@jgb said:
First, I'm not sure what you mean by "archviz folks".
By "archviz" I mean the community of professional SketchUp users who use it as the modeling front end to an advanced (photorealistic) rendering process for the pre-visualization of architectural design projects, either still images or animations. As for example represented in the CGarchitect forums.
From your list of issues, I'm going to guess (please confirm or correct so I can answer your questions more accurately) that you are doing more "MCAD" kinds of projects with SketchUp. In other words, the sorts of projects which might also be done in Solidworks? Things which might eventually be fabricated in a machine shop?
If this is the case, then I can imagine the sorts of problems you are seeing in SketchUp. And to be fair, we didn't design SketchUp for this sort of work. As you may know, SketchUphas a hard lower precision threshold at .001". For folks working on projects from 'furniture' to 'office campus' scales, this precision is perfectly sufficient. For folks working on projects smaller than 'furniture', problems like those you describe can occur. I think this probably accounts for all of your issues with 'face forming' and I'm afraid the only recourse is to scale your project up artificially while you are working. There is no fix for the .001" lower precision threshold coming in a future version of SketchUp.
The issue you refer to as 'Hyper Pan' or 'Hyper Zoom' likely comes from the same root cause as the above issue. You're working close to the lower precision threshold in SketchUp, and tools which have been tuned for use at larger scales are beginning to behave in an less predictable way. You may find that the "Camera>Previous" command will allow you to recover easily from errant Zoom or Pan operations.
The adoption of "Pencil Tool" as the startup tool comes from a historical decision that drawing should be the default behavior in SketchUp. Over time, alternate opinions have asserted themselves. In fact, for several releases, we flip-flopped on this decision. Which folks also found upsetting. In our current build (SU8M1), "Select" is the default tool on our Mac OS X build. Perhaps one day we will also make it so on Windows.
Toolbar positions are very difficult for SketchUp to maintain when you are using lots of Ruby scripts that add their own toolbars. The addition of a new Ruby toolbar is currently the most chaos-inducing thing you can do. We're still working on this problem, but you should know that it is like 'cat herding' for us.
As for your preferred units, I think this is a simple tech support issue. "Decimal > Inches" are supported in SU8 today. In fact, under the hood, SketchUp uses decimal inches natively for all calculations. If you would like this to be the default for all your new models, learn about Templates.
Now for your mouse with all the buttons- this is a tech-support issue as well. SketchUp can never hope to support every mouse in the world natively. There are literally thousands of them. Most mouse drivers for more complex mice include some kind of application-level settings for their buttons. This is your best bet for configuring your mouse to use more buttons in SketchUp.
There will always be some keys on your keyboard that are either reserved by SketchUp for some purpose, or by the operating system. Are you really running out of keys to use for all the thinks you want shortcuts to access?
And finally, Materials. Certainly it is possible to modify sets of materials in SketchUp, though perhaps not in the ways you wish to do so. Probably you'll find some crossover with the archviz folks here (or maybe not?). I find that purging unused materials often solves the majority of my problems with ballooning material lists. A way to consolidate all of the similar colors in a model would be useful and I'm glad you've found a plugin to help you resolve that.
john
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