@rv1974 said:

Traditional one huge sense of shame..

You'd think. But they have proven they are utterly shameless over and over again. I don't know why I bother to open those stupid emails that announce the "new" version every year.

Same story every release. I said ages ago that the problem isn't Trimble (or Google before them) --the problem is the top leadership of the actual SketchUp devs. If anybody is surprised by any of this you haven't been paying attention at all.

While this is certainly drifting off topic from the plugin, I will say there are many options to choose from that are better choices -- for me the choice was Modo.

Modo cost me twice as much as SketchUp Pro (and all the paid extensions I bought years ago) -- however Modo outperforms SketchUp by at least 10X. It is also a rapidly growing package, in the true sense of the word... meanwhile SketchUp stagnates and slowly fossilizes.

I have many packages, I like all of them more than SketchUp.

I have a bunch of reasons -- but the most practical is I have not made a model in SketchUp in over 2 years, largely due to my extreme dislike of the direction (or lack thereof) of development of the software (Combined with the easy availability of much better and much more dynamically growing packages). I did purchased SketchUp Pro 2015, because I publicly said I would if they made the 64-bit change (and I try to keep my word), but the software is really useless to me without a decent unwrap. And so I never used it for a project.

I can put the money that would be needed to purchase extension (and updates) towards keeping my more full-featured and actively growing 3D packages up to date (which have built in Unwrap). To me SketchUp is all but dead -- so I see no reason to "throw good money after bad" into this sinkhole of a software.

I do feel for the authors of these great tools, trying to make the best of an impossible situation... but I am not interested in continuing to endlessly work around SketchUp limitations. And since Trimble does not officially support these extensions, they are under no constraints to do anything to improve the endless workarounds.

Rich asked if people would buy, to help him decide to proceed or not... I answered for myself (and only myself) honestly.

Hey Rich,

As you know this has been a longtime wish of mine. However my stance is that I simply will not give any more money to Trimble until basic unwrapping functionality is part of the SketchUp Pro Suite (I envisioned something stand-alone like Style Builder or Layout).

So, while I really want this functionality, I cannot request you build it... because I have frozen all spending on SketchUp (or SketchUp extensions) until such a time as they (Trimble) pull their heads from their rectums.

The "technology:meal" analogies miss the mark because food doesn't really change. Technology however does change, these days at a frighteningly frantic pace. Yet SketchUp doesn't... watching the development is almost like watching moss grow on a rock.

The writing has been on the wall for several years regarding the slow strangling of a once promising package -- but I guess some are happy to "go down with the ship".... or "fade away into obscurity together".

For myself, I don't have money to waste on a software that is not keeping pace with technological developement (or the third-party ecosystem artificially propping it up). I do find it hilarious that they (Trimble) expect users to buy the updates, sight unseen, via continous subscription... plenty of suckers out there I guess.

I have to laugh at the blatent display of a startling combination of greed, ineptitude and lack of vision/leadership. Under normal circumstances I might expect them to be ashamed of themselves... but I learned a while ago they have absolutely no shame.

LOL

I am glad you found a workflow that will allow you to incorporate Substances -- they are worth it IMO.

FWIW -- IMO the "jumping in" approach will serve you best. There really is no need to fear UV layout, or even using other packages. It is a pretty straightforward process once you get into it. And in the end you will be better off for understanding it... even if you come to the conclusion the workflow doesn't suit you.

Also, help will be easier to provide once you are dealing with actual issues rather than rhetorical concepts.

I think you are suffering from an overly simplistic idea of how things work regarding UVs. You must have UVs to apply a 2D texture to any standard polygon-based 3D model (we are ignoring voxel and poly-painting techniques which require high polygon resolutions, and are technically part of the geometry itself). SketchUp creates UVs (as it must) -- it just does not do a particularly efficient job with them, nor does it allow the user direct control of UV space. SketchUp also can support models which have UVs externally unwrapped (via plugin), however it can sometimes cause a big slowdown in SketchUp performance, and bloat SketchUp file size.

Substance Designers Tri-planar projection can resolve seam issues regarding how your model UVs are set up, but it does not UV unwrap your model for you. What this is doing is using the existing UVs to bake World Space Position and Normal Maps (2D textures), which are used to eliminate seam issues. But the UV's still must be in place to bake the 2D texture in the first place.

Now due to the seam compensating nature of Tri-planar projection, SketchUp default UVs may be workable in some instances. You will most likely find SketchUp UVs will result in resolution issues (and other possible issues). Part of unwrapping a model is about packing the UVs in such a way as to make efficient use of the texture resolution. But you may be able to at least bypass the seams as an issue using Tri-planar projection. SketchUp does odd things sometimes, and just because something can work in one instance does not mean it will always work in every instance.

That is assuming you can export your model in a format that Substance Designer can bake from without issues. Substance Designer will not make any changes to your model, so the idea that you can use it for any modeling operations (including UV layout) is fruitless. It is a one way export from your package to SD. You will only be bringing the 2D/texture portion of the Substance back to SketchUp/Thea.

So what I am basically saying is you are going to have to resolve yourself to setting up your UVs before you go to SD -- whether that be inside SketchUp or otherwise (some Ruby plugins might be helpful here). Substances do not free you from worrying about UVs, in fact the opposite is true. At the very least you will need to use some of the UV helper ruby plugins, and will most likely need to use an external UV unwrapper at least part of the time.

Frankly I am getting a bit tired of playing with "what-ifs" -- you are just going to have to use the software's together and work out for yourself whether this pairing can become a usable workflow for you or not. Nobody else can answer that for you because only you know how far you are willing to go to make it work. The only thing I can say for sure is: compared to more robust modeling packages you will definitely find a SketchUp based workflow to be problematic. So you will need to be willing to potentially put up with alot of workarounds/plugins to find a usable workflow. Which is not true in the Substance supported modeling packages, where the workflow is straightforward.