Who said SketchUp doesn't need to be 64 bit?

tt_su · 28 Apr 2014, 12:16

I agree that much can be accomplished with better plugin integration but a thing like quads (and better editing without destroying UVs). Wouldn't it be better if integrated to the core program so all tools would benefit?
Otherwise there could be for example numerous 3rd party move tools that would do essentially the same thing? One with each plugin authors solution to move vertices without messing up UVs.
That could easily make SU bloated IMHO.

Oh, there are most certainly a number of things in the SketchUp core that can be improved. I'm not saying that things are set in stone and the core will never change. But the essence is improve the core generically, specialize with extensions.

We have a looong list on the extensibility team of improvements to the API we'd like to see. We still rely on a good connection with the community to identify new things and put everything together in the big perspective so we can yield the best bang for the bucks for each release.
Along with improvements to the API (which may require core improvements) we also want to build up a good network for developers to use. This include sharing experience and interacting with open source projects so the wheel isn't reinvented for each extension. The rate of progress will be so much faster and better if we all build upon each other.
There is admittedly a bit of a void for this atm. We have EW, API docs and a GitHub account, but lack a central hub to message this efficiently. Keep an eye out for changes to this!

@pixero said:

Also there has been talks here of real curves in SU.
Do you mean that could be implemented through 3d party or would that have to be a "core" feature?

That's something that would have to be a core change - SketchUp, at heart, only deal with edges and faces - everything else is an abstraction. Real curves would require some big fundamental changes. Custom entities would be a great feature though. dreams

thomthom · 28 Apr 2014, 12:22

@pixero said:

But does this means it would be possible to export this as a subd/bezierpatch or would it be exported as polys?

In theory, yes. One could export to a format that supported subdivisions and export only the control mesh. (Or one could manually toggle off the subdivision before exporting into a simple mesh format.)
The challenge here is that there are many different subdivision algorithms that will yield different results. I've been using Catmull-Clark - but even in that area there are different nuances in implementation, especially when you start to include soft creases.

In response to this Pixar has released OpenSubDiv, a standardization of the subdivision techniques it encourages software developers to make use of so geometry can be shared without loss of data.
https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenSubdiv

I only just recently came across it and I'm not sure if it'll make it into the initial release. But that would be the best solution for exchanging subdivided models and it is indeed possible.

Pixero · 28 Apr 2014, 12:27

Another quick question about you video demo. I see that you are doing all edits when only the control cage i visible. I assume this is a limitation to the alpha version?

Hieru · 28 Apr 2014, 12:38

Great stuff Thomas - very exciting

thomthom · 28 Apr 2014, 12:44

@pixero said:

Another quick question about you video demo. I see that you are doing all edits when only the control cage i visible. I assume this is a limitation to the alpha version?

I started a new thread for this topic: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323%26amp;t=57480

AirWindSolar · 28 Apr 2014, 14:41

@andrews said:

Obviously these sorts of statements seem ridiculous in retrospect, but the thing is that one never really knows which assumptions will hold true and which ones won't back when the original decisions are made.

The safe bet is generally not to artificially limit things when it comes to computers. I had a 40MB full height MFM drive. I remember installing and formatting the first 400MB drive in my city. I also remember seeing the first 1GB drive come through that shop and wondering just what the heck they were going to put on that monster. Now I don't leave the house without a 32GB flash drive in my pocket and a 32GB MicroSD in my phone. Nearly every one of these devices, at its introduction, had to have some sort of workarounds for limitations in the major OS of the time, because the developers had assumed that no one would ever use that much storage.

Of course, an even more helpful approach would be to waterboard developers when they add bloat. I remember using an 8086 and 5.25" floppies to do a lot of things that now require a CD full of software and are far from instantaneous on a 2.4GHz CPU.

jeff hammond · 28 Apr 2014, 15:46

@tt_su said:

I have the impression that many people think of extensions as second grade tool sets - which is unfortunate. Maybe it's because the majority of current extensions is made by hobbyist (I have been) without the resources to provide dedicated support and full time development.

in general, that's how i feel about extensions.. before solid tools, we had bool tools. when using boolTools, it was always "ok, gotta save before using because i have a 50-50 chance of sketchup crashing after this".. when it did work, it would often take an extended period of time for the operation to complete.. there were installation issues not necessarily related to booltools (iirc, it was actually the podium installer creating a folder in a separate library but it caused boolTools&subsmooth to not load whereas other plugins were not affected).. also the toolbars wouldn't remember their state on mac.. booltools and it's toolbars were always on unless you uninstalled..

then su8 came out and its solidTools were superior.. fast and stable with none of the toolbar/install hassles.. their implementation was much more 'professional' feeling.

i'm not singling out dale here and i think he's written some of the sweeter plugins out of anybody. it's just that in the case of boolTools, they were replaced by the native version so it allows to make a comparison between 'grade a' and 'grade b' extensions.. but if i were to make an overall gripe about plugins, bool tools wouldn't be prominent on that list.

anyway- i completely understand that most plugins for sketchup are more hobbyist related.. one man operations which in most circumstances, are being done for the good of the community (i.e.- awesome)

but when i see the way plugins often work with other applications, there still is the hobby type scripts which can be requested/found at forums and such but then there's another tier of professional writers.. infrastructure, development teams, websites, support, sales, etc.. i imagine you (@tt) know what i'm saying and these are the people you'd like to attract to sketchup as a platform.
(examples-- visualArq or clayoo )

i think maybe the toughest thing to deal with when/if those devs come is going to be money.. that type of development doesn't (and can't) come cheap.. i was blown away when tgi3d was (and maybe still is?) trying to sell their software for a thousand dollars.. that's just too expensive for sketchup (as in- twice the amount of the base app).. but, at the same time, i get it that they're selling it at a fair price as a 'pro' plugin writer.. i don't have a solution and i'm not trying to suggest one either (just talking is all).

dale (whaat) prices them 'right'.. $10, 20, 40 range.. i could see some plugins up in the $2-300 range, especially if they work well, but really-- anything beyond that is just not going to sell.

[EDIT]- well, i'm wrong about expensive plugins not selling.. in essence, many of the renderers are plugins and they're often above the 2-300 mark..

jeff hammond · 28 Apr 2014, 15:52

oh.. i started rambling again and forgot to ask the question i wanted to

could solidTools, exactly as we know them today, have been written by a third party or does their speed&reliability come from things which only the Sketchup developers have access to?

AirWindSolar · 5 May 2014, 17:07

@jeff hammond said:

dale (whaat) prices them 'right'.. $10, 20, 40 range.. i could see some plugins up in the $2-300 range, especially if they work well, but really-- anything beyond that is just not going to sell.

The problem there is that they add up quickly, and a lot of them are doing things that really should have been base SU functionality. (Add Centerpoint, Selection Toys and Purge come screaming to mind.) I wouldn't want to explain to the boss why I'm wearing out the company credit card on $10-20 extensions to do fairly basic stuff.

Then there's the separate issue of frequency of use; I probably have a couple of dozen plugins downloaded that I use maybe once a month, if that.

olishea · 5 May 2014, 17:22

@airwindsolar said:

@jeff hammond said:

dale (whaat) prices them 'right'.. $10, 20, 40 range.. i could see some plugins up in the $2-300 range, especially if they work well, but really-- anything beyond that is just not going to sell.

The problem there is that they add up quickly, and a lot of them are doing things that really should have been base SU functionality. (Add Centerpoint, Selection Toys and Purge come screaming to mind.) I wouldn't want to explain to the boss why I'm wearing out the company credit card on $10-20 extensions to do fairly basic stuff.

Then there's the separate issue of frequency of use; I probably have a couple of dozen plugins downloaded that I use maybe once a month, if that.

$10-$40 for plugins is cheap for the amount of work the authors put into them. I never asked my boss to pay for my plugins, I bought them with my own money out of respect for the plugin authors. The frequently used "basic" plugins you mention are free but I wouldn't mind paying for them either.

Can you say which $10-$20 plugins do "fairly basic stuff" because generally the ones in that price bracket are shit-hot and invaluable. They are worth double or triple what the authors sell them for, but they realise the SU community tends towards freebies and very cheap products and nothing will sell if it's over $50 or so. Other 3D communities aren't like this and people even pay for simple tutorials. Things are changing though, if you want a high quality plugin/product for SU, then you have to pay for it because people don't work for free! I realised this when I was giving away freebie models, getting tens of thousands of downloads and only receiving a few thank yous.

jeff hammond · 5 May 2014, 17:36

@airwindsolar said:

@jeff hammond said:

dale (whaat) prices them 'right'.. $10, 20, 40 range.. i could see some plugins up in the $2-300 range, especially if they work well, but really-- anything beyond that is just not going to sell.

The problem there is that they add up quickly, and a lot of them are doing things that really should have been base SU functionality. (Add Centerpoint, Selection Toys and Purge come screaming to mind.) I wouldn't want to explain to the boss why I'm wearing out the company credit card on $10-20 extensions to do fairly basic stuff.

Then there's the separate issue of frequency of use; I probably have a couple of dozen plugins downloaded that I use maybe once a month, if that.

that's sort of outlining the issue though..
if sketchup were to attract professional 3rd party developers (and i mean 'professional' basically in that developers whose main source of income would be that of developing/selling plugins and whose available resources for support/coding/etc would be greater than that of a one man do-it-all operation).. then people will have to pay for it.. not in the sense that they can donate or whatever.. they must pay or it wouldn't be possible within the monetary structure of today's world.

if you want freebies than that's what you'll get.. if you want polished, high performance plugins then you'll have to be willing to pay for them or the developers aren't going to come to the platform.

Tandem · 27 May 2014, 18:23

Can someone please explain to me how is it that with all the improvements in 2014 SketchUp still struggles just navigating through a large model while a third party plugin like LightUp has no difficulty at all to do a high res fly through and running a screen capture software at the same time.

64 bit or not , It seems to me that even the latest SU release is still not able to take a full advantage of currently available hardware.

See the Templar Town Tour topic for a good example.

edit: forgot to include the link.

sketch3d.de · 30 May 2014, 14:52

@tandem said:

Can someone please explain to me how is it that with all the improvements in 2014 SketchUp still struggles just navigating through a large model while a third party plugin like LightUp has no difficulty at all to do a high res fly through and running a screen capture software at the same time.

in SU you can edit the model... sothat the inference engine and automatic snapping etc. is required to permanently interact with the whole geometry, just displaying rendered raster data is a completely different thing and thus can be distributed to multiple kernels or computed by the GPU.

Norbert

tomasz · 31 Jul 2014, 11:09

@andrews said:

Given the size, complexity, organization and nature of the SketchUp application code, I personally estimate it would take on the order of two to three man years to reliably port it to 64-bit and achieve an equivalent level of reliability from the end product.

That was something I was afraid of.

@mike lucey said:

I wonder if the situation might be leveraged for the generation of an Ultimate SketchUp Pro 64-bit version (with all the bells and whistles sought by power users) via a Kickstarter-like venture?

It is clear that SU is so intricate inside, with old game engine being used etc. that bringing it to 64bit means rewriting it. Patching it may not be the best option.

It is time for our community to build something on Kickstarter basis. There was a thread on it already started.

tomasz · 31 Jul 2014, 11:17

By the way... I have recently received a 250MB SKP file from an user who couldn't render it. I was surprised to learn that I couldn't even open that file in Vista 32bit. I thought it was corrupted. So I have downloaded it once again. No luck. I was only able to view it in Win7 64bit. An attempt to render the whole model was obviously not even considered by me.

tt_su · 31 Jul 2014, 13:21

When you say you couldn't even open it, what happens? Do you get a BugSplat? If so, did you submit it?

tomasz · 31 Jul 2014, 13:49

@tt_su said:

When you say you couldn't even open it, what happens? Do you get a BugSplat? If so, did you submit it?

No good news Thomas. When I open the file SU loads it and quickly reaches ~1.8GB+ memory usage which combined with a space occupied by the system fills up whole memory. Windows message comes up then saying that SU stopped working. BugSplat didn't even have a chance to catch the exception.

Going 64bit is a must, no matter how long it will take you. There is no excuse.

Just a side-note. It is not a model of an airport, large terrain, hospital. It is just a house with all furniture and appliances inside.

tt_su · 31 Jul 2014, 15:09

Can you email or PM me that model for debugging please?

tt_su · 31 Jul 2014, 15:14

@tomasz said:

I was surprised to learn that I couldn't even open that file in Vista 32bit. I thought it was corrupted. So I have downloaded it once again. No luck. I was only able to view it in Win7 64bit.

Was this on the same machine? Vista 32bit crashed with memory usage at around 1.8GB but Windows 64bit - same machine - worked?
How much system RAM does the machine has?
1.8GB sounded much just by loading a SketchUp model. Does that happen with extensions disabled?

tomasz · 31 Jul 2014, 15:52

@tt_su said:

Can you email or PM me that model for debugging please?

No. It is a model of one of our customers.

@tt_su said:

Was this on the same machine? Vista 32bit crashed with memory usage at around 1.8GB but Windows 64bit - same machine - worked?
How much system RAM does the machine has?
1.8GB sounded much just by loading a SketchUp model. Does that happen with extensions disabled?

Machine #1
Vista 32 (4GB installed, 3.0GB available)
Machine #2
Win7 64 12GB

I guess the scenario was following: the model created on 64 bit machine, right at the memory limit. It simply crashes on 32bit system due to lack of additional few hundreds of MB.

I have done it especially for you - yes, it happens with no single plugin installed. I have even taken a screenshot with a cursor showing the position when SU silently crashed.