Client pressure for sharing files has us using SketchUp for various projects more and more over recent years. Admittedly, there are some great things about SketchUp, like the robust Component system, Styles, and 3D Warehouse. However, coming from decades with Rhino and FormZ, we find SketchUp’s native tool set extremely lacking. This results in needing many dozens of additional extensions just to make it work efficiently like we are accustomed. This is not only very costly, but the extensions often bug out or fail to load correctly as SketchUp is opened, resulting in a bug splat crash, along with incredible frustration more than half the time. Support suggests uninstalling all 40+ extensions and reloading and testing them one by one. Unacceptable! We are not your free labor! We pay for your software, and you should test it yourself. If you allow extensions, then you should deeply test them together on your dime and robustly implement them to be stable with a full featured safe mode and robust logging to fix any problems as they arise.
What is the solution?
1 - The obvious and best solution is to include these extensions as MANY more native tools which are by their very nature of being native, more stable and more robustly tested, instead of all these ridiculous extensions to pick up the slack. Come on! It’s 2026 and I can’t even draw a simple Circle by 3 points without an extension? We should be able to do all sorts of things with the native tools like … select and move different Topology like all points, lines, inside of groups and components together! (Thank you Curic Stretch, Offset & Trowel) Bevel/Round, Draw Walls, Bend things, Union, Difference, Split, draw a Sphere, Align, Space, Array, easily Texture Map a Cyl, Double Cut to through walls, Mirror a copy across using a center reflection, etc. The tool list that needs to currently be covered by extensions goes on and on.
We are also desperately missing true curves like Smooth NURBS style. This should ideally be implemented into the native tools as it is the modern way of handling curves. Nearly every other major 3D software includes them. At the very least for SketchUp style segmented/faceted curves, there should be a global ‘Curve Resolution’ setting that can be turned up to High by default so that drawing a curve or circle automatically increases the number of edges to an acceptably smooth looking level. It’s woefully sad that when you draw a circle in SketchUp out of the box, you can see all the segments making up the sides and you have to manually increase the segment count. This feels like something from the dark ages of AutoCAD where there wasn’t enough memory and you had to limit the number of lines. It should default to a much higher number of segments, calculated by the size of the radius to always appear smoother unless zoomed in very closely. This is how FormZ handles faceted or segmented curves, and it works wonderfully. Of course it also has smooth NURBS curves most users use instead because that is the modern way of doing it. Without this, curved lines often render poorly in SketchUp for client presentations unless the user is very diligent about creating curves using high count segments, which is a much slower workflow. This can be automated so curves can be high resolution.
2 - While this more robust native tool set is being implemented, we still need a better solution for the required extensions and their compatibility and stability. How about as extensions are loaded at startup, there is a robust extension check system and open log that records any problems to the exact detail for which extension is having an error loading? It could automatically disable only that extension instead of crashing the whole program and that would make it easy to identify which extension needs to be disabled / bug checked by the developers. This would help to eliminate the finger pointing that is happening when different extensions are not compatible with each other for whatever reasons.
This is the very least that Trimble needs to implement ASAP as we rely on these pesky Extensions that often break and cause SketchUp to crash at opening more than half the time. You all should have free access to all of the Extensions available and should load them all together, test them, and make sure they all work fine together 100% of the time. Pushing this incompatibility testing off on your paying users is absurd and you should do better.
