Google's involvement with SCF

mitcorb

Even though there are many issues floating out there concerning Sketchup's strengths and perceived shortcomings, I have been impressed with the fact that Google's Sketchup Team often responds in this forum.
I do not perceive that same concern, or interaction with other "giants" such as Microsoft, Autodesk, Adobe to name a few.

So, thank you, Google for your interest in communicating. This goes a long way in my view to promote an understanding between/ among your organization and those who utilize your tools.
mitcorb

As always, I hope this is the appropriate subforum for this comment.

solo

Except when we ask for a response about high poly support, then they mysteriously dissapear.

kwistenbiebel

Good to see people of the SU team responding to peoples questions and sharing things , for instance in the mover.rb thread.

It would be even better if there would be some communication on future development as well, especially on the conerns a lot of SU users have about stability, speed and high polycount control.

mitcorb

Yes, Solo:
As I wrote this, I was thinking about your position regarding high poly as well as the OpenGl matter. I tend to agree on these.
With no defense intended for SU, perhaps these problems are so fundamental that it would take a rewrite of the program in such a way as to cause it to lose some other user friendliness.
Look at Blender. It is very versatile, yet, to do any operation requires a lot of protocol and searching for buttons etc. I wouldn't say that its representatives were as responsive as Sketchup's.
Frankly, it would be great if Sketchup could gain Blender's versatility, while Blender gained Sketchup's accessibility.

to kwistenbiebel: regarding hints on future development, I suppose that they don't want to make implied promises with implied deadlines, only to disenchant their clientele.

mitcorb

thomthom

@mitcorb said:

Look at Blender. It is very versatile, yet, to do any operation requires a lot of protocol and searching for buttons etc. I wouldn't say that its representatives were as responsive as Sketchup's.
Frankly, it would be great if Sketchup could gain Blender's versatility, while Blender gained Sketchup's accessibility.

I don't know how many times I've installed blender and ended up just looking at it. I think I managed to place a cube and that's as far as I got. Saying that, I never looked up the manual, but with any other modeller I've been able to get started with the basics without resorting to a manual.

mitcorb

To Thomthom:
Point well taken on Blender. Again, no defense here, but there is considerable documentation, support, wiki's and so forth for Blender.

The appeal of Sketchup is its accessibility-ease of use.
Incidentally, I checked, and Blender uses OpenGL, yet it does not suffer from the clipping problems associated with zooming in too far, etc. It does have scale limitations.

I really only got involved with Blender because I wanted to model a statue in a church renovation project I was doing, and thought that the learning curve would be tough at first--it was. The statue is not finished.
I am kind of caught in limbo with modeling. It has become an end in itself. I have yet to really progress to the rendering world. The quandary of rendering for me is all that dancing around in 3d space just to deliver one still view of an approximation of reality.

remus

@mitcorb said:

I am kind of caught in limbo with modeling. It has become an end in itself. I have yet to really progress to the rendering world. The quandary of rendering for me is all that dancing around in 3d space just to deliver one still view of an approximation of reality.

I think thats the beauty of SU, for more geometric objects you can focus on what your modelling and not how your modelling it.

sceyefeye

I have to say that I am glad to learn that the sketchup devs do frequent this forum - as someone mentioned earlier this is severely lacking from the giants. The ultimate responsiveness would be the developers of Cockos Reaper (music production software). They are active on the forums and respond quite quickly in terms of developing features or at least explaining why they will be focusing on something more important. Suspect that this sort of answer would at least let Solo know when they might address this or if as suggested it is too big a task for the foreseeable future

Regarding blender, ah yes.......I have downloaded and installed and uninstalled. Did manage to follow a tutorial that allowed me to turn a sphere into a heart and then do a basic render.

Just that sketchup would introduce some decent animation path functionality. Took a look at Truespace (but since they no longer offer a format converter to bring in and export CAD friendly files.......) but man they have nice camera tools......