SketchUp 2014

IdahoJ

Well, I didn't change to 2013, won't be changing to 2014 either. No need for my non-professional usage. Good 'ol SketchUp 8 with a few plugins and my life stays simple.

KrisM

I can appreciate that the new features presented are both needed and positive. Whether the sum of the improvements is worthy of a new version, I am somewhat skeptical. I really expected something more. I'm quite sure others feel the same. Perhaps if we had an explanation of what's happening under the hood, we could appreciate the magnitude of the work done.
The major gripe I have is with respect to the changes is the implementation of Ruby 2. I can understand that this is a necessary step. The issue I have is that I just counted the plugins I have and it totals 80 items. It is all very well to say that I should just install the plugins fresh but this surely belittles the amount of hours involved. As well, some of the older plugins which are quite useful haven't been updated in years and certainly will not be updated to be 2014 compliant. The reliance on plugins by both Google and Trimble is both a blessing and curse for SketchUp. I applaud all the plugin developers for their hard work and contributions to the better functioning of SketchUp but the implementation of this capability is a mess. I don't have any bright ideas here but I am sure Trimble has some pretty sharp guys. I need to get work done, not to be spending my time vetting errant plugins that perhaps should be incorporated into SketchUp's basic functionality.

KrisM

Pherim

The new 3D Warehouse is a joke - no rating system, no comments, not possible any more to add descriptions in multiple languages, no search by popularity... really disappointing. Being able to upload bigger models and view them directly in the browser is nice, but with all those features gone - why?

jo-ke

I hope this one will be better then the last one

where can I find the 64 bit version?

andybot

@jo-ke said:

where can I find the 64 bit version?

Now that I would pay for in a heartbeat!

arail1

Okay, I'm confused.
Traditionally I go to Plugins at the top of my screen (right between Windows and Help) to access various things - OBJ Importer, for instance. It's not there in 2014.

And ... when I download a plugin, I unzip and drag it into Plugins in the SketchUp folder. That's not there anymore, either - only something called ShippedExtensions.

So, let's say I want to download Layer Manager for 2014. What do I do?

Thanks in advance for any advice you have and pardon my ignorance (it's wide, it's immemorial)

valerostudio

Seriously? We still have clip plane issue on large models? What the heck man! This is a 2007 problem.

kupono

Looks like SU 2014's a bust for me. It seems that every other plugin doesn't work now and I was getting massive clipping. For some reason they've decided to bury the Plugin folder here (win): C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014\SketchUp\Plugins

sicd_steve

mmmmm. so far had a little playaround and found it to be slower than 13? I will play around some more this morning but I brought in a model at say 38 mg I had been working on and it was very slow...infact slower than 13 so I wonder about the 15 times faster?

When I try to zoom in in Layout it is very sluggish, and this was a clean download with no extar plug ins at this stage I like to let it settle in before changing my whole work load and current projects.

Lets see how it goes, but at the moment it does seems to rock my socks?

charly2008

I am still very skeptical about the future development. Will plugins (Ruby 2.0), developed for Sketchup 2014 still be backward compatible in the future?

Will we then have two SketchUp groups here in the Forum?

CJRyan

The bad thing for me is I don't have time to re-load all my rubies, and re-learn all the extra nuisances. I don't use SU as a hobby, I work, and use it for work. Why can't all my plug-ins just be automatically migrated? That's why I pitched the 2013 version, it screwed up my profile builder in my Pro 8 version. Heck, even though I prefer SU to AutoCAD, at least I can revert to AutoCAD classic and be seeing the icons I'm used to. Not to mention the same right click menus. (OK, I'm over it, my rant that is).

I'll be looking for more feedback on 2014, before I upgrade.

And what the heck, new arcs? We've been begging for true vector circles and arcs. When's that coming?

Chris

Aerilius

We could not be more excited than we are, no wishlist for 2015!

Congratulations for this big release!

mitcorb

@arail1:
The Plugin menu button does not appear on the Menu ribbon until you install a fresh plugin. This is something not yet documented in the Knowledge Center help.sketchup.com (so far as I know), nor has anyone explicitly enough included this in the threads I have read. Of course, you do know that the plugin destination folder is now under "...AppData...Roaming" and this path has been explained.

I might mention that, in order to see a couple of plugin toolbars after loading, I had to restart 2014. But this also happened a few times in 2013version. And they weren't simply lurking among my desktop icons. No big complaints.

Al Hart

@charly2008 said:

I am still very skeptical about the future development. Will plugins (Ruby 2.0), developed for Sketchup 2014 still be backward compatible in the future?

Will we then have two SketchUp groups here in the Forum?

With a little work ruby developers can make their rubies work for both SU 2014 and earlier versions.

Many of the changes we had to make were required in Ruby 2.0, but still work in Ruby 1.8

In other cases, we can check the ruby version, and execute different code for both versions. e.g. (.index in Ruby 1,8 had to be replaced by .key in Ruby 2.0)

[pre:2k60l9ti]if (RUBY_VERSION.to_f >= 2.0)
sname = material_names.key(current_mesh.material_index)
else
sname = material_names.index(current_mesh.material_index)
end#if[/pre:2k60l9ti]

It turned out to be much easier for us to make our ruby code compatible with both 2.0 and 1.8 since we have customers who want to run new versions of our plugins with old versions of SketchUp

cotty

Sorry for disturbing the bad mood coming up with each new version of SketchUp, but I'm happy with the new release and all my installed plugins (>100) are working perfectly...

ken28875

Hi there,

I just installed SketchUp 2014 and added all my plugins. Then I opened it and it crashed every time. There might be a conflict with some of the plugins, but I am not sure which ones.

I have tons of plugins and installing them one by one to see which one causes the crash is kind of time of consuming.

Has anyone used SketchUp 2014 yet and experienced the same problem?

Anyway I think I will stay away from it for now till I figure out what is wrong.

Have a good weekend!

_KN

TIG

@charly2008 said:

I am still very skeptical about the future development. Will plugins (Ruby 2.0), developed for Sketchup 2014 still be backward compatible in the future?

Will we then have two SketchUp groups here in the Forum?
All of my Plugins [several 100] were made v2014 compatible over the last few months. They still work on all of the earlier versions too. Most of the major Plugin authors have been working closely with Trimble over the last few months, discreetly in the background, to get their scripts to suit all versions [if they did not do so already], in anticipation of this update... That's why there has been a flurry of 'future-proofing' of scripts...

There are some subtle changes to the way Ruby works, but 90% of Plugins will work out of the box in both versions.
The newer Ruby is less forgiving of sloppy coding, so you just need to be a better coder.
Many of the issues were already advised about in the earlier Ruby implementation anyway.
New expanded and clearer error-messages explain what is up.
There are bound to be a few issues, but they shouldn't be too hard to resolve...

The main issue I expect to come up over the next few weeks is some incompatibility with v2014 because of a few older Plugin .rb files' "encoding": it was always recommended to make such files encoded as 'UTF8 without BOM' [to do with 'newline' characters etc] - that's the default on MACs. but 'ANSI' is the default in Windows Notepad.exe - in earlier versions Ruby could take this messing about, but in this newer version ANSI fileswill fail to load, with helpful error-messages. Notepad++.exe lets you set a suitable default encoding, and you can change the coding of an existing file and re-save it, so updating older Plugins is usually straightforward - if a pain. If a non-compliant .rb has been complied into an .rbs it will display similar errors - it cannot be fixed this way: in that case the author needs to correct the encoding of his .rb and recompile a new rbs, which again will suit version 2014 and earlier versions too...

Do not copy old scripts from an earlier version.
'Auto' Install the newest available versions from RBZ archives from the PluginStore, or the EWH if they are only available from there.
If you find a failing script let the author know in the tool's thread, so that it can be fixed asap...

neets

How do I upgrade with an Educational License? The website diverts you to their 'educational reseller' but the companies don't specify free downloads of 2014 if you're a current 2013 user. Should I go back to my UK reseller to request a free upgrade?

Anita