Looking ahead to SU 8.
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Something that really bothers me is the initial startup screen. If I really want to change the unit of measure, I can do it later, but I do not have to select my unit of measure and style every single time a go on sketchup.
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Lot of good ideas, here. Cast my vote in favor of the one that opposes complifying the UI. Now, the two other things I want for Christmas:
A <sketchup> tag in at least one HTML rendering engine. Maybe the engine that powers Chrome and Safari. With scriptable animation so we can have some serious fun.
And how about a material that renders scriptable HTML (including the <sketchup> tag, of course)? (TBD's idea.) That billboard you see as you enter your SketchUp town becomes compelling when it shows an animation. (Probably dangerous if placed on a real highway.)
That puts the web inside my model and my model inside the web. Just two things (and almost all the code is already written). Those would make a great Christmas.
For my birthday, I'd like to be able to export my animation to .GIFs. That could really spruce up your emails, no?
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Better vertex manipulation and control, including soft selection.
Texture layering and blending
UVW Mapping
Better selection tools (Select ring, select loop, freehand selection window, select all in bounds/crossing bounds toggle, etc.)
Snap/Inference on/off toggle
Keyframes and animation timeline
Animated texture support
Support for Spherical background images directly in SU
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@smokinbakin said:
Something that really bothers me is the initial startup screen. If I really want to change the unit of measure, I can do it later, but I do not have to select my unit of measure and style every single time a go on sketchup.
Im sure theres an option to disable that somewhere. I dont suppose theres a little tick box on the bottom of the window?
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Mike, actually you can import TIF images in SU.
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@unknownuser said:
How about the ability to import TIF images.
As far as I can remember (back at SU 5 when I started), importing tif images has always been a feature - just like now.
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@remus said:
Im sure theres an option to disable that somewhere. I dont suppose theres a little tick box on the bottom of the window?
Curious so I looked and took a pic
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@unknownuser said:
Better vertex manipulation and control, including soft selection.
Texture layering and blending
UVW Mapping
Better selection tools (Select ring, select loop, freehand selection window, select all in bounds/crossing bounds toggle, etc.)
Snap/Inference on/off toggle
Keyframes and animation timeline
Animated texture support
Support for Spherical background images directly in SU
But if all this shows up I'll have to ask myself why I paid $800 bucks for modo.
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Above all else I would like to see Google buying shed loads of all the plugins out there, polishing them and incorporating them properly into the core product. No need to reinvent the wheel.
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@linea said:
Above all else I would like to see Google buying shed loads of all the plugins out there, polishing them and incorporating them properly into the core product. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Personally i think thatd be really bad. It would make SU incredibly bloated and introduce a lot of tools that will go unused in the majority of cases. Much better (in my opinion) would be to introduce some way of easily accessing plugins from within SU, so beginners dont have to make the leap of looking for plugins and working out how to use them.
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A native "plugin manager" similar to the component window, with access to the "plugin warehouse"?
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Something like that. The tricky bit would be maintaining the quality of the plugins though.
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@linea said:
Above all else I would like to see Google buying shed loads of all the plugins out there, polishing them and incorporating them properly into the core product. No need to reinvent the wheel.
I don't want that. I want to pick the plugins I want - adapting SU to my needs.
I'd rather see SU developed further as a platform with more power to plugin makers. With that a menu and toolbar manager where each plugin register it's menus and toolbar buttons and the user can pick and choose which one to use. -
Well i've just been busy with (too much
) work but finally i have time to post here my opinion.
I really liked this update and it seems that slowly we are going in the right direction now
, but i also think everyone needs to stop acting like with these released sketchup it's perfect now. It's far from this, and if sketchup 7.0 had been launched like 7.1 it would still be a weak release. The speed increase is great but we still need 64bits and multicore etc etc etc, and please for everyone saying that 64 bits it's just good for big textures that it's a (and i'm sorry about beeing really direct here) a LIE. You have to keep in mind that everything takes up memory including a line, a face, a polygon, everything, the diference is that it's easier to use more memory with textures than meshes, and that's why in software like mudbox, 3DS, Maya etc you can subdivide (or open) meshes to 12 million polygons and keep modeling in real time with 32 bits version, but the limit with the 64 bits it's just limited by your ram (there's people subdividing meshes to 32 milion!!)But as i said i really liked this update but sketchup for me needs more polished tools and more professional features too. so here are things that for me i think it should be in the next version:
- Line tool: update to the same has layout;
- Pushpull tool: update to use with multiple faces ant to choose to work like in joint pushpull;
- Vertex tools: vertex should be used like lines or faces, or should be able to select them,pushpull them, move them etc;
- Select tool: More seletion options including loop select;
- Shadows: At least fix the shadow bug, and for a real update gives us soft shadows or ways to simulate other lights;
- Sandbox tools: more stable for bigger models, and improved for organic modeling (for example the "add detail" should subdivide when meshes are selected or triangulate when faces are selected);
- Maping tools: UVunwarp tools, Cilindrical and spherical maping options, Layer textures;
- Animation tools: save position of components, faces, lines, and points (this way allowing even some deformation in animation);
- Import/export options: Obj import for meshs and textures with correct mapping and every other exporter importer working as it should, and give better tools for developers doing better integration with other apps;
- Hardware support: Use of full capabilities of current OS, Graphics Cards, and CPUs;
- Sales strategy: separate the sales of sketchup from layout (right now looks like everyone that bough SK was paying to evolve Layout and not Sketchup and that's just wrong, besides there's people that don't want layout; do a bundle for who want both);
Sorry for the long list but as you can see some are just more polished tools. But no matter what new feature they implemet, it should always be easy to use and understand, as that has always been the base of SK.
David
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@unknownuser said:
The speed increase is great but we still need 64bits and multicore etc etc etc, and please for everyone saying that 64 bits it's just good for big textures that it's a (and i'm sorry about beeing really direct here) a LIE. You have to keep in mind that everything takes up memory including a line, a face, a polygon, everything, the diference is that it's easier to use more memory with textures than meshes, and that's why in software like mudbox, 3DS, Maya etc you can subdivide (or open) meshes to 12 million polygons and keep modeling in real time with 32 bits version, but the limit with the 64 bits it's just limited by your ram (there's people subdividing meshes to 32 milion!!)
64-bit is double edged though - it can make things slower. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/08/a_64-bit_reality_check.html
And multi-core - it isn't that easy to just add another processor to the workings. I don't think we should be so specific to what we think will make SU faster - and rather just focus on what our desired goal is - faster SU. And let the SU team work out the technical bits on how to do that.
Personally, I'd like 64bit SU so that render plugins like V-Ray can work in 64bit because it does have a use for 64bit processing. But I make no assumption it'll make SU faster or better.
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Thanks for the post thomthom. Nice reading.
I've read more things similiar and you are right about it we, as users, shouldn't make assumptions about this. We need it, how it's done shouldn't be our concern.And I also should have been more focus about that, the term here it's not faster but bigger. At very basic terms more memory means more things in the screen at the same time, so more memory will probably mean able to work with bigger models at normal speed (and that's what it want).
I'm no coder or developer so i'm not the right person to say "do this way that it's better", i just tryed to compare 3d apps that can do it, as a way to say it's possible, and other developers, as you said, would also gain with this. 64 bits will probably be the future, and it's hard for me to imagine in a year buying PC with the standart 8Gg ram an sketchup not using even half...
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A simple duplicate and mirror tool. I use this in Vectorworks all the time, and it really makes life easy.
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tap into this :
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@unknownuser said:
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) in Mac OS X Snow Leopard addresses this pressing need. It’s a set of first-of-their-kind technologies that makes it much easier for developers to squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems. With GCD, threads are handled by the operating system, not by individual applications. GCD-enabled programs can automatically distribute their work across all available cores, resulting in the best possible performance whether they’re running on a dual-core Mac mini, an 8-core Mac Pro, or anything in between. Once developers start using GCD for their applications, you’ll start noticing significant improvements in performance.
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@unknownuser said:
- Vertex tools: vertex should be used like lines or faces, or should be able to select them,pushpull them, move them etc;
You can actually do this right now, but only one vertex at a time: make sure nothing is selected, then place the move tool over a vertex and click. It works best if you want to move the vertex along one of the axes because you can lock in the direction of the move with one of the arrow keys. It's a bit clunky, but after a while mouse-click + up arrow + VCB (for displacement distance) becomes second nature.
As for SU 8, something more elegant for vertex manipulation would be appreciated (with a soft select as in Silo) but I think SU's current UV tools implementation is its biggest shortcoming. Maybe it's fine for wrapping low-res photos onto cubes for Google Earth, but for anything else it's unbelievably primitive.
I would also greatly appreciated to expand selections one at a time, as in other 3d progs: in other words, select 2 adjacent polys, edges (or verts!) in a loop, and have the up arrow (or some other key) add the next logical item to the selection set. Double clicking an edge to select a loop would be mega as well, or double clicking the second poly in a loop to select the loop etc. The ability to save a selection would be helpful as well, although there are workarounds for this...
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Ability to handle larger models: I know they've increased this with the last upgrade, but I think they need to push it further, especially if some of these other features are included.
reflective, shiny materials, and lights. It would be nice to create a basic SU rendering with these features without having to use another program.
Password protection, so someone can look at a model without editing it (my boss has been fond of giving the models to clients).
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