The prolific extension developer and SketchUp power user Christina Eneroth shares some of her favorite extensions she's made and how using SketchUp changed her life's trajectory.
The "why" behind Eneroth extensions
Christina Eneroth started coding extensions to help make her modeling life easier. Almost all of the extensions she's developed have been in service to one or both of two overarching goals: to increase speed or precision across various workflows.
When she was an architecture student, she used SketchUp for class projects and coded on the side to pay the bills. One school project was a spiral-shaped building, which was difficult to draw precisely in SketchUp. She created a Cylindrical Coordinates extension that interprets the local X (Red) axis as a radius and Y (Green) as an angle, allowing for radial planes to be drawn as parallel planes, making the spiral design easier to execute.
Bibliotek Västra Hamnen, a seaside library created in 2015 when Christina was in architecture school. Scale 1:100. Extensions used: Eneroth Cylindrical Coordinates. Click arrows to scroll.
Throughout architecture school, Christina kept designing and coding. In 2014, she attended her first 3D Basecamp. Before she went, she had some sense that people were interacting with her work, but only knew the extent of it once she met with people in the SketchUp community for the first time. Shy and still working on her English skills, Christina found a warm welcome among her fellow SketchUp users, learning about the many ways people used SketchUp — and her extensions.
Christina became more involved with SketchUp ever since, and now works on SketchUp’s extensibility team, which supports other extension developers with a platform, customer success, and dev camps.
Extensions for architectural modeling workflows
Christina has over 90 extensions listed in the Extension Warehouse, representing years of work. While working on architectural projects for school, she created extensions that solved problems or created shortcuts for architectural workflows.
Here are a couple of the extensions that she found especially useful.
Eneroth Scaled Perspective2
Video showing the Eneroth Scaled perspective UI.
The Eneroth Scaled Perspective extension introduces mathematical precision to setting scale in perspective. Christina designed the tool to remove the guesswork for people; it’s simple to set up a precisely scaled view of a section cut that someone can easily send to LayOut. This helps increase precision and reliability in scaled drawings exported from SketchUp.