Google is Listening!
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@mrwip said:
Actually, when someone says on the forum “we should add this function”, I'm really sad to see that there is always someone to respond “no, no, keep sketchup simple”... that classical answer clearly shows that there’s no innovative research in term of interface going on.
What a load of arrogant nonsense! It is precisely SketchUp's innovative interface that makes SU so easy to use. My 6 year-old daughter was building houses within 20 minutes of first using SU's innovative interface. How many other titles out there can claim this? Blender? 3DS Max? Cinema 4D? Heck! I can't even figure these apps out straight away, yet alone a 6 year old child! Drown SU in multifaceted buttons and devices, and the interface bombs.
Look at any design which has lasted. Take the humble transistor FM radio. An on/off button. A volume control, and a tuning dial. Simple as anything, but it works, and is reliable. You can turn it on and be listening to the radio straight away. Anything with menus and a over complicated interface, and you're ready to throw the damn thing out of the window (DAB for eg).
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@unknownuser said:
Just one more thing before I get back to work.
Taking the path of 'add all this stuff for ME' doesn't seem too productive and/or likely. Put yourself in the developers shoes and try to understand their vision. Personally, I would love to bloat the he'll out of sketchup as long as it was tailored to my personal needs. If i try consider everybody, which I think google does (ranging from beginners to advanced modelers) then, while I may understand some of the demands of the expert users- in all likelihood I'm not going to cater to them when they are such a small part of the user base. That balance is important to understand when making demands and I personally feel it's better to discuss ideas that include all users. Sketchup is going to remain simple wether you like it or not but it'd would be nice if the individual user could complicate it to their liking.
(sorry about the choppy typing etc. I'm on a phone)
+1 from me.
While its all showing willing of the Google guys to have this laundry list of stuff people would like, you cannot get away from the fact that everything has a cost and there is finite resource with which to deliver.
Over many years in software development I've always found that if you ask people to bang out wishlists with no 'price' to them, you kinda get junk.
Having said that, this brick bat session over the last few days does seem to have crystallized around a small number of key areas/features that seem to have broad appeal. I hope we can get some transparency and a publicly available, "live" roadmap document from the Boulder guys.
Pretty please!
Adam
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@unknownuser said:
Wanna hear a rant though? I'm so sick of people demanding all these visualization functions so they can beautify their rather stale drawing ideas.
that's about the most boring building I've seen in my life but hey look!, it's really similar to a photograph. Wonderful... Not
Spot on Jeff!
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@tfdesign said:
@mrwip said:
Actually, when someone says on the forum “we should add this function”, I'm really sad to see that there is always someone to respond “no, no, keep sketchup simple”... that classical answer clearly shows that there’s no innovative research in term of interface going on.
What a load of arrogant nonsense! It is precisely SketchUp's innovative interface that makes SU so easy to use. My 6 year-old daughter was building houses within 20 minutes of first using SU's innovative interface. How many other titles out there can claim this? Blender? 3DS Max? Cinema 4D? Heck! I can't even figure these apps out straight away, yet alone a 6 year old child! Drown SU in multifaceted buttons and devices, and the interface bombs.
Look at any design which has lasted. Take the humble transistor FM radio. An on/off button. A volume control, and a tuning dial. Simple as anything, but it works, and is reliable. You can turn it on and be listening to the radio straight away. Anything with menus and a over complicated interface, and you're ready to throw the damn thing out of the window (DAB for eg).
But if SketchUp was the Jeep of CAD. ie Totally bullet proof, totally stable, whatever you throw at it, it keeps on coming back for more, and did just what it said on the can and no more, I'd agree with you.
But while we all love SketchUp, its by no means bullet proof.. so it slightly falls between 2 camps: Neither the tough workhorse, nor the fancy higher order surfaces design tool.
Adam
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@bobpineo said:
I have 2 work around methods. I have posted a tutorial on youtube.
Great, Bob, thank you
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@adamb said:
But while we all love SketchUp, its by no means bullet proof.. so it slightly falls between 2 camps: Neither the tough workhorse, nor the fancy higher order surfaces design tool.
I kind of agree, but for now it does (almost) everything I want it to do. But it's like that hammer argument set out by Thom, SU is only a tool, part of a bag of tools. If you engineer too much into one software title, you then, if you are new to that title, have a very steep learning curve. It's important to have tools that can complete 100% of the job, but that need just a little more thinking about- and that's where the plugin comes in.
Personally I'm not too keen on too many plugins, because I am then forced to think like the programmer who made them, and some think in other ways to the rest. Again, I'm with Jeff, where I think that you should be able to bloat SU as much as you like, or like me, keep it as simple as possible. To me that is a great plus (+) for SU.
PS, Adam, I'm originally from Lewes.
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@unknownuser said:
Wanna hear a rant though? I'm so sick of people demanding all these visualization functions so they can beautify their rather stale drawing ideas.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but are you talking about requests for better UV mapping?
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No.
Pretty much all the stuff that would noticeably improve by sketchup being 64 bit. (as I understand)But really, my 'rant' was more of a get back at someone who took a stab at me earlier in the thread.
Pay no attention to it. -
OK, I was just checking.
I have to admit that I was someone who thought that a move to x64 was a no brainer - but that was only because I thought that it would allow more hardware utilities to be put to use for an improved SU engine that would better handle high-poly models and faster calculation times for plugins.
I can now appreciate that it isn't that simple.
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Nice Tuts Mr Bob!
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@tfdesign said:
What a load of arrogant nonsense! It is precisely SketchUp's innovative interface that makes SU so easy to use
Well, well, well...that was quite a violent assertion... Actually I think you really don't get what I was trying to explain, but maybe it wasn't clear enough, and that's why you saw arrogance where there was only a testimony of facts...
So : SketchUp interface was really innovative when it was created, and still is by many ways, but it hasn't really evolve the way it can.
Let's keep the example of the push pull, and, if you don't mind, your 6-year old daughter.
I think, and that's the marvel of sketchup, that's it's really easy for her to build something convincing in a few minutes. But, and that's where I made my point, it should be then quite tricky for you to explain to her why it's not possible to push-pull the curved wall in the backyard, and why she couldn't extrude a simple line to make a fence next to the entrance.@unknownuser said:
Drown SU in multifaceted buttons and devices, and the interface bombs.
I never asked for that...but rather the opposite... Actually, if the native tool were a bit more clever, and able to do such things, it will only make things more easy and interesting, without adding loads of button and toolbars (as it is today if you're using plugins). SketchUp will still be SketchUp, and even maybe a bit more...
Again, making it more capable does not mean making it weaker, more complex, or fashion for only a small time. The efficiency of a tool is the result of a long engineering, of all of its parts, and looking at SketchUp, I have the feeling that some of them have not been push to their best, that's all.
The idea is not to ask "more tools, more tools", but to say "what could we bring to this particular tool to make it better, while keeping it as easy to use as before ".@unknownuser said:
How many other titles out there can claim this? Blender? 3DS Max? Cinema 4D? Heck!
And don't get me wrong, I'm using sketchup since several years, been trying most of the other apps, and still coming back to sketchup, because in many fields it's still by far the best tool. If it was not, why posting anything around here...
... If you still think it's a bunch of nonsense, then I'm sorry...
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[edit].. mrwip, you're misquoting me up there ^^^ (as in, i didn't say any of that) but i'll chalk it up as a typo
@mrwip said:
So, in the case of the “push pull”, in 2010 it should be a kind of multipurpose and intelligent tool, that is able to extrude about everything, regarding to the context. It will greatly help new user, by assisting their hand efficiently, and it will boost the productivity of pro user by reducing the amount of operation necessary to make one simple action.
i sort of skipped over some of this on my phone earlier but yeah, i like your thinking..
it'd be great to have more multipurpose tools in the manner you describe.. like you say, you choose the push/pull and the actual action depends on where you put the mouse.. flat face and it'll work as normal but you can also do the same thing to a curved surface or a line (or series of lines).. pre select and it all extrudes evenly etc.i think that could happen very well in certain cases but, just using the push/pull ideas, i don't think it would be as simple as you make it out to be.. joint-push-pull, i think, draws those preview lines because sketchup can't display the sketchup look to all the moving faces at once.. it needs time to calculate and generate the geometry which takes some. it'd be awesome if the suteam could pull it off somehow and make jointpushpull work the same way as normal pushpull but i really doubt it.
with pushpulling a single line, you're going to run into the problem of which direction to extrude in.. there's a lot more steps or actions involved than just clicking the line and extruding it to the point you're trying to move it to.. it's no longer a simple tool and i seriously don't see the 'greatly helping new user via efficient hand guiding'..
probably the only thing su could do to the pushpull tool while keeping it intuitive is multi select pushpull (to an extent)regardless, this gets me thinking of the bigger picture.. it's not so much 'sketchup is a decade old and needs to to rethink the way it's users interact with the app and it's tools' -as- we're interacting with the computer in the same way we always have.. there's the mouse and there's the keyboard (and 2D screen).. that's pretty much all we have and neither are very natural to us.. (the mouse more-so than the keyboard but still, it's super clunky and outdated).. that's the actual point of contact we have with the computer and it's highly flawed.. all (most) UIs revolve around that and try to suit themselves to fit but really, if you want to make truly smarter and more intuitive drawing tools then you're gonna have to tackle the real problem first.. until then, for the most part, we can either add more toolbars/menus/mouseclicks/keystrokes/etc..
i do think sketchup could accomplish some streamlining and/or add more functions to existing tools while keeping them relatively intuitive but to the extent and ease you're suggesting, i'm not so sure.you know, apple is sort of public testing some stuff along these lines with gestures.. five years worth of refinements and who knows, we might start seeing the mouse going into retirement. not sure if that's the answer but it's a start.
@unknownuser said:
It's really strange to see that no one is ever mentioning the fact that the base of SketchUp could evolve...SketchUp way of handling situation is not some kind of sacred text. The original set of tool was good when it was released, many years ago, but it have to evolve. Creating new function does not mean adding modified old tools to the program, but rethinking the way the original funtion was working....and that should be the job of the developers (no offense...).
I don't like to talk about others software, but programs like Inventor Fusion or spaceclaim, try to find new approach, by making the program more clever, in order to make things more simple, while still really powerful.one thing you might not be understanding about my point of view here is that i definitely have a dream app in my head.. i've tried every single modeler out there that's available on mac (rhino, modo, cheetah, maya, c4d, etc) but i'm always finding my way back to sketchup.. so do many other people because just about every feature request i've seen can end with 'like in max' or 'maya does this'.. why are people using sketchup when there is much more powerful and capable modeling software out there.. that's sort of an important question for the advanced users to answer.. and i'm talking beyond the simple "i like it because i can try multiple revisions of an idea rather quickly" or "it's fun!" or "it's free!!
" .. i'm saying, what do you really like about it? what keeps you coming back to it?
i admit, it's hard to put in words but i'll try.. if i keep it simple and all encompassing, i like it because at it's core SU feels like an architectural modeler.
if i elaborate on that then.. man, i've been building things since i was two years old.. always curious as to why this was built that way etc.. how can cars go up there when if i try it with my legos, it collapses? etc.. got into drafting somewhat early which allowed me to start working through some problems on paper.. got to the age of needing to support myself so i started to put these curiosities and experiments into realities (on other people's dollar i should add ).. i did mostly sketches while working out math and logic via calculators and/or onsite jigs.. some projects would be more formal with draft sketches (ie- not really blueprints per se but working drawings none the less).. a few times, scale models were created to help work through the complications.. eventually, i picked up sketchup (3) and i hope the tie-in is self explanatory..with all the other modelers i don't feel as if they're geared towards architecturally minded people (and i think architecturally is possibly the wrong word.. it's too prestigious or maybe narrow of a word to use for what i'm trying to say.. blue collar engineer?)
it also feels like 'this app is amazing and hey, check it out, it can do what i want.. sort of.. right from that dusty little corner over there.. "... "or, it's super awesome that i can draw this perfect blob of mud in 5 minutes but really, who gives a ? i don't.".. just way too much stuff that might as well be written in chinese.. (animation, sculpting, you know).. when i hear organics, i'm thinking organic form.. not organic the literal..what really needs to happen (if i may be so bold) is not an evolution of sketchup.. more like a revolution of sketchup. that pretty much starts with figuring out why you use it to begin with.. the sub-core of sketchup struggles when dealing with too many polygons but the real core is a bit beyond that.. whatever those original @last guys were thinking, well, they pretty much nailed it whatever it is..
one specific thing i like about sketchup is that it's totally ground based 3D.. there's no vertical planes this and that-- it's just the ground then the inference system.. those 4 window apps are not what i'm looking for.. if i need top front and side views then i'll just draw this thing on paper.. rhino is like that and while i understand the purpose and benefits, it not correct.. i like being able to feel like i'm on the ground and all points are ultimately, related to that.
that's pretty much an immediate bad taste with bonzai for me.. all those planes bouncing around from the get go make me feel like i'm in the matrix instead of the market.. sketchup has the up/down/left/right/front back covered very well within 3d space, and it keeps that at it's root.. i don't really care if i can draw an accurate compound miter's cut line in blank space at a moments notice.. i definitely want that capability available in the app but it doesn't have to be so in my face.. the basis of su navigation is the most comfortable to me..
speaking of bonzai, they almost did what a lot of us are hoping for from sketchup.. i mean, feature wise, that app does what sketchup does and a lot more but why aren't people flocking to it (or heck, maybe they are?).. same with formz.. on paper, that's basically the dream app i'm thinking of.. i think they realized some of the advantages and pitfalls of sketchup and set out to fix it up.. problem is, they made bonzai more sketchup like when in reality, it should be sketchup being more bonzai like.
or a better recipe might be 3 parts sketchup, 1 part modo, 1 part rhino.. it would more likely than not have to be written from the ground up.. with the base idea that kicked off sketchup but with the freedom and aspirations to make it more sleek, refined, and more geared towards the intermediate to advanced modeler.. it's architecture based at heart.. it's not an architecture module.. the modules would be more like animation, smush tools, and the like instead of typically being the other way around.
****cutting myself off here regardless of clipping my ideas.. this has gone on long enough
[i guess i should add this last little snippet concerning some of the realities of an undertaking such as this.. yes, i will wait 2 1/2 years and yes, i will pay 4 figures if necessary]
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@mrwip said:
... If you still think it's a bunch of nonsense, then I'm sorry...
"violent"?
No, quite the opposite. Thanks too for making yourself more clear. I am English, and speak with an english 'tongue'. Sorry if you are not used to that.
Looking at you proposition now, having such a tool doesn't sound as complicated as it did before. It's a good idea. A more intelligent tool, that recognises when you are near a curve, and so then allows a different tool behaviour, if say is accompanied by pressing another key.
I think what made me jump was once using SpaceClaim, which claims to be an engineering version of SketchUp (SketchUp on steroids, as the marketing blurb suggests), and the tool automatically updates for you, which is, in my mind, wrong. I actually found that this behaviour slowed down my workflow! But it could work, if it had an option key that allowed this behaviour.
As for my 6 year old, Key Stage 1 children don't have a hold on the idea of being able to extrude a curved wall (some- yes, but a very small minority). It's only until they reach upper key stage 2 that they start to grasp this concept. This is why, this SU tool should stay as it is (but an option key to trigger this behaviour, yes. I'd support that).
I hope that makes sense now.
Tom
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PS, I don't think I could have said it better than Jeff has in his last post.
However, I think people flock to SU instead of Bonzai, because it is free, and the SU Pro version is cheaper than Bonzai!
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@unknownuser said:
[edit].. mrwip, you're misquoting me up there ^^^ (as in, i didn't say any of that) but i'll chalk it up as a typo
Whoops, sorry, I've messed up with the quoting tool on the last post....
tfdesign, I'm glad to see that my point of view is a bit more clear after that...
... Actually, I find that it's really hard to explain things about the way you're using a program and the way you want it to evolve on such a forum. Everyone has his own point of view, shaped by his own experience, no-one really know why someone is writing something, and it all get quite confusing...I mean, we're always reading things as we want to see them, and really often missing the point of the one who's trying to explain something. Adding to that the fact that many of us are not English native speakers, and the discussion easily turn into great mess... Still, it's really good to be able to express ideas around here !
Jeff, I really appreciate your try to define what makes sense (and essence...) in sketchup... it's quite effective, and shows why it works, by bringing together many concept not well used before in "old" 3D apps (snapping, navigation,...).
@unknownuser said:
the sub-core of sketchup struggles when dealing with too many polygons but the real core is a bit beyond that.. whatever those original @last guys were thinking, well, they pretty much nailed it whatever it is..
... You're touching there what I was struggling to express...There is "something" in the way sketchup was though at first, that still lie in it (that's why we keep using it with pleasure), but that "thing" have not been push or bring in action in the way the software is made, since some years.
... TO end up with the push pull thing, of course it was a schematic example, I'm conscious that extruding a line is not the same action as pushing a face...but still, I'm sure there's something to make there (and on many other subjects too).
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am i missing something with this super push pull tool?
if i want to 'extrude' a line - don't i just grab the end point and move it?
if i want it to be an extrusion i need to lock an inference to vertical, left, right, etc?i agree on a multiple face or curved surface push pull - but that needs to work in specific instances - JPP is a fairly complex ruby in its implementation.
as someone who teaches workshops for a specific application of sketchup - i certainly welcome more powerful tools, but if i need to tell a student too many of these things - 'right click, option, ctrl, left mouse, wiggle your toe, click, end command' - sketchup loses at its core what makes it so wonderful - simple tools to start, with (semi)consistent approach to modify those tools.
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@bmike said:
am i missing something with this super push pull tool?
if i want to 'extrude' a line - don't i just grab the end point and move it?
if i want it to be an extrusion i need to lock an inference to vertical, left, right, etc?Oh, you mean the rectangle tool? That's already in core sketchup.
Tig's extrude edges suite includes vector push pull which allows you to do things that the rectangle tool can't do. But, there's more setup involved which I don't think belongs in core push/pull
(again, don't get me' wrong. I personally woldnt mind more complex operations within the base tools but, they are no longer that simple so I don't think you're going to see it happen to sketchup)
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@unknownuser said:
@bmike said:
am i missing something with this super push pull tool?
if i want to 'extrude' a line - don't i just grab the end point and move it?
if i want it to be an extrusion i need to lock an inference to vertical, left, right, etc?Oh, you mean the rectangle tool? That's already in core sketchup.
Tig's extrude edges suite includes vector push pull which allows you to do things that the rectangle tool can't do. But, there's more setup involved which I don't think belongs in core push/pull
(again, don't get me' wrong. I personally woldnt mind more complex operations within the base tools but, they are no longer that simple so I don't think you're going to see it happen to sketchup)
vector push pull is very cool... but i think it would be a hard sell on packing all those options into a single tool.
fredo and tig and thomthom's tools (and others) are very welcome additions - but IME beyond the beginning user's knowledge base. i usually show a few of them in the workshops i teach - to whet the more experienced students appetite (and give them a link to this forum!)
30% of the folks i teach have a hard enough time installing a basic plugins package into their plugins folder! 10% of them can barely navigate to their programs directory and locate various folders aside from their 'Documents'. 2% have a hard time remembering where they saved something...
so, more complexity - sure - so long as it is layered on a base program that does not overwhelm the core functionality of the program.
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duplicate post!
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