@matteo said:

The Italian version of Layout lacks all the TB Scrapbooks.
I don't know why. Maybe because it's a standard architectural style of North America.

Matteo,

The QA team says this is a known issue with an easy workaround. The templates are included, but just aren't being found by LayOut.

Go to Layout -> Preferences -> Folders and restore the defaults for everything. That should fix your problem.

Please let us know if that works.

Andrew

@ashscott said:

Can anyone explain why this is hidden?
You may thank Microsoft for this. They automatically hide all sorts of folders these days, like it or not.

@ashscott said:

The new plugin system doesn't seem conducive to maintaining my plethora of plugins across different versions of SU....
I would argue that making it easier to maintain your plugins is exactly why we created the extension warehouse and moved the plugins folder to the location where it should have been all along.

Here's my advice though. Don't worry about where your plugins live. Go to the extension warehouse and install new copies. Be blissfully unaware of where they live on disk. Just use the plugins and go about your business. This is the way we intended the feature to work.

Andrew

Hi, Bob,

I'm sorry to hear of your frustrations and problems. I'll forward this thread to our support and QA teams and see if they have any ideas.

In the meantime, here are a few of my thoughts.

@3bucktruck said:

1. I have to leave my desk walk away and find something else to do for sometimes several minutes while I'm waiting for a save.
   I was going to suggest that you might have an aging hard drive and that upgrading to an SSD would help. But you have an SSD, so forget that. Just make sure you're working with models that are stored on your local machine rather than on a shared filesystem; holding open file handles over the network can cause severe lag.

@3bucktruck said:

2. At some point in the development of a model it becomes impossible to copy components in the same model without serious lag...
3. Again, at some point in the model development I can't explode larger components without seriously long waits...
4. When I open up the Components menu and select "in model" I have to wait a couple of minutes up to ten minutes for it to recover. Then I can "purge unused" normally for the most part.
   This sounds absolutely awful. I've never heard of such problems before. Can you please check out the "Model Info" window on a couple of the files that are giving you fits and post the stats for us? I'm curious of there's anything illuminating there.

@3bucktruck said:

I have done this on two different computers now after I told my boss I need a real video card and 16mb+ RAM. He gave me a new build with all that and i7 processors and SSD. This new computer is worthless or there is a problem with 2013.

I assume you mean 16GB+, not 16MB+, but if you have any sort of reasonable video card, I don't think video memory is your problem. The majority of the issues you mention have nothing to do with the graphics card anyway.

I was going to suggest trying a second computer, but you've already done that. However, since you're working on a company-owned computer, I wonder if there's possibly an anti-virus or anti-malware program interfering to such a large degree that SketchUp can't perform its disk I/O at normal speed. If you have the chance to check out the same model on a personal computer or something, perhaps that would be helpful.

Along those same lines, it would be good to pull up the Task Manager or Resource Monitor. In particular, if you can sort the list of active processes by CPU usage from highest to lowest, then position it so you can still see it while working in SketchUp, you may be able to see if it's actually SketchUp that's chewing up the whole CPU while you're waiting for it to do things, or if perhaps there are other processes getting in the way.

@3bucktruck said:

I can't install v.6 on new machines. What is the deal?
The deal is that SketchUp 6, useful as it is in this particular circumstance, is ancient. We simply cannot continue to provide support for the old stuff. There are known limitations in the SU 6 installer (and probably 7 and 7.1 IIRC) that will prevent installation on new computers, and there's nothing we can do.

Another question would be in regard to whether you're running any plugins at all. If so, it's totally possible that a rogue Ruby script is chewing up all of SketchUp's resources. Please let us know of any plugins you're using.

My final suggestion is this: SketchUp 2014 is available now, and as it's been less than a year since you bought 2013, it's a free upgrade under your support agreement. Since it installs and works side-by-side with 2013, there's no harm in adding it to your work computer and seeing if it behaves any better with the problematic files than 2013 does. If you need to save as 2013 format for others' sake, that's easy to do as well.

Sorry again for your struggles. I'll see if we can find you some help from our side, and I'm sure the folks in the community here will have some ideas as well.

Andrew

@pixero said:

So SketchUp should be run in admin mode? I thought the new locations of files were a fix for that?

The answer is that it's complicated, but yes, running in admin mode may be advisable. You're right that we've invested a lot of effort trying to straighten out plugin paths and whatnot to work without admin privileges. Licensing is a separate issue we haven't fully addressed yet. Our ancient licensing code can be a real source of frustration, which we hope to alleviate someday by completely reworking it, but it's difficult to find time for everything at once.

We tested licensing on Windows 8.1 without having to do anything special regarding admin privileges and never saw this issue. Nevertheless, we have some ideas...

Try uninstalling SketchUp 2014. Then re-run the installer, making sure to choose "Run as Administrator" when you do. The installer is supposed to automatically elevate to admin privileges (I should know; I wrote it), but perhaps it's not doing so on your machine.

After installing as admin, try running SketchUp, at least the first time, with admin privileges. Maybe that'll make a difference.

The other note I got from our licensing expert is that although you're seeing a very specific message about the license file not being writable, there are unfortunately a few other esoteric reasons why that message may arise which aren't exactly a result of the named file not being writable. That's certainly confusing, and obviously something we need to try to work out in the future.

Please try the reinstall and let us know how it goes.

Andrew

@dan rathbun said:

The Mac example at the bottom of that loading info page has an error.
The directory variable is different in the last statement.

Thanks for pointing that out. The extensibility team is fixing it.

Andrew

@tomot said:

I think the common courtesy would have been to respond to my inquiry directly.

Had there been no other responses to your inquiry, then yes, I would have responded to you directly. However, given the potential for hundreds of other users to see this thread at a later date, I chose to respond in a way I thought would benefit the greater good, by asserting my statements alongside a potentially confusing answer to your question that came from another user. No disrespect was intended.

@unknownuser said:

Do you not think it would be appropriate to include a statement in the API that I can direct customers to where SU 2014 users, on Apple iMac's should expect to find the plugins folder?

That's a fantastic idea. Luckily several other people have invested significant time and resources in such documentation. Here's just one such example from the loading instructions on our developer site.

@unknownuser said:

Customer is upset by scripts are not SU 2014 compliant.

Customer needs to be patient and understand that software development takes some time and effort, especially when it comes to adapting existing software to work with a new product. While significant effort was expended to inform the most prolific plugin developers of the impending changes and involve them in an early "alpha" test of the Ruby 2.0 interface well before we launched 2014, given the vast number of plugins that exist in the world, it was not possible for us to involve every single plugin author. Therefore, a great many people such as you are in the position of needing to update their plugins now in response to our most recent release.

The only comfort I can offer is that this action-reaction, or release-update cycle is not at all unique to SketchUp. It is a reality that exists throughout the entire software development ecosystem, for plugin developers, web designers, hardware manufacturers, etc.

I would tell your customers that if using your plugin is an absolutely essential part of their process (one which they can't work around in any other way, such as exporting the file to 2013 format and using your plugin there), then they need to carefully evaluate that as part of their migration strategy. They must then make sure they have either a replacement solution or a reasonable workaround in place before upgrading. Otherwise it's best to just hold off upgrading SketchUp until their dependencies are completely sorted.

@unknownuser said:

He's telling me my scripts should all be in .RBZ format and should be installable in the Extension menu.

There are various ways to handle making your scripts as easy as possible for your users to find and install, but I would recommend that you adapt your plugins to the standards revealed to the developer community when we launched the SketchUp Extension Warehouse almost a year ago, and do what's necessary to get them published there. It's free and pretty straightforward to do, in addition to being a great way to make your plugins easier to discover and more readily available to the SketchUp-using public. Is that the only way to do it? No, but it is the officially supported method.

@unknownuser said:

You guys are creating a nightmare, not a solution. Solutions require critical thinking

You'll forgive me if I don't share your opinion on this. From as early as 2008 (against difficult opposition by our Google overlords), I was an advocate for the creation of the extension warehouse, so I can't begin to tell you how excited I was when it became a reality last year. In fact, I think we've done a phenomenal job with the extension warehouse and its associated developer documentation.

@unknownuser said:

Unfortunately you can't buy critical thinking, it only develops after one has been on the planet for a very long time.

I fail to see how levying such character judgments is expected to motivate me or my colleagues toward further action. I'd prefer we steer clear of such unproductive endeavors.

@dermotcoll said:

Andrew.... sign this man bjanzen up for a free trip to the Basecamp!!!

Dermot,

I think you're right; bjanzen (Barry) definitely earned a free trip to Basecamp. Do you hear that, Barry? Don't worry about Trimble paying for your Basecamp trip; Dermot is picking up the tab.

I'm glad this made a difference for you. I enlisted Barry's help this morning when I was unable to make any further headway, as he's the primary QA person on the 3DWH team. The tricks he keeps up his sleeve are probably his best attribute, other than being a decent cyclist.

Andrew

@otb designworks said:

See attached screenshot. SCF is only plugin installed and SU crashed when trying to open the first file.

Chuck,

I found your BugSplats in the database. I see that you crashed about ten times with this bug yesterday. Your most recent crash contains the note, "scf test with only SCF installed", which occurred while opening a file called "30814_walton.skp".

All of the BugSplats like that ended up here:
[pre:1v9aklgs]com.sketchup.SketchUp.2014!CRubyApplicationObserver::OnOpenModel(...)[/pre:1v9aklgs]
Not that we necessarily need it, but this is confirmation that the crash is due to a problem with Ruby observers, as was suspected.

Andrew

@bmike said:

Did they move it on the Mac? Otherwise its in Application Support...

Your intended clarification may be confusing, as there are multiple application support directories.

The location of the plugin folder for SU8 and before was buried inside the root-level app support folder:
[pre:3fpbb2ln]/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 8/SketchUp/plugins[/pre:3fpbb2ln]This is a system controlled (i.e. machine-wide) location that requires root privileges to modify, and is therefore a very unfriendly way of doing things.

For the 2013 release, we moved the preferred plugins location inside the user's personal app support folder. It remains the same for 2014. In that sense, as of the 2014 release, Windows and Mac are now both the same in preferring to have plugins within each user's personal Plugins folder instead of in a shared location.

The full pathname for Mac plugins in 2013 and 2014 is:
[pre:3fpbb2ln]/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/SketchUp xxxx/SketchUp/Plugins/
aka
~/Library/Application Support/SketchUp xxxx/SketchUp/Plugins/[/pre:3fpbb2ln] Where of course, "xxxx" is 2013 or 2014.

I believe the code still looks for plugins in /Library as a secondary location, but as is the case with Windows, you really should use the user-specific location instead of the system-wide location unless you have a really good reason to do otherwise.

Andrew

@dermotcoll said:

Im accessing the site from Northern Ireland (UK) and accessing directly to the site as far as I know.

Hi, Dermot,

Thanks for the additional information you provided. We discovered an isolated outage of the servers that cover Ireland and Northern Ireland, which we've since resolved. Can you please take another look and see if things are working better for you now?

Thanks!

Andrew

@dermotcoll said:

Anyone experiencing a problem with the 3D warehouse inside 2014? I keep getting this blank screen when I try to borwse for models from within SU.

Hi, Dermot,

Sorry to hear of your troubles. We've seen only a few limited reports of this type of issue and are having a hard time tracking it down. We are unable to reproduce this on our systems, which is a necessity before we can diagnose what's wrong or hope to provide a fix.

In order to help us dig deeper, please provide some additional information.

Exactly what version of SketchUp are you using? What operating system are you running? SketchUp uses Internet Explorer behind the scenes, so what version of IE are you running? Where in the world are you accessing the site from? Do you know if you're going through a VPN or proxy? Does the problem happen all the time, or just at certain times of the day?

Have you tried accessing the 3DWH from your normal web browser instead of using the component browser in SketchUp? If not, please try that and let us know if it works.

Thanks,

Andrew

@ben ritter said:

Wow, this is my first time on the new 3d Warehouse site and is it ever slooooow to browse, compared to the previous one. Not to mention, I haven't been able to download anything. It times out and says "An error occurred when connecting to the 3D Warehouse. The operation timed out".

Ben,

We're not seeing the slowdown on our end, nor the problems downloading files. We'd like to try to diagnose/fix this, but we need a lot more information to try to reproduce the issue first.

How are you accessing the 3DWH? Are you using your web browser or the component browser inside of SketchUp? If you're in the browser, exactly what version? If you're accessing it through SketchUp, exactly what version are you using? What operating system are you running? SketchUp uses Internet Explorer behind the scenes, so what version of IE are you running? Where in the world are you accessing the site from? Do you know if you're going through a VPN or proxy? Does the problem happen all the time, or just at certain times of the day?

Thanks,

Andrew

@unknownuser said:

So I tried to uninstall and reinstall once more and still got the Bug Splat even by manually deleting all plugins and folders in SketchUp 2014.

FYI for the thread...

We received the BugSplat and looked at it. Sure enough, the crash was due to the presence of incompatible Ruby scripts in the user's plugins folder and a failure to delete those plugins before re-launching SketchUp.

As has been indicated elsewhere, you must not copy the plugins folder. Reinstall the scripts via the extension warehouse to get the latest versions that are 2014-compatible.

Andrew

@ken28875 said:

So I uninstalled SketchUp Pro 2014 and reinstalled it without adding any plugins...and it crashed everytime I clicked on it.

SketchUp's uninstaller will only remove files it was responsible for installing in the first place. Therefore, if you copied other items into the plugins folder, then uninstalled and reinstalled SketchUp, those plugins will still be there, along with any problems related to those plugins. You'd want to uninstall 2014, then manually ensure you've removed all plugins, before reinstalling.

@ken28875 said:

I also have SketchUp Pro 2013 active. I am wondering if there is a conflict between having both on the same machine.

SketchUp 2014 was designed to install alongside 2013. It's probably the very first installation scenario we test and something nearly everyone on the SketchUp team does. I do not know of any reason why you would not be able to have both programs installed.

Andrew

@jarynzlesa said:

hi, sorry for this topic, but i can not find thread for sketchup for linux. where can i download sketchup for linux??

There is no SketchUp for Linux. SketchUp runs natively on Mac and Windows only.

There are some folks in the community who have made SketchUp run successfully under the Wine Windows Emulator for Linux, but no official support is provided for that method of operation.

I know that SketchUp 8 worked with Wine. I don't know about 2013 and 2014 though.

Andrew

@unknownuser said:

How do I upgrade with an Educational License?

Hello, Anita,

I forwarded your question to SketchUp's program manager for education licenses. The answer is that yes, you need to contact your reseller, and yes, they are already equipped to get you a 2014 license upgrade, for free.

Here's what she had to say:

@unknownuser said:

We're trying to avoid confusion by making sure all paths of user inquiry point to the reseller.

The license wizard on sketchup.com addresses EDU licenses on the landing page with the statement, "Unexpired educational licenses can upgrade to SketchUp Pro 2014 for free. Contact our Educational Reseller."

Also, when users either hit the reseller link, or actually put their license info in the wizard, it will tell them to contact their reseller.

All resellers have received updated 2014 licenses for EDU users whose older licenses have not yet expired. Once they contact the reseller to request the 2014 code, reseller will send.

I hope this resolves your issue.

Andrew

I've alerted our QA team; they're looking into it for you.

Andrew

@tig said:

However, in your case I suspect that you will see little benefit from having an alternative Plugins folder configured - and you'll just get a bigger admin headache to sort out your current mess.

This is what I've thought for the last few days as I read through so many of the threads describing plugin problems. As I've said elsewhere, when you try to fight against the way the system was intended to be used, you're bound to get burned.

In my mind, it seems a lot easier to just follow the simple path and install plugins through the extension warehouse and plugin store, into their default locations, rather than worrying so much about the details of where they're going.

Sure, there are occasionally good reasons to understand the details and even to override them with alternative installations. But I would estimate that 90% of the people messing about with this stuff don't actually have a good reason to do so.

Save yourselves some headaches and let the system do as it will.

Andrew

@tommyk said:

I always find myself trawling through dozens of poor quality models before I find one I can use.

We agree; bad models suck.

@tommyk said:

The 2014 3D warehouse is appreciated

Thanks; you wouldn't believe the kind of effort it took to pull that off. The guys on the 3DWH team are incredible.

@tommyk said:

but there are still thousands of models! And you can only sort by title...?

You're off by a few orders of magnitude, but point taken. Trust me, it's being worked on, but we had to start somewhere.

@tommyk said:

I propose a few ideas to "page rank" the models somehow

Thanks; the 3DWH team will appreciate your suggestions here.

@tommyk said:

I thought Google (who hosts 3D warehouse, no?)...

No. The original 3D Warehouse was created by Google, on proprietary Google infrastructure, after buying SketchUp in 2006. In June 2012, Google sold SketchUp to Trimble. Last week, we launched an all-new 3D Warehouse.

BTW, does anybody know the gestation period of an African Elephant?

Andrew

@polynechramorph said:

I can't find any of the following files on my windows 8 computer
C:\ProgramData\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014\SketchUp\Plugins
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014\SketchUp\Plugins

That is expected.

SketchUp's installer is designed to create only folders it will populate itself. Since we don't put anything into those folders, we don't create them. Either you must create them yourself, or they may be created if needed by something installed from the extension warehouse.

Make sure you pay close attention to the other threads' discussions about exactly the right places to install your plugins, as well as the differences between "All Users" and an individual user's folder. Unless there are multiple people using the computer who all need access to the same plugins, I always recommend installing them in your own user's folder, not in "All Users". Make sure you put your plugins in the right place according to your needs.

Andrew