SketchUP 8
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Jeff in Windows, in the free version, the 'Set North Tool' is greyed out ['Pro Only']
This is a tool I use constantly when Im rendering to set up the right lighting....when dead accurate north orientation isnt important.
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This is pretty much a Google upgrade rather than a SketchUp upgrade with most of their headline changes revolving around GE.
Ive use SU since V2 and I use it daily. I got really really angry when @Last sold out and the prediction then was that it would pretty much become a GE tool....and we werent wrong!.
But these days Im no longer emotionally involved....and my expectations are quite low [and Google hasnt done anything to change this attitude]
From my point of view there is nothing in this upgrade thats worth paying money for...I dont use Layout [possibly should look at it again though, sometime]...I dont give a stuff about GE...and I can live with the occasional toolbar explosion.
I will continue to use V7 Free [and V6 Pro for DWG export].
You cant help being cynical about the way Google released the free version of SU with most of the Pro power....waited a few years to get lots of converts....and then they started taking out bits like DWG import..and now the North orientation....which commercial users pretty much need.
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@stu said:
Jeff in Windows, in the free version, the 'Set North Tool' is greyed out ['Pro Only']
This is a tool I use constantly when Im rendering to set up the right lighting....when dead accurate north orientation isnt important.
well, you did say "which commercial users pretty much need"..
shouldn't they be buying the software anyway?regardless, i'm pretty sure a ruby version will come out soon enough.
in the meantime, for your renderings, can't you just turn on shadows then select everything and rotate it until it's close enough?
[that sounds even easier to me then digging into the model info/location/set.. just ctrlA then Q right? i mean, that's how i've always done it prior to the toolbar version] -
I find this Google comment rather (un)amusing:
@unknownuser said:
Scene Thumbnails
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Scenes Panel included little image previews of the scenes in your model? Your wish is our command.Yeah, right!
How many users have asked for that compared to the REAL improvements we've all been asking for?I feel sad that they seem to have lost contact with reality. And why are they putting up a site for ideas for SketchUp when they clearly don't care one bit what we want?
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I agree with the general consensus that this upgrade isn't worthy of being called 8.0...in fact I'm sticking with using version 7 myself for now. What I don't agree with is pointless complaining - if you have a beef, be specific.
What would make me willing to upgrade is a better plugin managing system and high-poly support. -
Jon, it should be just $95 USD to upgrade.
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Hi all
I've just found out about the release, haven't read this thread, been off the forums for a while (you've been missed
). Does anyone know if I can upgrade my Pro 6 license or do I need to pay the full whack?Jon
edit: the 8 trial has just finished downloading, I'll check I want to upgrade...
2nd edit: It has taken me precisely 5 minutes to see that there is not much new there. Layout 3 looks very interesting though. Dwg export makes it worth buying.
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Thanks d12dozr
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I had some big expectations for v8.
64bit was a given in my world after the huge amount of requests.
I didnt expect any major changes to animation (though SU would surely need them) but I had hoped for some beefed up Open GL enhancements with multiple lights and reflective surfaces. Look what's possible in modern game editors. That should be how all 3d apps looked. Real time lights, reflections and animation.I also naively believed Google would surprise us with some intelligent way of using SketchUp as a sketching device with BIM software like Revit. But nada.
There has already been talks of ditching SketchUp for Revit completely where I work but I've been fighting it off in hopes for some real world productivity enhancements that would justify SketchUp's existence at work when more and more is beeing streamlined and BIMified.What makes me sad is Googles way of letting SketchUp die when it could have grown into something beautiful.
Just by their lack of will to give it some nutrition and water.Where is the creativity in the "new" features of SketchUp v8?
And Google Earth. It's a yoke! Who is using it? I'd rather use some photo images to see how a building looks than a lowpoly, badly textured 3d model of it.
Once SketchUp was seen as a threat to Autodesk but now its withered away into a dusty corner where almost no one take it seriously anymore. Su IS a very good non organic modeler with short learning curve and fast workflow.
BUT, that is not enough today. As it is now we have to use all kinds of work arounds and tricks and third party apps to make it work as we want. And maybe that could work if SU had worked in such a way that it almost was an extension of lets say 3dsMax or Revit. (Yes, I know it's now rather easy to go to MAX but not back and forth as is needed. And there is no BIM intelligence in a SketchUp model.)
SketchUp has to be a child of it's time and work together with other software in a much deeper way. Kind of how the Adobe CS suite works together or Autodesk's software for that matter.I will probably buy the upgrade to v8 just for the ruby speedups but I no longer believe SketchUp will be a major player in the professional architecture industry.
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@stu said:
This is pretty much a Google upgrade rather than a SketchUp upgrade with most of their headline changes revolving around GE.
Ive use SU since V2 and I use it daily. I got really really angry when @Last sold out and the prediction then was that it would pretty much become a GE tool....and we werent wrong!.
But these days Im no longer emotionally involved....and my expectations are quite low [and Google hasnt done anything to change this attitude]
You said it all
I'm a SU user since v2.1I remember the breakthrough of v3 with TRANSPARENCY and SMOOTH CURVES (Villa Savoye was the perfect showcase
)Sketchup 4 introduced the follow me tool, intersect with model, texture repositioning, and of course RUBY API!!!
Sketchup 5 and the sandbox, outliner, collision detection during walk, face me components, opacity maps for cutouts and mesh textures, mesh splitting during 3DS export (finally SU was able to export big meshes),...
Since SU 6 I lost all expectation for any useful tool for me but I'm really thankful to the Ruby plugins coders.
About the infamous shadowbug:
SU3 introduced a fix, called "Carmack's reverse" (John Carmack is the idsoftware genius programmer and guru behind Doom, Quake etc. but it seems that it was Nvidia's Sim Dietrich who found the fix: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/7113) which is patented by Creative. It was disregarded with the introduction of the new revamped 3D engine of SU4 for unknown reason (probably $$$) and never seen back.
To be able to produce "realtime" shadows, SU's 3D engine uses 3D techniques involving OpenGL but these are getting old and Google doesn't seem wanting to actualize them. So we are left with an aging 3D engine, unsolved shadow bug, un-optimized high polycount mesh support (ever seen the world of GTA4, Fallout3, Stalker, Crysis, Just Cause2?), no 64bit support, no "shader" materials (Blinn, Phong, Ward, etc. allowing shiny behaviours), etc.BUT I'm married to SU, I'll keep loving it forever (even if I'll have one-night adventures with, say, bonzai3D or modo or cinema4D or...) BECAUSE it's sooooo easy to use, my brain is addicted, I see the world like a combination of pushpulls/follow me/sandbox, so I guess I will have to live with that
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@pixero said:
I no longer believe SketchUp will be a major player in the professional architecture industry.
Oh stop being so over melodramatic! What on earth are you talking about? Why is this so? What nonsense!
SketchUp is beautiful!
As for BIM intelligence, go get Archicad, Revit or Vectorworks for that (and shell out the rest!).
Google Earth is extremely useful. And it's free, which means my children can use it, as well as inspiring them to become future architects, engineers and designers. Heck, you can even update GE to a professional GIS package if you wish. Alternatively, that's what ArchGIS is for. Is ArchGIS built into Revit, Vectorworks etc? Of course not!
When I show my SketchUp models to common, ordinary people, they are thrilled. No one ever questions the quality of the modelling, animation or rendering. People seem more amused by the inclusion of a toilet! It seems that it is only architectural visualisation technicians who grimace over these minor little details. A bit like hi-fi, and the quest for that 'perfect sound'.
and btw, "yoke" is something that comes from an egg.
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@pixero said:
[...] I no longer believe SketchUp will be a major player in the professional architecture industry.
I don't. I don't see SU going away from my office at least. But then again SU it only used as a visualisation tool - for for that it works great. For BIM work my office use Revit.
@pixero said:
Once SketchUp was seen as a threat to Autodesk
? Really? Why would it be seen as a threat? Apples and oranges. There are many comparisons of SU against other applications - but when it comes to it, SU is designed as a quick sketching 3d visualisation tool - something none of the apps its compared against try to be.
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I've been reading the thread and find it interesting and somewhat informative.
We use sketchup as a tool in our office not a religion. As a tool, it works incredibly well and the dollar to value gained is extremely high.
I know more and more firms in this area for sure are using sketchup as a regular part of their design process. Some of these firms are the celebrity types in Manhattan that can afford to buy any hammer in the hardware store they choose and have many hammers.
We don't use all the abilities of sketchup. just the ones we need and for that, it works incredibly well.
For $95 I get the upgrade or, if I choose, I can pass and not buy it. The cost is not going to change my life and for those not in my situation, they can elect to freely download or not download the free version.
Ok, it didnt come out with everything everyone hoped for and whether its a point upgrade or a whole number upgrade is a matter of symantics. Photoshop rarely if ever changes its interface which I appreciate. I have the latest version and everything I know how to use and existed in a previous version is still right there. I hate when Microsoft rearranges the toolbars and work flow with each new update so I dont update. Last I checked, I was free to do so.
If Google stops developing sketchup today, I would still have a great tool. I also still use pencil 1.0 and pen 2.0.
Its going to be a sunny day so I'm going outside. Later.
Allen
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SketchUp is at our office our mean tool and not only for visualization. We model all our buildings with SU and make real hatched sections through it which are exported to Vectorworks with a ruby and a vectorscript. We use Vectorworks only for layout. I tried layout 2, because it does almost the same what we do in Vectorworks but it is just not good enough. We even use SU for our bill of materials.
This is why i'm very happy with v8 because now SU knows the volume of objects. In v7 i had written my own ruby to calculate the volumes, it worked very good, but it was sometimes a bit slow. I have a ruby and a VBA to export and import my bill of materials to excel and it works perfect.
I use SU as a real BIM and for our office it works better than revit or any other software. And the price less than 10% of revit!
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I use sketchup since its version number 4, and soon came to me that version 5 is now the most robust and flexible version of sketchup. Both still use it for modeling and only I finish some things in version 7.1.
In itself, the version 5 to 8 were almost four new versions in four versions I just saw the program insert text in 3D which I easily solved with CAD or COREL in version 5, photomatch for me not for my work , are possibilities to edit the textures and now a tool that bool tools already offered before .... or 4 versions just for that?? It is rather disappointing!
I do not want to become a sketchup 3dmax, it only takes three things in it TODAY, a UV mapping tool, easily read many polygons giving the opportunity to work with models heavier and better while the file weighing 200 megs and perhaps what not very necessary, an organic modeling tool ....
In four versions I only needed two of those tools I listed and yet Google considers us as worker ants to model the 3D world for the GE ..... but google, me, GE is nonexistent in my work.
And it is my criticism of the Google team trying to fight with several major softs market and fairly with sketchup, she steps back and laughs at us ....
--> Google, please, be professional because we are not amateurs to play house in the GE! <--
Forgive my English ... use an online translator!
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@tfdesign said:
As for BIM intelligence, go get Archicad, Revit or Vectorworks for that (and shell out the rest!).
The point is I don't want to go to another software. As I wrote SU is a good modeler that is showing it's age in many areas. Polycount, UV tools missing and animation rudimentary at best just to name a few.
If it was all up to me I would continue using SketchUp but I work in a 500+ architecture company that is moving fast forward towards doing everything in Revit (and 3dsMax for viz work).
We still use SketchUp in early stages but I can only guess for how long that will be allowed.Now what am I to say to my boss when I ask that we should upgrade x-number of licenses to SketchUp 8?
-Well...they have now fixed the exploding toolbar problem. And wait, we got scene thumbnails. Wow! Must be worth the upgrade cost alone? Probably not. (Layout and GE is not used by us and booleans or solids very rarely if ever.)
I would get a laugh in my face.@tfdesign said:
and btw, "yoke" is something that comes from an egg.
Sorry, I'm not nativly english speaking.
Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, but I love SketchUp too much to let it just wither away.
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@unknownuser said:
Once SketchUp was seen as a threat to Autodesk but now its withered away into a dusty corner where almost no one take it seriously anymore....
.... I no longer believe SketchUp will be a major player in the professional architecture industry.
While my gut reaction about SU8 is one of dissapointment, in my little world up north I personally haven't seen a drop in professionals using Sketchup, perhaps the reverse actually. All day Thursday and Friday just gone, I sat through several presentations about 8 new major developments. 7 of the 8 different architects practices that presented were using Sketchup often for very detailed work. These weren't small local practices either, they were all well known national firms.
Without wanting to go over old ground, Sketchup, for me and others I'm sure, really was/is a threat to Autodesk because it convinced people there was a world beyond Autodesk. However, with Autodesks new found generosity with free online apps such as Project Butterfly perhaps there will be some migration back towards the depths of Autodesk as Sketchup stays in the shallow-end with (some might say) armbands on
@unknownuser said:
SketchUp has to be a child of it's time and work together with other software ... Kind of how the Adobe CS suite works together or Autodesk's software for that matter.
I couldn't agree more.
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@unknownuser said:
2nd edit: It has taken me precisely 5 minutes to see that there is not much new there. Layout 3 looks very interesting though. Dwg export makes it worth buying.
I used the DWG Export in Layout3 and it seems to be kinda fake... it does export the layout lines to Auto-CAD and it converts text to actual Auto-CAD text, however the Sketchup model itself does not export out of layout as vector lines. it comes out as a referenced image in the dwg file.
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I too see SketchUp as a serious threat to Auto-CAD for Residential Architects like myself... Autocad does not consider us in the least... all of the new AutoDesk software is built around grid-dimensioning. if Layout could dimension precisely it would be a dream... I recently tried to use it for construction documents but dimensioning the floorplans was just too cumbersome and messy... the precision in the drawing was also insufficient at 24x36 with 1/4" scale.
why is there no Ruby in Layout?
I ache for the day when I can toss AutoCAD...
I'm not impressed enough with this version to upgrade from Pro 7.1 to 8... perhaps after I see more of where this thread goes.
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