Looking ahead to SU 8.

arail1

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.

linea

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.

remus

@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.

Ecuadorian

A native "plugin manager" similar to the component window, with access to the "plugin warehouse"?

remus

Something like that. The tricky bit would be maintaining the quality of the plugins though.

thomthom

@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.

dacad

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

thomthom

@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.

dacad

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...

dale

A simple duplicate and mirror tool. I use this in Vectorworks all the time, and it really makes life easy.

jeff hammond

tap into this :

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#grandcentral

@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.

RustyShack

@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...

Daniel

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).

Anssi

User-configurable regional settings (decimal, delimiter, etc)
Scandinavian (or other extended or Unicode) characters in PDF exports (Still not there after so many years)

Anssi

JaViXP

**1.-**More than 2GB RAM Support
**2.-**Native renderer
**3.-**Some subdivision add-on

I do hope that all becomes true, which is I think everyone wants of Google SketchUp.

SketchUp Team, keep up the good work!

Regards, Javier

remus

@javixp said:

2.Native renderer

With so many options already available, I can only ask why?

JaViXP

In my opinion, native renderers are free, easy to use and nice results. I'm a little newbie at rendering, I know, just my opinion.

remus

Give twilight a go, you really cant get easier to use and the price is close enough to free.

If thats still a little pricey, try kerkythea, lots of similarities to twilight but not quite as easy to get to grips with.

numerobis

64 bit!!!
multi core support! ...the GHz race is over - now we're on the core track (for several years already). or what should we do with the other 31 cores sketchup doesn't use next year?!?
better texturing tools!
better file handling - it's really annoying to have 200mb files that need 5 minutes to load or save... 3dsmax can do it within a few seconds

brodie

numerobis,

I like all your suggestions! Good point about the multi-core. With the direction processors are going, as processors improve SU is going to get slower and slower. And the file handling is a big deal to me that I don't hear talked about much. SU take an inordinately long amount of time to save or export files compared to other 3d programs. As you said I can save the same file in 3ds Max in a fraction of the time. Or exporting from 3ds Max to Maxwell may take seconds where SU will take minutes.

-Brodie