Are you ready for SketchUp 7 news?
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@solo said:
There was a thread once where it was mentioned that the 'elite' in the arch-vis industry do not take SU serious .... neither does Google it seems.
I don't know...I spoke to the GC/Bentley people about getting one of the $6K parametric packages...and during our conversation, as they were extolling the advantages of their Norman Foster-approved product, without prompting they offered, "Oh, and don't forget, we can import your SketchUp models natively, and even pull things off the Google Warehouse."
Talking to ZCorp about their $40K high end machine, the manufacturer's rep pointed out, "Oh, and if you have a SketchUp model all you need is this free STL script in this language called Ruby...we can give you a link."
Solo, if you're that unhappy with the program you should just go to one of these trade shows and scold them about it, or just resolve to learn (and pay $3-10 grand for) one of the Dinosaur modelers. I actually walked out of the convention feeling much more hopeful about it all, and none of the SU clones or also-rans on display with other companies seemed worth the time I spent watching their demos.
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Maybe (hopefully?) some smaller firm (like good old @last) will make a Sketchup clone with extended functionality.
Actually, some clones (or at least ones that share some of SU's tools) do seem to appear on the market lately : Spaceclaim, 3DVIA (the Microsoft counter player of Googles SU to populate Virtual Earth...and it sucks
), 'Bonzai' from the makers of FormZ, the notorious Autodesk SU clone, etc...But none up to today seems to succeed in making one that truely breaths Sketchup.
I say we wait a little.....If one company doesn't make it, another will. -
thanks Lewis for the news.
a short idea about what you said about styles:
to make them much more useful (for students
) coloured faces and especially shadows should be stylized as well - to make a professor truely believe in handdrawn sketches. -
@plot-paris said:
thanks Lewis for the news.
a short idea about what you said about styles:
to make them much more useful (for students
) coloured faces and especially shadows should be stylized as well - to make a professor truely believe in handdrawn sketches.One of my students showed me what she does...it involves printing out a Stylized hidden-line rendering, scribbling in textures with a Sharpie pen, scanning it back into her computer, and tweaking the whole thing in PS. Oh, and I think she feeds cheap sketchpad paper into the laserwriter manually so that even the surface looks right when she prints the final version.
As a sometime studio critic, I can tell you that it would have fooled me. But then of course I encourage my students to remember that they live and work in the 21st century, not some benighted hand-drafted version of the nineteenth.
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Looking at lewis feedback about his contacts with SU, I think we should be more "readable" with our needs in term of evolution with SU.
That would help us to ask the good questions to SU team, and would clear and classify all the needs of every one.
I appreciate like magic these brilliant ruby that I test, and stare at ingeniosity of their authors, but most of them stay dead in my computer because I often have no use for them.
But I would not do without them...- The first job would be to classify in a few groups the SU users: architects, carpenters, designers, mechanicians..
- The second would be to define each particular groups needs in term of functions
- the third would be to study the enhacements in SU, not all in one bunch, but maybe in packages by category , and have a suggestion about how to gather all.
That would give with SU team a consistent speech in order to get consistent answers. I was really hunged to Coen thread, and desappointed with the banal answers.
I second Kwisten with his astonishement about one of a SU remark so we may have results in being directive
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@anglaret said:
Looking at lewis feedback about his contacts with SU, I think we should be more "readable" with our needs in term of evolution with SU.
That would help us to ask the good questions to SU team, and would clear and classify all the needs of every one.
I appreciate like magic these brilliant ruby that I test, and stare at ingeniosity of their authors, but most of them stay dead in my computer because I often have no use for them.
But I would not do without them...- The first job would be to classify in a few groups the SU users: architects, carpenters, designers, mechanicians..
- The second would be to define each particular groups needs in term of functions
- the third would be to study the enhacements in SU, not all in one bunch, but maybe in packages by category , and have a suggestion about how to gather all.
That would give with SU team a consistent speech in order to get consistent answers. I was really hunged to Coen thread, and desappointed with the banal answers.
I second Kwisten with his astonishement about one of a SU remark so we may have results in being directive
A work Coen Naninck could do with a couple of his polls...
Excellent idea anglaret! -
I like to have the ability to create different various line shapes in the style editor "Squiggly, scribbles, pencil, jagged, paintbrush ETC.."
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OK, so, I'm sorry I'm late to the SU7 News Party. I too attended the AIA but, because I've been swamped, haven't had a chance to post, until now.
I heard from a Googler (he's probably giggling now), who said more or less, "... SU releases will not be any farther apart as Photoshop; the time-lapse between releases should be more or less the same...". I couldn't bear the uncertainty anymore so did the homework: CS2 (Photoshop 9) was released April '05; CS3 was released exactly two years later (April 16, 2007); SU 6's beta-cycle started in July 6, 2006 and was eventually released January '07... therefore, the countdown to beta 7 should be hopefully less than a couple of months away(!?)
Cheers,
- Diego -
Naively and eternally optimistic
- Diego -
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Cool, then My guess for Sketchup 7 is July.
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If it is July, there may still be months taken by beta testing - especially if there are some new featurs added (like styles or photomatch to version 6).
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Ya Gai..,
but then they will loose the match against Photoshop
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Ahh Geee,
Been re-reading Lewis's enlightening conversations with the Gooogle VIPs...'Curvey Stuff?'....I think Lewis pretty well summed that up.
'Sketchy Styles?'...well it would have been a real hit about 3 years ago when the 'Watercolour Phase' was in full swing. The greatest exponent ot this style, Mr Marshall, was last heard of talking vaguely of Mondo before he vanished for good].
I think it's fair to say that photorealism is the prefered export option of most 'Pros' these days...and native SU probably works well as the non-PR, this-is-only-a-concept-and-is-easily-changed export. Sketchy Styles/Edges was dead in the water when it was introduced and its pretty depressing that the Google people even need to ask about it's popularity.
Maybe they need to spend even more time checking out this forum.
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I don't think SU needs a built-in renderer. I mean, we already have Indigo and Kerkythea and Podium and Yafray. And we can export to programs that have built-in rendering features already. Actually, i don't know why i'm posting this, because we probably won't get one.
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Human,
Yafray? Is there a Yafray exporter around?
If you know one I would love to see a link. -
@kwistenbiebel said:
Human,
Yafray? Is there a Yafray exporter around?
If you know one I would love to see a link.Yeah, it's called "Blender." And as a plus, with it you can high-poly-model "curvy stuff" until your eyeballs drop out.
http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/yafray/
More interesting than Yafray is the fact that Blender has a node-based "compositor" (multi-channel renderer with a graphic interface) which is quite an unusual beast. Here's a screenshot from the Blender site:
Among other things, you can mix and match photoreal and non-photoreal elements live. It's just bizarre.
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@lewiswadsworth said:
Yeah, it's called "Blender."
So Blender is an export thingie for SU to render with Yafray.
Hell, what a complex one. -
@stu said:
Ahh Geee,
Been re-reading Lewis's enlightening conversations with the Gooogle VIPs...'Curvey Stuff?'....I think Lewis pretty well summed that up.
'Sketchy Styles?'...well it would have been a real hit about 3 years ago when the 'Watercolour Phase' was in full swing. The greatest exponent ot this style, Mr Marshall, was last heard of talking vaguely of Mondo before he vanished for good].
I think it's fair to say that photorealism is the prefered export option of most 'Pros' these days...and native SU probably works well as the non-PR, this-is-only-a-concept-and-is-easily-changed export. Sketchy Styles/Edges was dead in the water when it was introduced and its pretty depressing that the Google people even need to ask about it's popularity.
Maybe they need to spend even more time checking out this forum.I still get a great many NPR rendering requests, although I rarely use Styles as part of the process. I did just upgrade my Piranesi license to make my life easier in that direction.
Stu is correct about PR being the preferred option of the "Pros", at least at SCF..you won't be seeing any of my NPR work here, as a consequence. I don't see the interest.
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@lewiswadsworth said:
tu is correct about PR being the preferred option of the "Pros", at least at SCF..you won't be seeing any of my NPR work here, as a consequence. I don't see the interest.
That's niot true, Lewis, you know. The fact that there are many people playing around with PR (and there are some impressive results to be honest) doesn't mean that other styles should vanish. Just look at Tom's or Tina's posts - when there is something new, there are many positive responses (maybe because there is a shortage of NPR renders?).
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@stu said:
Im basing these ideas on what I see here, in this forum....and I dont think it's too presumptive to think that what gets posted and discussed here is at the forefront of SU use
Yet, outside of this particular render-package-besotted forum, that doesn't entirely reflect trends in my field. One of the US architecture firms getting the most positive publicity in academia now, LTL, does not use PR rendering.
http://www.ltlwork.net/pages/portfolio.html
I strongly suspect they are using SketchUp, at least for recent work. (I'm often tempted to ask them for a job, since they seem to be hiring. I could be Lewis working at Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis!)
LTL came up in my conversation with John Bacus, incidentally...he had asked me if I knew of any cutting-edge firms that were using SU, since we all know of the chauvinistic ones that scorn it.
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I've studied the drawings of LTL and I came to the conclusion that they don't use sketchup. Even their recent stuff doesn't sniff of any styles. If anything, they may trace over a SU model, but from what I've seen (before they made their drawings the size of postage stamps on the website), my guess is a pencil perspective scanned in with tone added in Photoshop. My 2 cents!
PS I was laughed at in a London school of architecture for using SU. As far as I am aware, I believe it beats the pants off things like Rhino with some of the scripts I've seen.
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