I am interested in knowing from the longstanding members here how many feature requests have made their way into the software we use today.
I am not pre-empting this. I genuinely don’t know the answer. It could be a lot or it could be very few.
It is not an entirely academic question. If this forum is listened to and things get implemented, then having a Feature Request section is valuable. But if it is largely ignored, then it just gives false hope and might be better expunged.
Actually, I probably am pre-empting this a bit in that I have become aware over time of many things that have been requested over and over again but which fall on deaf ears. Of course, it could be that each and every one is either too difficult or expensive to implement, but as we aren’t told, we can only guess.
SU is open software in that third parties can write extensions. That is a double edged sword, of course. Rather like this forum standing in (some might say) for more meaningful support from Trimble, so Trimble can outsource a lot of development to others. Result is, some extensions become invaluable, others can just cause more problems than they solve (just like 3DW models). But here’s the thing. A lot of things requested cannot be dealt with by third parties. Bringing Layout into the 21st century is only the most obvious of those.
I’ve given up on my requests over the years for SketchUp to enter the world of BIM and to be able to export to IFC correctly and include geometric quantities such as length, area, perimeter lengths etc. And before someone says you can write attributes to DCs, this is so time consuming and clunky. It is so disappointing that SketchUp has stalled in the way of development and basic functionality to interact with other main stream software.
I’ve have recently moved across to BricsCad BIM and it’s been a wonderful eye opener on what we have been missing out on in SketchUp.
Yes, a BIM application that worked like SketchUp would be cool. But it would be a totally different application than SketchUp that was designed as a general 3D modelling tool. A BIM application has a different toolset - it must have tools to create the specific elements that a building consists of, and a way to document and maintain the data. Basically, it has nothing to do with drawing edges and faces.
There is no actual shortage of BIM applications, and today, at least where I live, using a traditional CAD workflow, whether 2D or 3D is no longer an option. In our parts, it has to be Archicad or Revit, if for instance advertisements for vacancies are to be believed.
I would LOVE to have the ability to bookmark files that I use regularly. We’re an event management company and I have a “Black book” of stage design. Having that always on the home screen to load would be ace.
Also, I guess the holy grail would be the ability to make use of multicore support for geometry…!
I wonder if saving all the files you reuse into a folder and adding that as a collection to the Component Browser would be a way to accomplish something like what you suggest…
The users have been waiting for almost 30 years for 3D Studio Max to achieve that. It might be impossible. Don’t know what quantum computing will bring.
It’s much quicker to copy them from the file, it also involves combining and editing each time depending on the brief.
In terms of the multi core support, yeah it would be amazing. I’d love to know the limitations - like, why they can’t zone geometry into different cores etc. As you rightly point out though, it’s obviously a very difficult task and I don’t understand that stuff, so likely a lot I don’t know.