I'm a millimeter away from switching from SU to Modo. It isn't as easy to just pick up and use at first, but as I learn it, I'm starting to think that, inferencing engine aside, I can be ultimately faster in Modo (for what I actually do, not just extruding blocks) than I can even approach in SU. Modo 401 now imports SolidWorks. (Huge for my situation.) Modo can do a full-screen preview render using Global Illumination with environment in seconds, sometimes actually as fast or FASTER than SU can update the same scene with SU shadows and profile lines in the actual scenes I'm doing. Modo won't choke on mere thousands or tens of thousands of polygons. Modo 401 can be had for $895 at some resellers, compared to the $795 we paid for a network license of SU. Modo does instancing and 'replicating', which means it can get into the millions of polygons compared to thousands in SU. I'm not saying it is better than SU in every way for ArchViz, but for my needs, it IS far superior. On the other hand, a lot of people are doing ArchViz in Modo now. Of course, both apps use polygons and can use .obj, so using both together is a great option.

@kevsterman said:

@shamos said:

i found a good and very simple interim solution
im using the windows explorer. i choose thumbnails and just drag&drop the components into the sketchup window.
works for me just fine

a.t.

I'd love to be able to do that but I can't see a preview image in my thumbnails which is really annoying

I had that problem on Vista Ultimate 64. If you open Explorer and go to Tools, Folder Options, View Tab, there should be a setting for turning on image previewing. Unlike XP, Vista doesn't have a 'Thumbnail' view. You just set the size of the icons, and they will be the image preview, if you have the correct option turned on.

How about a 7.1 release before the end of the year that fixes all the obvious bugs?

I just read this thread and I have to say that I agree with DacaD and kwistenbiebel the most.

But I also believe that the Warehouse should be massaged into something more like 3DContentCentral for SolidWorks, which isn't about advertising... It's about Design, and not wasting Time redrawing the wheel. 3DContentCentral has user contributions as well as corporate models, but it is all there for making the designer's job easier and faster, not for generating advertising revenue for SolidWorks' parent company.

Much of this thread tried to address the profitability of SU, and seemed to be mixing up the for-free product model metaphor with the standard for-profit product model. BUT I'M PAYING GOOD MONEY FOR SKETCHUP! For all the money I've paid, I expect it to handle AT LEAST as many polys or entities as $180 subdivision modelers. How about ZBrush? For the same money as Sketchup it uses multicore processing to great effect, realtime shadows, a full 4GB of RAM even though it isn't 64-bit yet, and easily handles well over ten-million polys without sweating, billions with some craftiness. Can SU even load and function with a model that requires 100 measly MB of RAM? In ZBrush (poly with subdivision smoothing and realtime self-shadowing) or Solidworks (b-spline with poly realtime rendering, including shadows and other shader effects such as ambient occlusion), I can basically have models so complex that all available RAM is used up, but the programs are still responsive!

If Google is expecting people to pay $500 to $800 for SU, then they need to make something that provides increases in productivity, plain and simple. That's how to be profitable! That's why I got SU Pro 5 in the first place. Solidworks '07 was SLOW to do factory automation layouts, but as Solidworks has increased their UI interaction speed, workflow speed, and operations speed, and 3DContentCentral has grown into something Google Warehouse wishes to be SOME day, the benefits of SU are slipping away. Yeah SU's still cheaper. Is it still faster? For some limited things, maybe, but its debatable. If I try to add Warehouse or converted CAD models, SU quickly becomes a narcoleptic turtle on morphine. But expectations are increasing. Blocky, flat-shaded models aren't acceptable anymore. Simple shadows are old-school, and it's becoming increasingly hard to claim they're 'real-time' shadows anymore.

I noticed that Google turned the once-very-nice SketchUp website into what amounts to just another Google Beta Software page. Since Google themselves have obviously confused THEMSELVES on whether SU is being developed under a free-product model or a for-profit model, and they may in fact view it as a "blurry object on the horizon", maybe I should just hook me up a morphine drip and learn to live at SketchUp speed.

@solo said:

They never had it as an option on the survey, only options were things that they might be able to fix, High poly support is a taboo topic to the GSU team as they have never mentioned it, aknowledged it or even responded to all the complaints and cries about it.

SU's shelf life is nearing the end without it, start learning another app now before you find yourself redundant.

Yep, and 'high poly' is a moving target that is now in the Giga-poly range in terms of how many polys some apps can handle at once. And that's Giga-POLY, folks, not Giga-entity.

SU is getting to the point that it can choke on 'LOW-poly', nevermind 'HIGH-poly', compared to what other apps and game-engines are now handling!

How's that 'free' working out for you now?

The original realtime features were meant for realtime assistance in visualization during presentation or during modeling. I remember the @Last marketing videos where they talked about this. Google really hasn't developed anything new in the graphics since they acquired SU, and it's embarrasing now how few polygons it takes to turn shadows into a non-realtime feature, at least in relation to where other modelers with shading or shadows are now at.

Personally, I would like to see the current rendering features made much more efficient. Surely using four 64-bit hyperthreaded cores ought to make shadows, textures and outlines much, much faster. REALTIME, even.

And in the spirit of just staying up with the current capabilities of other MODELERS, and the visualization abilities they have added, I would like to see a real-time or at least a non-realtime (but fast) ambient occlusion render. This combined with texture and shadow should make a very nice, easily visualized presentation or model. Or even without shadow and texture: It's amazing how much AO does for correctly perceiving the volume and shape, or relative depth of surfaces in the render.

If there is AO rendering with SU, then I can see a feature like an 'AO Texturizer'. I'm thinking of something where a highly detailed model (house with all moulding, mullions, etc. modeled) rendered in AO, and then textures of each side of the house are applied to a simplified model so that the medium detail is shown as a texure on the low-poly house. Or conversely, the poly-model isn't changed, but the textures are applied so that the model now appears to be rendered with AO in a realtime renderer that doesn't have AO at all. Having SU bake in the AO shading into a textured surface, or automatically making a non-textured surface a textured surface and baking in the AO shading would be pretty desirable.

It's a trick used in games all the time for both characters and mechanical devices:

• Model the large, medium, and fine detail.
• Render this with AO+texture in the modeler and get screen shots from all sides.
• Retexture the model using the AO+texture screenshots as the model textures.
• Remove all the fine (& sometimes medium) detail that can just be represented as texture only. (some fine details can be realized as normal or displacement maps in games - unlikely to ever be added to SU.)
• Now when rendered in the game, the object looks like it is being rendered with AO, but it's not.

The same trick can be used purely within SU to get better looking, faster-running realtime presentations, such as in walkthroughs/flythroughs of large developments or in the SketchyPhysics sims Wacov is doing. You couldn't tell the difference between realtime AO and AO textures unless objects move within the scene relative to the ground or each other, or they change shape, and even with motion, I think it's still over 90% as good as realtime AO.

@fossa said:

Is it just me or is the lack of a back button on the components window really unhandy.

It's officially not just you. Six months of no Back button.

I think they sacrificed it to the god of the vertex for more polygon handling speed.

Proof that programming by means of ritual sacrifice does not work...

well, except when the sacrifice is your own life, your wife, your family, your health...

Anyway, the spirit of the original @Last guys is now truly gone, IMO.

Thanks for the info, guys.

I found that at cheapest it was about $37 vs. $49 online wired vs. 30' wireless, Windows compatible, shipping included. (Microsoft brand)

With setting up keyboard shortcuts to control things, it sounds like two different vehicles could be controlled separately. Can xpadder be used to allow two different controllers to control one vehicle each by mapping the appropriate shortcuts?

Thanks Physicsguy,

Q: wouldn't the wireless types just have a usb transceiver that still works the same way as far as the PC can tell? I have a PC with 21" monitor and a X-Large flatscreen monitor nearby used as our 'TV'. (I have Netflix and an HDTV receiver, so we get all the local stations in HDTV, and watch recorded HDTV or Netflix streaming within the Vista Ultimate Media Center, or DVDs, listen to Pandora, etc. from our computer. We currently don't use a VHS, DVD player, or any of our audio-video equipment. Just the PC.) It would be nice to be able to sit in front of the 'TV' and 'play' SP!

Well, I don't think anyone simulates with a realistic number of molecules. The least realistic fluid animations use a particle emitter, where the particles use a 'blobby' algorithm to simulate a fluid surface. A single particle looks like a polygon-sphere, a droplet. A tight line of particles looks almost like a true fluid stream. The major downfall is that the particles don't have any expression of 'surface tension' or volume, so they freely scatter and also can flow to a single small spot. Scriptable particles have partially overcome even that drawback, if you can script in a kind of attraction that has a min. standoff distance, and still incorporates friction between objects, damping, and so on.

True fluid simulators that do all the work internally still operate on a mesh that you produce which has a relatively small number of vertices. Just like Finite Element Analysis (FEA) used to simulate the failure of a given part design that uses a given material, such as acrylic plastic or a certain aluminum alloy. The part model, usually created in software like Solidworks, is broken up into elements, small blocks, so that the part looks like it is made of tiles, like the space shuttle. (It also has a resemblance to a quad-only polygonal model where all the quads are the same square area.) But the tiles are blocks, and the entire solid has been 'blockified'. Then the expected 'force' is applied to the part in a specified vector, and based on the material selected, an analysis is performed and a report is produced that details the amount of force that produces deflection and ultimately failure of the part. Usually an image is generated that shows which areas of the part are stressed the most, allowing the designer to rework it to improve his design.

The point is that these sims usually work on mere hundreds of elements, maybe several thousand at the most, not tens of thousands, and certainly not millions. You might be able to make something that looks like flowing sand or wheat, or maybe even 'like' a fluid, if some more advanced physics scripting is added. But since SU doesn't do any special rendering, the best is could probably look like is 'watery particles'.

Is a 360 controller just a USB device, so you could plug it into a Vista PC, use xpadder, and immediately be controlling SP?