Announcing SketchUp Shop

#1

Hello SketchUp Community!

tl;dr: We’re launching SketchUp Shop, a more advanced version of SketchUp Free for an affordable subscription price of $119/year.

Last November, we launched SketchUp Free – a new version of your favorite 3D modeling application that runs natively in your web browser. Always up-to-date, available to you from (almost) any computer with a web browser. In the months that followed, we continued to launch new features every couple of weeks, watching and learning all the time.

Many of you asked if we could release a more capable version of SketchUp for a price lower than a full license for SketchUp Pro. A version a bit more capable for DIY-designers, builders and makers of things. Something you could use more easily in the shop to interface with 3D printers, CNC routers and other fun shop machines. Something that wouldn’t break the bank.

We listened, and are happy to announce a product we developed with you in mind. We’re calling it SketchUp Shop, and it’s available as a subscription for $119/year… SketchUp Shop is designed to help you explore ideas, communicate them more expressively, and ultimately turn them into real projects. Here are the highlights:

  • Advanced Solid Tools: To help you with 3D printing complex forms, SketchUp Shop includes all of SketchUp Pro’s Solid Tools.
  • Outliner: Because sometimes your models get more complex when you’re building them up from components and sub-assemblies, SketchUp Shop adds a new Outliner UI to help you manage your model more effectively.
  • Material Creation: Sometimes you need to make new materials from scratch; SketchUp Shop adds material creation and editing to the basic material browser.
  • Removable Watermark: Don’t care for that SketchUp logo in the top right corner of your models? We’re partial to it, but that doesn’t mean you have to be. Remove it when you upgrade to SketchUp Shop.
  • Importers and Exporters: We know that you often need to move your models from one application to another, especially when you’re working with robotic tools like CNC routers. SketchUp Shop adds support for all of SketchUp Pro’s 2D and 3D model importers and exporters.
  • Unlimited Projects, Unlimited Storage: Store as many models as you want with an upgraded Trimble Connect account (included with a SketchUp Shop subscription).
  • Collaborate with Others: Use Trimble Connect’s project sharing features to work together with others on larger and more complex projects.

For those of you who can’t use SketchUp in your web browser, we’re still keeping the installers for SketchUp Make (2017 and 2016) available, just like before. And as always, if you need all the bells and whistles of SketchUp Pro, you can still buy a license any time to get the classic full desktop 3D modeling experience. We think you’re going to love SketchUp Shop, though. Learn more about why we made it, and why it just might be a perfect fit for you.

john
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New user - things I've found annoying so far
Select tool delays on Windows 10
.iges format in sketchup free web
#2

What is the Maximum 2D export limit @jbacus (if larger than the browser window)?

#3

We added 3D model and 2D vector interoperability today but didn’t make any changes to 2D raster image export. Unfortunately, you are still limited to screen resolution for png or jpg image exports.

john
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#4
SketchUp Shop
SketchUp Shop
#5

Does this mean that outliner and material creation won’t be implemented in Free? Other Make parts too?

#6

Will any of this rub off on SketchUp for Schools? I found the lack of an outliner while helping students to be a real disappointment.

#7

With today’s launch, we have introduced a new product level between SketchUp Free and SketchUp Pro. There will be features and services which differentiate those levels. Outliner and Material creation (along with the other announced features) are now part of SketchUp Shop, not available to SketchUp Free users.

As we develop new features for SketchUp for Web in the future, we will target them to either SketchUp Shop or we will make them available to all users. Today’s launch of the Text tool is an example of the latter.

I don’t have any new announcements about SketchUp for Schools today, but you should expect that there will continue to be differences in its feature set to set it apart from both SketchUp Shop and SketchUp Free. I’ll make sure that team knows how important you feel Outliner is when helping your students.

#8

Would it be possible to replace Layers with Outliner in SketchUp free? The Outliner much better corresponds to what layers are in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Paint.net, Inkscape etc. I really think SketchUp Layers should be hidden deeper so new users don’t discover it right away and think of it as the layers they are used to. Making SketchUp layers a pro only feauture is in my view a more reasonable approach than making the Outliner pro only, especially if the idea still is that components made by hobbyists should in any way be useful for professionals.

#9

I think there’s some merit to this idea, but it is tough to reverse feature differentiation decisions once we’re launched. If we removed Layers from SketchUp Free, we would be reversing a launch that was made last November and subsequently used by millions of people. Some of them would disagree with our decision :wink:

What I would rather do is to make Layers more helpful to new users. In testing, far more users asked for a “Layers” feature than an “Outliner” feature… even though most of them probably really wanted something more like the layer systems in 2D drawing and painting apps. As you point out. So maybe the right strategy would be to reform Layers in general?

Porting a product as complex as SketchUp is a multi-step process, particularly when it has a user community as large and diverse as ours is. The first step is to migrate as many features as we can from the original app to maximize code reuse and minimize special/unique work done just for the port. Then we can start iterating from that base to improve the overall experience.

What makes this exciting for everyone, I hope, is that we can now build and launch new features almost as fast as we want in SketchUp for Web. Rather than waiting for the once-a-year major release of our desktop client. We have quite a bit more room to experiment and try new things on the web.

john
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#10

Bingo! :slight_smile: I would wager that most new users of SketchUp do not grasp SketchUp’s unusual meaning of “layer.”

#11

Both yes and no depending on how you see it. The current feature of global visibility tags independent from hierarchical component nesting is highly useful and I don’t think the feature itself should be re-engineered. Doing so would break existing workflows and extensions. However I very much think it needs a name that better describes what it does.

Normally objects on different layers are separated and don’t spontaneously merge. Normally a layer can be locked. Normally a layer can be thought of as a place in the document. In SketchUp this all applies to the component/group hierarchy but not to layers. I think calling SketchUp layers Tags, Styling Tags, Visibility Tags or something similar would make the program easier to understand and lead to less confusion.

#12

I like @eneroth3 suggestion of not fundamentally changing layers, enhancements always welcome, but instead changing the name. “Visibility” has the right ring to me.

Additionally, changing the name in SU has the second benefit of differentiating SU’s “Layers” from LO’s “Layers”.

#13

Also note that there is precedent: “Scenes” are called “Pages” in the Ruby API, reflecting an older nomenclature. I’m sure there are other examples of renaming…

#14

A lot of the requests for SketchUp Free here on the forum have been answered with “Wait some time, Free ist under development and your requested function will be available in the near future” or similar answers (I would bet Outliner was one of them).
It would be helpful for giving correct answers if there would be an official roadmap which (MAKE or PRO) function will probably reach which of the different web versions.

#16

How about “Visibility Layers”? It connects the dots between other CAD layers, which get imported to SU as layers, and what they do in SU.

#17

It’s better to fix the importer to make CAD layers into groups, and assign SU layers to the groups. Then users can control visibility both from the outliner (on a per definition basis) and in “layers” (globally).

#18

Unfortunately, we never publish our roadmap or make announcements about future feature development. I recognize that this would be a nice thing to know here in our user community, but we aren’t able to share that information.

#19

Disclaimer: I’m not (yet) sure that I really mean what I’m about to say!

Here’s my first reaction to SketchUp Shop:

I’ve paid $700 for SketchUp Pro, then $120/year for maintenance. I’ve watched SketchUp Free going back to its first incarnation as my.sketchup.com. I opened my first web page within two minutes of the announcement at Basecamp 2016. I was in the room with my tablet in my hand taking notes!

While I don’t yet use Free regularly, with each new refinement, it’s become closer and closer to something I might indeed use in my hobby shop to access designs I’ve created on my computer in my home office.

SketchUp Shop appears to be exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

But I’m reluctant to add another $119 yearly expense on top of my yearly Pro maintenance.

Ideally, I’d like Shop to be included with a Pro license (ending in 1 year) and included in the cost of Pro Maintenance. But I’d feel better about it if it were offered to Pro licensees at a reduced rate.

Your thoughts?

#20

Yes me too once (if) the max image export cap is lifted.
Could be fun to use on the move if I’m working away and need to make some quick concept sketches.
Ed: perhaps only having access if you have the additional support and maintenence deal as you say @sjdorst good idea

#21

Could someone clear up whether the Shop version is licensed for commercial use?

On the Shop page it hints that it is for hobbyists but doesn’t say explicitly that you can or can not use it commercially.

I’ve tried to make sense of the legal stuff at https://app.sketchup.com/tos.html. It doesn’t mention the word “Shop” once there, but does mention employees of the customer in this bit:

Does that mean you can use Shop commercially? It is clear in section 1.5 that the Free version is not for commercial use.

It’s good that you seem to have been listening to what people wanted i.e. a middle level of SketchUp but did they really all ask for it to run in a web browser?

The terms say something about a trial subscription. Is this available now?