Layer groups as the only "major" new feature...?!?
I mean, yes, this looks like a great improvement after last years "features" of renaming layers to tags and groups/components to objects.
Unbelievable...

Autodesk's reply to the open letter:
https://adsknews.autodesk.com/views/reply-to-open-letter-on-revit

The usual blah blah...

@thomthom said:

What version have you been using so far?

Still 2015. I have paid the maintenance/reinstatement fee in 2018 to be able to update in the future, but i'm still using 2015 because the latest version that is supported by Maxwell v3 is v2016. But i think i will update to the last perpetual version before november (hoping that the raw polygon performance finally is at least on par with 2015...)

Very cool!
Now i need to update my SU...

@chippwalters said:

Yes, it is all quite easy. If you want to snap, just hold the CTRL key down and it will snap to the nearest vertex, edge, face depending on what you're trying to snap to.

Thanks for the info! I will try it.

@chippwalters said:

The newest Blender, available in beta now, has push/pull

Yes, good to see this happening. But WHY do they have this stupid handle?!? Is snapping working with push/pull? And numeric inputs? How would you snap with this unprecise handle? The videos i watched sadly didn't show any precise push/pull operations.

Ah, ok... so it's already there. Nice.

Thanks for your answers - even if it sounds like a max plugin is still far away

Just to be clear... "daily build" was just referring to the term that is used by the corona team for their frequent unofficial releases. In fact they are more weekly or even monthly releases as you suggest. So, yes, weekly or monthly builds are surely enough (like in maxwell alpha/beta days )

Do you have a timeframe for the SU plugin? And for the planned 3dsmax plugin?

And some more questions/suggestions regarding the development...
I suppose you're aware of the general market and technology situation and what features renderers need to have today, but i will try to write down my personal opinion regarding some points. My first question would be, how you want to position your renderer... for big scenes (archviz, film) or only for small stuff (product shots, etc.). In my opinion or for my needs, GPU or hybrid CPU-GPU would be great IF it is feature complete and the memory problem can be solved (out of core, or memory optimization like in Fstorm). If this is a problem i think it would be better to focus on CPU, especially with the increase in CPU power we've seen in the last time.

I don't know what your plans are, but for me it would be great if the development and communication would be organized similar to what they do with the Corona Renderer development. Open communication regarding potential features with the community, maybe incl. daily builds and a public roadmap (they are using Trello). The Fstorm development would be another one to name - not regarding communication, but more regarding features and the general interpretation of the workflow. I don't know if you're aware of the recent discussions about tonemapping? (FStorm, ACES and all the stuff). But I think this is a point that can have a tremendous effect on realism and usability that is still overlooked/ignored be many companies (i.e. NL)

And thanks for staying away from the subscription model and having one license for all plugins and incl. five render nodes (like it used to be in the good old Maxwell days). I think the nodes are also reasonably priced at 50€. Maybe you could add bundle prices with 10 or 20 nodes.

WOW! How could i miss this one? Nice to see you back in the game JD! And thank you once more for your outstanding support in all the years regarding the SketchUp plugin!
This looks VERY interesting, especially the caustics solver!!! If this is really working... finally... I have to try it...
So there are several developers working on this, who used to work for NL? What happened? Is this related to the leaving of Juan Canada? The GUI and features surely have some similarities with Maxwell at first sight.
I was scrolling through the forums and noticed some familiar names like Thomas An., Tim Ellis, Magnus and Hervé... reminds me of the good old days of Maxwell Alpha/Beta. Would be really great to get this spirit back after NL doesn't seem to be interested anymore in developing renderers.
Do you have a road map?

Impressive!

ThruPaint?

Mortality monitoring in Europe
http://euromomo.eu/

@applemango85 said:

Trimble has been a relatively good software company to us users over the years - I like to take them on their word
I’m only relaying what I’ve been told by a respectable retailer - it’s better to pre warn on something that never comes about then say nothing and it catches people by surprise with no time to plan/budget

I'm not sure, if you're talking about the same "Trimble"...
And yes, thanks for the warning! I think, i would trust your retailer more than a company that has shown more than enough how "credible" they are and what intentions they have.

@jbacus said:

We haven’t announced any future end to our existing support and maintenance for perpetual (classic) licensing, so I wouldn’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that we are actively working against your best interests. You’ll have to decide if you trust us or not, I guess.

SketchUp in 2019: where great ideas get to work

Well, it has been quite a year (plus a little) here at SketchUp HQ, with tremendous amounts of coffee consumed and today we’re finally ready to spill what we’ve been working so hard to finish. There’s quite a lot to shar…

SketchUp Community (forums.sketchup.com)

@unknownuser said:

Currently, we do not have a date when we will sunset the classic M&S upgrades completely. You will always be able to use the version you’ve last upgraded to in perpetuity, even if the day comes that we do not offer M&S anymore.

SketchUp in 2019: where great ideas get to work

Well, it has been quite a year (plus a little) here at SketchUp HQ, with tremendous amounts of coffee consumed and today we’re finally ready to spill what we’ve been working so hard to finish. There’s quite a lot to shar…

SketchUp Community (forums.sketchup.com)

@unknownuser said:

Yes. We will phase it out eventually, but we do not have a timeline as to when the sunset will occur.

SketchUp in 2019: where great ideas get to work

Well, it has been quite a year (plus a little) here at SketchUp HQ, with tremendous amounts of coffee consumed and today we’re finally ready to spill what we’ve been working so hard to finish. There’s quite a lot to shar…

SketchUp Community (forums.sketchup.com)

@unknownuser said:

WOAH! This is absolutely not true! I’m very sorry everyone. We are a big team and wires got crossed here.
Rather than try to hide this I’ll simply say that it is not the true. No decisions have been made to phase out perpetual licenses. We will continue to let our customers and the market as a whole, inform us as to how they want to purchase software in the future.

SketchUp in 2019: where great ideas get to work

Well, it has been quite a year (plus a little) here at SketchUp HQ, with tremendous amounts of coffee consumed and today we’re finally ready to spill what we’ve been working so hard to finish. There’s quite a lot to shar…

SketchUp Community (forums.sketchup.com)

@kaas said:

Maybe some speed improvements?

I don't know about 2020, but for 2016-2019 i can say, that from my experience there are only speed improvements regarding shadows and texture display. Overall 2016-2019 is clearly slower and less workable for me compared to v2015. The degradation kicks in earlier and the recovery time is longer (very annoying!). That's one reason why i'm still working with v2015 (besides the stupid tray system...).
I have a model (3.2 M edges, 1.7 M faces) which i can rotate and zoom in 2015 without any degradation with ~8-20fps (textures and hidden lines on, without shadows of course), while in 2019 the model already degrades and runs with only 4-9fps.
(i7 5960X@4.5GHz, GTX 970)

Texture display/recovery is clearly faster since 2016 like i said - for a low poly model with many (small) textures (e.g. ~12k edges, ~300 faces, ~300 textures/mats) almost instant, while 2015 is very slow with this model. So this is a really nice improvement, but sadly not usable for me since the general performance is worse. I hope the performance drop will be less noticable with new hardware, especially a better video card, because i would like to use some plugins, that only available for newer versions...

"We now call them Tags! One of our three big new features for SU2020, besides the revolutionary option to hide objects (our new name for groups/components ) and transparent objects!!!"

WTF?!? Is this for real? Every year i think that this can't get worse anymore and next time has at least to be a step up - just to see that i was wrong again...

We'll see what all the alleged "performance" improvements are about. Since they aren't even mentioning improved viewport performance this time i think there won't be any.

@unknownuser said:

We’ve spent a lot of time in 2019 learning more about what you, the user, wish SketchUp did better. We’ve been eyeing your comments on the forum and discussing ideas during our training events to see what trips up your workflow. So, thanks for speaking up! You helped us discover how you’re using SketchUp and how we can improve your design process, resulting in workflow improvements galore! They’re so good you’d think we’d been sneaking into design firms or something .

Ok, maybe next year...

I would be more interested in a good working SKP to 3DSmax file linking... The only solution i know is Mirza Link Manager, but it combines by material and doesn't support Instances...

Yes, Speedflow and Snap Utilities are already quite good. I hope they can add better numeric inputs and improve the snapping with an inference engine...

Blender is improving really fast, i think even more since the first release of 2.8 one year ago. There are already tons of great plugins available and i think with the support of corporations like Epic, AMD, nvidia and Ubisoft the future could be even better.
I really hope someone adds Sketchup-like modeling to the toolbox...

Geo-Scatter 5.5

Geo-Scatter is the most powerful and most popular scattering plugin for blender professionals.

Blender Market (www.blendermarket.com)

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