receiving requests to give speeches and teach seminars. The technique lives on to be included in this book along with the other gems of visualization wisdom meticulously collected for your reading pleasure.

This is the first book ever on SketchUp that goes beyond the basic modeling exercises that you can typically find in the online video tutorials. It contains a kind of instant information that anyone using SketchUp needs to deliver a knock out visual punch.

As a registered architect I often rely on the power of SketchUp generated imagery to help a client to become comfortable with a solution that I am proposing. "Seeing is believing", says the proverb, well done visualization helps people to believe in the possibility of the design.

Personal proof of this for me came recently when I had to sell an idea of an underground shopping mall to provincial Chinese officials. The prospect of having to educate them for hours on patterns of pedestrian retail traffic; means of vertical circulation and the importance of natural light, especially if you consider my less than perfect Mandarin, was rather daunting. However, an effective visualization did all the work for me and secured the client.

This book shows you how to set up your work and dress it up for a kill in such a way that it jumps off your screen, grabs your audience by the guts and never lets them go.

The newest gems of SketchUp visualization wisdom are here for the taking. Read on, my friends, and see your models shine like they never did before.

Dennis Nikolaev, AIA