One other thing I’ll say about Blender. Their constant development and speed of development really gets in the way of usability. You never, ever want to rely on any of the dot zero releases as they’re incredibly buggy. Add the fact that they’re trying to literally compete against every feature in every surface modeler 3D package and you end up with a nightmare UX. They’re currently trying to outdo Houdini in node generated procedural modeling using something called geometry nodes. While it is very powerful I suspect less than 1% of the users actually do a whole lot with it.
On the other hand you have SketchUp with a super easy to use interface that pretty much never changes-- which is good. Unfortunately, their engine rarely changes either and has got to the point where it just can’t handle large models.
I would say that Blender is no longer for those who want to casually model now and then.
As an add-on developer, I need to update my add-ons a couple times a year just because they introduced so many changes to the underlying Python. Not to mention they deprecate things that you use requiring you to rewrite the add-on from scratch at times. It’s very frustrating.
And most surprisingly, it’s clear to addon developers that they are not wanted in the official blender group in the Netherlands. They provide a ridiculously archaic way to access add-ons using something called an ‘N’ panel with vertical text tabs. If you have more than half a dozen add-ons then you can’t see them all. This has been noted for years and yet no change has been made.
Still, I do love using the program. But then I’ve got the 10,000 hours of prerequisite training already in.
Geometry nodes is really a powerful feature, on top of the already existing modifiers. Id’ be happy to have at least a few of those in Sketchup instead of Live Models. (And I’d be also happy to have an auto UV unwrap in Sketchup)
I have no doubt that what can be done with Sketchup is nowhere close to what can be done in Blender.
I wish they had the Layout equivalent but, as you say, would I really dive into Blender even with it?
I developed an add-on on Blender, and I encountered a bit of these problems but I freed myself from them. I now develop everything independently with my own APIs, which is possible on this software, since we can easily access the structure of the geometry for example. We can also “wrap” the APIs of Blender to facilitate adaptation in case of change. But if we work a lot from concepts specific to Blender, it is always a problem.
There is another interesting possibility that I have experimented with in Python (which is also possible in Ruby), it is to program your own compiled C/C++ libraries, which will run (theoretically) up to x30 times faster and which can be called from a Python script.
In short, it is apparently problematic… but not that much!
Absolutely! It’s impressively powerful, but at the same time quite difficult (I should re-evaluate it). And Geometry Nodes also allow to build specific tools for architecture : wall tool, railing tool, and even an attempt at 2D documentation from 3D (to stay on the discussion about ‘Layout’)…
A little over a month ago, I developed my own parametric engine, and I’m lucky to have part of the code that allows me to develop my nodal system, which gives me the opportunity to explore other directions. Even in Grasshopper, which is a reference for me, there are things that would deserve to be reviewed to improve its use.
Has anyone developed an extension for Sketchup to be able to export/import Blender native files to and from Sketchup?
This would allow Sketchup users to take advance of both the Rendering and Animation capabilities of Blender, even more so now that Chaos group have released a beta version of Vray7 for Blender.
That would be a good idea. There is an extension on Blender that opens SKP, but it is rather reserved for Windows users. If not, the import can be done with the OBJ format (very good) and 3DS.