SketchUp 2019 release

Pixero

I think the attack on Chip over at the SU Community was irresponsible. It shows that SU management feels threatened.

Do you have a direct link to it? I didn't find it when I searched through the thread.

kaas

@rv1974 said:

They call it a pointrelease. Just feel the difference (the previous one was only 4 month ago)

I use Unreal quite a lot. I note a big difference in my experience with UnrealEngine & Epic compared to SketchUp & Trimble;

Open communication at Epic. There's even a roadmap on Trello you can read.
A good bug reporting mechanism at Epic. You get a notification if a bug is reproduced and logged. You can even track if/when it will be fixed (target release).
Regular bug fixes at Epic. They have teams that develop the engine AND teams that make commercial products using the engine (games like RoboRecall, Fortnite etc). So they eat their own dogfood and nasty / annoying bugs get fixed quite fast. Compare that to SU.. its day & night
Exciting new features are added all the time at Epic. I think they can't afford not to in the games industry. SU is another thing. Still...at the time Trimble was proudly announcing !! we have dashed lines !! Unreal for instance relatively quietly released their first implementation of Real Time Raytracing - its a first step that could be big for archviz. So yeah .. dahsed lines were quite underwhelming to me...

It isn't always perfect at Epic though - features sometimes brake, the documentation is always outdated, and when using the latest build, you quite often have to look on the forums to solve problems. Still - I far more prefer the energy, ambition and communication over at Epic.

Using a software day after day with long time annoyances and stupid delays for basic operations wouldn't happen over at Epic. The devs would get slapped in the face by the teams that have to develop the games. Meanwhile over at Trimble...

david_h

well the way SU is going--and based on what I'm reading here. .. looks like I'm switching. . . or at least try to. . . Sketchup
Blender

Mike Amos

Some folk here suggested an alternative to sketchup, developed by the gifted among us. Is that idea still around or were they all given jobs on the development team?

david.

@pixero said:

@david. said:

I think the attack on Chip over at the SU Community was irresponsible. It shows that SU management feels threatened.

Do you have a direct link to it? I didn't find it when I searched through the thread.

I would describe it as a passive/aggressive attack. To me, it misrepresents Chipp's participation in that thread. It intersperses suggestions like "if you want to help people prepare their models for rendering in Blender, that's great" while accusing him of interrupting topics with a cry to abandon SU and belittling the community, etc. I haven't seen any of that. It was this one:

https://forums.sketchup.com/t/sketchup-in-2019-where-great-ideas-get-to-work/87199/593

srx

This looks interesting, at least for architects https://www.bricsys.com/en-intl/shape/?utm_source=boa_mail&utm_medium=update_mail_boa&utm_campaign=new_shape_release_V19

chippwalters

@xtov said:

Hum....it is your choice, and you may have right at the end.
BUT...SU lovers, check this Blender QUICK References Card...
You may regret SU simplicity...event with some plugins loaded...

[attachment=0:1igs9ypl]blender-infographic-1280-SM.jpg[/attachment:1igs9ypl]

That's the old version of Blender, which relied too much on keystrokes. I would hate to see what a similar map for SU would look like if it included all the same features (from plugins).

Please see the 2.8 Blender app for a much simpler interface.

masterpaul

Is there something that is essentially stopping us from developing our own opensource SketchUp "clone"? Except for time and money?

juju

@masterpaul said:

Is there something that is essentially stopping us from developing our own opensource SketchUp "clone"? Except for time and money?

copyrights and patent infringements

masterpaul

@juju said:

@masterpaul said:

Is there something that is essentially stopping us from developing our own opensource SketchUp "clone"? Except for time and money?

copyrights and patent infringements

What is copyrighted? Don't software patents expire after a while? Copyright doesn't really apply as we wouldn't be calling to SketchUp! All icons would be different too. LibreOffice doesn't get sued into oblivion, gimp exists too.
The style of SketchUp UI has been around since paint, so I think we could have a very similar UI too.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6628279 The only thing that is tricky is the push-pull, but I've seen other software try and attempt that and plugins on other programs (I think).

If it's possible we could actually get a lot of things built in from the start, a built-in curviloft feature, features like fredoscale a built skatter like feature for exporting images and rendering etc. So we would have the standard toolbar which would have a very similar feature set as the large toolbar as in Sketchup and an advance toolbar with all those more "complicated" commands. Eventually, a simple to use built-in render and most important actual, support for large heavy models.

rv1974

It'd be more efficient to develop a-la SketchUp mesh building mode inside Blender

masterpaul

Edit:

There's a destructive push pull in development:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beZau_wpR-U
https://blenderartists.org/t/destructive-extrude-beta/678275

It seemingly has components like in SketchUp that can be edited all at once. It's lacking the UI, and perhaps with the upcoming blender, it will be possible to clone SketchUp's UI layout to help out with people wanting to migrate. Perhaps that could be done with a separate install exe so that beginners don't have to mess around with preferences or anything. I'm not sure how much more work would be needed to get everything sorted. I never used blender before. So I don't know what else would have to be done/coded in.

andybot

@masterpaul said:

I never used blender before. So I don't know what else would have to be done/coded in.

I don't believe there are any tools in SU that are not available in Blender (inclusive of SU extensions.) IMO, the big difference/special sauce is the inference engine in SU. You can already push-pull with the extrude command. Manipulation inside meshes is not a whole lot different than SU, it's just a very a different workflow and shortcuts. The 2.8 UI changes make Blender miles more accessible coming from other software. Do take some time and explore Blender.

monsterzero

Oops. I just lost my lengthy post. So I'll keep this "version" short

Looks like I won't be using Sketchup anymore. For some time it was meditative to build in SU. But now with the SU 2019 release, the writing is on the "proverbial" wall. For the VR/AR and other art projects I am doing, I can no longer justify using SU. Nothing against SU, it isn't robust enough for me anymore.

So Blender it is.

I do know I'll be diving into Chipp Walter's videos like mad. I'm already digging into them and I'm fully invested and excited for 2.8.

(I will be modifying my setup in Blender to feel as much like SU and my build style as much as possible)

pbacot

@andybot said:

@masterpaul said:

I never used blender before. So I don't know what else would have to be done/coded in.

I don't believe there are any tools in SU that are not available in Blender (inclusive of SU extensions.) IMO, the big difference/special sauce is the inference engine in SU. You can already push-pull with the extrude command. Manipulation inside meshes is not a whole lot different than SU, it's just a very a different workflow and shortcuts. The 2.8 UI changes make Blender miles more accessible coming from other software. Do take some time and explore Blender.

I wonder if another difference in the interface is the ease of drawing in dimension. Haven't done much in Blender yet, but from comments I gather it is not as straightforward to draw dimension-ally as you want to do in architecture.

rv1974

@pbacot said:

I wonder if another difference in the interface is the ease of drawing in dimension. Haven't done much in Blender yet, but from comments I gather it is not as straightforward to draw dimension-ally as you want to do in architecture.

My eyes are bleeding when I see Blender archviz tutorials. They use raster blueprints as reference, move mesh subobjects without exact input, just eyeballing. The lack of fast and exact input on the fly is my biggest concern.

L i am

@rv1974 said:

@pbacot said:

I wonder if another difference in the interface is the ease of drawing in dimension. Haven't done much in Blender yet, but from comments I gather it is not as straightforward to draw dimension-ally as you want to do in architecture.

My eyes are bleeding when I see Blender archviz tutorials. They use raster blueprints as reference, move mesh subobjects without exact input, just eyeballing. The lack of fast and exact input on the fly is my biggest concern.

I wondered about that myself but keyboard entry is do-able in blender and apparently 2.80 also has an improved tape measure.
I think that it is metric units only.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcTntkU6e30

optimaforever

A bit late to the party but I agree with most here... SU isn't innovative anymore.
I fondly remember the anticipation when AtLast software brought v3 with the introduction of curves and v4 with transparent materials, and then eventually, the ruby scripting allowing the writing of plugins. Direct mesh/imagery import from Google Earth was nice plus too.

Nowadays I only use move, rotate, measure and pushpull (and sometimes section planes) as standard tools. All the rest is handled thanks to addon plugins.
So, I think all the tools I use in Sketchup date from v4 or v5. Everything that Google and Trimble brought on the table after that was not really needed. Which is a shame because I feel basically I pay every year for compatibility issues (clients keep updating and send us latest ver Skp models, or latest DWG files for instance)...

For several years now, SU's power is basically its plugins potential.

sketch3d.de

@masterpaul said:

Is there something that is essentially stopping us from developing our own opensource SketchUp "clone"?

lightyears of knowledge in highly complex development of a 3D kernel as well as an accelerated OpenGL display output, glueing a programming API and last but not least connecting/developing vector-based 2D/3D data exchange interfaces for multiple platforms... just to name the most difficult stuff.

masterpaul

@sketch3d.de said:

@masterpaul said:

Is there something that is essentially stopping us from developing our own opensource SketchUp "clone"?

lightyears of knowledge in highly complex development of a 3D kernel as well as an accelerated OpenGL display output, glueing a programming API and last but not least connecting/developing vector-based 2D/3D data exchange interfaces for multiple platforms... just to name the most difficult stuff.

I think I would rather pay developers to create an opensource alternative than to pay that yearly for pro every year that brings nothing new to the table.