Click on What's New, just under the big red Download Sketchup button.

Hi Dave, you are correct that LumenRT does not do object based animation and, in my opinion, there is no really provocative solutions for OBA in SU at this time. To me, the huge limitation with OBA in SU is that it is only accomplished with scenes and having thousands of scenes never sounded like a smart way to accomplish anything.

If you use a mac, I would highly suggest you check out Cheetah3D. It is very inexpensive for what it is capable of and has been my goto solution of OBA for years. Full key framing, excellent and fast renderer, a vibrant community forum, and development is ongoing. Oh, and it has a physics engine so you could do what you want with the water, though that might take more time and effort than you might be willing to invest.

You would export your model out in FBX, OBJ or 3DS formats (I use FBX). All your textures will export from SU and import in Cheetah and then you can take advantage of Cheetah's node-based material editor

The thing about lists is they tend to get longer when not much is ever removed from them.

And Richard, I'm pretty sure yours is longer, haha...

Nope, not here.

My mouse has a setting for clicks or smooth scrolling, but the SU zoom still "steps" regardless of scroll wheel setting

Anyone heard from the Layout beta test team after sending info to Marc? I have not heard anything...

Hi Marc, great to hear from you!

I'm sure it was as hard for you to write, "We've made progress on a few items, but sadly not many." as it was for me to read them.

I do greatly appreciate your candor, however. I know it is easy for me to whine from the outside, with no insight to what you guys are going through to work on the code, and I appreciate being able to at least talk to someone on the development team.

I, of course, would love to make it to a Basecamp. Whether I can actually pull it off, or not, is maybe another question.

Any chance you guys were interested in maybe doing a video conference? I'd be happy to be a beta tester, too, if you were interested in that?

I just tried the same process with Layout 14 and it is the same.

Are you perhaps remembering dimensioning in Sketchup and displaying in Layout? Because dimensions do update with geometry in Sketchup.

I am pretty sure layout has never worked like Sketchup does with respect to dimensioning.

It was certainly never a deal breaker for me,, but it definitely and source of frustration, inefficiency, and also greatly increases the likelihood of sending a drawing out with an incorrect dimension.

I have a very intense crosscheck protocol that I use with my drawings to help ensure that things like that don't slip through

Calypso, you are seeing the reality of dimensioning in Layout. That is exactly how mine works and the render method makes no difference.

@dave r said:

If both ends of the dimensions are anchored to points in the model, they should update automatically.

Really? That sure doesn't happen in my version of layout.

If I snap both ends of a dimension to a viewport SU model and then go and change the SU model, there is absolutely no change to the dimensions in Layout.

The only time I see layout dimensions changing with a viewport change is if the scale is modified.

It would be great if they did update automatically and annoying that they don't. I'm on a mac fwiw

Hi Marc! I know you know of the list I speak...

One day I would love it if the Layout developers flew me down to Colorado where I could pull out my years of Layout portfolio and I could demonstrate my workflow over a few hours and they could see for themselves of what I speak. Perhaps a dialogue and beta testing role would be helpful. It's always good to see what the power users are doing every day. I would love that. I would assuredly not show up with beer or anything silly like that..

You guys have the power to vastly improve a large chunk of my everyday existence! Help me!!! I'm on my knees over here:)

@juju said:

@otb designworks said:

I would gladly pay for $1000+ for a real, substantive update.

Don't give anybody any ideas...

The key was the word substantive. I have a long list, posted on this site years ago, that would need to be addressed in a serious manner before that kind of money would be warranted. That said, if I could improve my workflow by 40%, I would happily pay money for that.

It is, without doubt, the best and only viable solution for 2D from Sketchup for me. I have generated thousands of pages of shop drawings, blueprints, and presentations with it and spend as much time using it as I do Sketchup

That being said, it is clunky, takes 1000% too many left clicks to accomplish anything, and feels like a piece of 1999 software. Just as an estimate, I would say that 40% of the time spent using Layout is wasted due to leader text editing sucking, moving dimension text around, and editing text.

For me, though, by far the most frustrating aspect of Layout is that the developers are not doing sh&%t to substantially improve it. I know, I know, it is way better than it was (true) but it is still way way not as good as it should/could be. Was it the last update that gave us two segment leader text that is awful in every other way? and what else did they improve? It's faster but still agonizingly slow with large vector rendering. And what else?

Would I recommend it to a SU user? Absolutely. Are there any other real options? No, not at all. Let's not forget that Layout was started by AtLast; that was a long freaking time ago, just sayin'

I would gladly pay for $1000+ for a real, substantive update.

Thanks, very generous of you!

I have found push/pull to be significantly worse than in earlier versions of Sketchup.

It regularly does all of the following:

1. As mentioned above, an attempted punch in the middle of a wall results in the face not being eliminated at the far side. click that face and delete it and it takes the whole face, not just the punch face and then you have to redraw a line and then redraw one of the punch lunes to get it right

2. Try this. extrude out a long skinny rectangle. Then draw two lines close to each other in the middle of one of the faces. Push/pull it to the other side, which should result in two separate objects. I find that the face on the far side is NEVER deleted. Very annoying.

3. Push/pull rarely inferences to the opposite side face anymore. So, now you have to find an edge to inference to instead of just push back and having it default to the back face and eliminate it. Earlier Sketchups were never this fussy, imo

4. On a related note, I find intersect to be much worse than before as well. How many times have I run a intersect command to locate a bunch of bolt holes, only to have to go back over and trace a segment on each one because the faces have not been separated in the intersect. IMO, much worse than it used to be.

5. My experience is that, if I were to guess randomly, that something changed when they released V13 and that they basically broke intersect/push pull and they made SU much less user friendly with one of it's core functions. I always kind of felt that when they made the significant progress in getting SU to handle larger models (which is way way better than it used to be) that something went wonky with intersect/PP. So now, I wasted chunks of time every day spinning models around, tracing line segments and deleting faces, all of which should never have to be done.

@jql said:

Still, If you're doing a series of drawings of your model and you want them to match in size and paper position it's easier to duplicate page and change what scene the new page's viewport is displaying.

I do all my plan section views like that and it's way easier than having to resize viewports to match each other...

That's my workflow, as well.

+1

I hope your list gets more traction than the other lists floating around.

These all seem to fall on the deafest of ears back at Trimble, unfortunately.

And your list is awesome and, without doubt, would make LO much much better.

Fingers crossed....

I love my MX, fwiw.

I concur with JQL. LO is the best solution for my workflow, but it is, for sure, the worst part of my job, too...

I re-save every pdf created by Layout to manage the huge file sizes.

I open the PDF in Acrobat and save as an Optimized PDF. Takes a 35meg file and turns it into 1 or 2 with zero noticeable changes to the document.

Just another small time waster that compounds into a pretty painful process. If I were to guess, I probably waste ~65% of my time in Layout.

Another annoyance? Trying to move a viewport and all layout entities, including "smart" leader text. Nothing like trying to get a cursor tip just right on a leader text end point so it doesn't stay in the same place as everything else moves. So then you get to escape if you miss and then re-select everything and try it again. And throw in having to zoom in to get the click right and then having to zoom out to see where you are trying to move it without losing the correctness of the click. Madness...