@juju said:
How close / accurate should one expect annual releases to be to the definition of annual, ie. how much "grace" would be reasonable? Asking for a friend...
Tell your friend 30 days. That's the grace period for letting your maintenance lapse 
I see there was a maintenance release for MAC users on the 12th. Maybe that was it?
Hope you got a lot of support this year because you sure didn't get any maintenance for your $120 per license.
Chrome will just change the favicon to an i with a circle around it and note 'Not secure' for any http sites starting with version 68. This is something else. If you are running v68 you will see it with this site.
I would qualify unearthed's request with a DEM importer that will deal with modern file formats. Most DEMs available these days are raster format. At least the ones I would use.
I've been using it since the @last days and it's still King for conceptual stuff but I have recognized like others that I need to move to Revit soon. That's just what the Arch world uses.
The other thing holding SU back is the lack of tools to deploy it in larger companies. No corporate license key for multiple installs unless you are a network license holder, plugin deployment is a nightmare and setting a common default toolbar arrangement beyond 'getting started' just isn't possible. It also frustrates me that many of the popular free plugins that we all seem to rely on have still not made it into Pro. Trimble could easily pay for the IP or license it. Having to side-load 2 dozen plugins to make it usable for us is unsustainable.
We use an Oculus Rift with Enscape with good results. They say they work with Vive on their website.
It's likely that the task of upgrading is the main reason your aren't seeing more frequent upgrades. IMO Trimble is way behind other companies like Adobe and Autodesk when it comes to enterprise tools to mass deploy/ upgrade/ license. SketchUp seems to have more of a single user focus.
Are you applying a style? Some of the heavily customized styles we use that have watermarks, etc. will dramatically increase our export times.
I think you can eliminate Lumion as a choice based on your criteria for render style and price. It would be overkill for massing animations.
i7-6700K @4.00 GHz with 32GB RAM. Boot HDD is Samsung 850 EVO M.2. Secondary is Samsung 850 Pro SSD. According to Lumion's benchmarking function the GTX 980 is the weak link. I haven't rendered any movies in 8 yet to compare render times with 7 but I expect things will be slower.
You don't need a render farm but you do need a beast of a machine to run it well. I have a Sager NP9870-G purchased two years ago w 8GB GTX 980 and 8 will probably be the last upgrade it can handle. I also recommend getting pro with the larger entourage library as you can't import any animated characters. You are stuck with theirs or people that don't move. All that said we don't hesitate to upgrade every year.
Our Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/derckandedson
Never mind. I found the documentation:
http://qgis2threejs.readthedocs.io/en/docs-release/index.html
I'm very interested to know how you exported to DAE. Please share!
@panixia said:
i tested the trial of su17 both before and after may 22 deadline..
looks like the terrain quality of the DG globe import was far better (very close to google earth mesh, but terrible texture resolution in comparison) before may 22 than now.. now the same locations i tested before 22 are left with just a couple of triangles..
has anyone noticed the same?
I'm seeing the same thing. Grid square's were around 50 feet before and now they are at about 250 feet for the same zoom level and same location for the DG stuff.
If using Google Earth Pro exports as sketch3d.de suggests check out the extension DanielTal_GEmaker to help ease the pain of scaling/lining things up.
So why can't Bing imagery be an option? ESRI does it if I'm not mistaken.
I haven't tried it recently but I've never had much luck with SketchUp in Wine.
If you have a large enough hard drive you can always dual boot both linux and windows. Rebooting to switch your OS is a pain but you don't loose anything this way and performance won't suffer like if you would run it in a VM. Also a good way to work out alternatives for windows apps in Ubuntu or see if they work in Wine before you fully commit to linux.
Sorry to hear your pc went down for the count. That's a bummer. I wouldn't stick with XP as your OS since it will no longer get security patches past next April. I've been running SU7/8 on Windows 7 since it came out with no problems.
You can download installers for past SU versions here: http://www.sketchup.com/download/all
As for your mobo you might be able to find one on eBay but after 9 years it's time to upgrade your pc. I would recommend adding a USB hard drive to your parts list and use syncback or something like it to automate your local backups for next time.
Good Luck
No upgrade for our company to date. Still waiting to see the future direction of SU in full. Without the free edition available for commercial use by my occasional users I have no compelling reason to move forward and many reasons not to.
I don't think so. I tried to export images from a model with a draped ortho in it two months ago and they still looked horrible. The Windows clipboard did a better job than SU's exporter.
