Dale Martens a.k.a. Whaat

Dale is the author of the now famous Subdivide & Smooth plug-in, which brings both conventional as well as proxy-controlled subdivision modeling to SketchUp.

CatchUp: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and your background?

Dale Martens: Sure! My name is Dale Martens. I am 29 and a professional Structural Engineer. When I'm not working, I spend most of my time relaxing at home with my wife and two kids (3 and 8 months). Obviously, I manage to find some time for my hobbies which currently include programming, home improvement, biking, and tennis (now that summer is finally here!).

CatchUp: How did you get involved with Ruby scripting for SketchUp?

Dale Martens: I actually discovered SketchUp about 18 months ago via a link from the Google Earth website. Since one of my hobbies is also 3D modeling, I downloaded it and was instantly hooked. This led to an idea to start a home business of architectural visualization (which I think would have been quite successful considering the current building boom in my area). My search for a powerful, yet low-cost, rendering engine led

me to Indigo. However, there was no SketchUp to Indigo exporter. The only way to render my SketchUp models using Indigo was by exporting the model to Blender (which was quite annoying to say the least). I started wondering if the Kerkythea exporter (SU2KT) could be easily modified to work with Indigo so I started digging through the code. Thankfully, Tomasz (author of SU2KT) had mentioned on the old SketchUp forums that he did not object to someone using the code for this purpose. I had never heard of Ruby before this even though I had been interested in computer programming since I was a child (I remember writing countless programs on our Apple IIc). I had learned some C++ programming during university so I found the Ruby code to be quite easy to understand. I became addicted to learning Ruby and the SketchUp API and it wasn't long until I released the first version of SkIndigo (SketchUp to Indigo exporter). By then, I was enjoying Ruby programming so much that I gave up on my original business idea!

CatchUp: What projects/scripts are you most proud of and why?

Dale Martens: SkIndigo without question. Even though it started off as a modification of SU2KT, it has continued to expand and now (version 1.0.8) contains about 95% original code. I was able to add features to this script that I never thought would be possible. Some features that I put into the script had not even made it into the commercial exporter scripts at that time. SkIndigo has exceeded my original goals and expections ten-fold. I definitely get a feeling of pride when users tell me that the script is far better and easier to use than certain high-priced commercial packages.