@RTCool, if you’re teaching SU to High School students, SketchUp Pro “Classic” is still available at no cost through the K12 grant program https://www.sketchup.com/education/grants. I encourage you to explore that option as I think will resolve your issue.
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I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to follow through with the local contact, but one confusion I have: It says “qualifying K-12 public schools,” and the contact is an @ct.gov person, but the school I teach at is a private school. Does the program not apply to private schools? If not, are there any other options?
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There’s a reason Autodesk is free for college students and it has everything to do with making money. So I would say you also educate the students about longer term investment.
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I have been teaching Vectorworks and Su for around 8 years now and I completely agree with the OP. The issue we have is using Su off site. Sure the students can use it on campus but outside causes us issues. I get them to download 2017 make but it will soon be 2020 and who knows how long 2017 will last.
I took the decision this summer to move over to Blender and so far I have no regrets about doing so. It will be another year before I feel able to teach it at a high level but that’s fine as I see it as an investment rather than keep flogging Su which for students has had its day.
Sean I also know that you use VW and assume you grab stuff from the warehouse to use in VW. What are your plans for that?
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You know I never really did that much Warehouse importing. By the time you hunted around for the right thing I could usually make exactly what I wanted in VW from scratch. The SU stuff would bring in a million extra ploys and all the components would clutter up the resource Manager. But again that’s me that been using VW for nearly as long as my students have been alive. Back in the day, my students would take advantage of SU imports or just do the whole project in SU. There are a lot more sites with free models now than there were when the SU warehouse first appeared: check out GrabCAD. You can search with “free” as an option on TurboSquid. Lots more. So a pain that you have to hunt around on several different sites but I find there is less stuff on these sites but they tend to have a higher quality. There is some great stuff on SUW but there’s also a lot of junk.
Good luck with your transition. The thing I’m most worried about teaching Blender isn’t steps 3 through 30. Its steps 1-3. In SU its click move click. But blender its Shift A, mesh>plane, S… So much more powerful from then on but its that first day I’m worried about.
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The longer term investment is in the leading platforms. Most of my students want to be designers for live entertainment. That’s Vectorworks. Some want to go into game design that’s Maya or several others. A lot want maker-fabrication, thats Inventor. The only place where SU has a presence is in early development concept art and Film TV art direction but my students interested in those areas are more likely to use Blender and Unreal.
The more important thing here isn’t what software to learn for what industry–it will probably be different by the time they get jobs–its teaching the fundamentals to students with no skills who don’t know for sure they want to be designers. And that’s where SketchUp was great. Those unsure students are also the ones least likely to spend the $55. The hardcore kids who bring their cintiqs class aren’t interested in SketchUp.
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My point was regarding the $55 to the eventual subscription price of SU currently at under $300/ yr. Autodesk gives free college access knowing that free access translates into guaranteed $1000/yr seats on the low end.
The limitations you mention with SU are the same ones I faced as an Architect with most of my competition thinking I was nuts (probably some truth there). However, I can’t imagine jumping ship to VW or anything Autodesk, as it’s simply faster to achieve more detailed results. The biggest hurdle is the “we are the industry standard” mentality.
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Although used a lot for interior design (my area of teaching) VW is poor due to no UV mapping. With Su there are a couple of decent plug ins and of course with Blender it does it all fine. I remember way back when I watched your tutorial on taking a screenshot and in PS mapping the texture and reimporting back into VW - thanks for that I still use that technique. So yes there is an initial OMG with Blender, which would happen with any similar software but the possibilities are so much greater.
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I get what you’re saying but from a student’s point of view when they are looking at those job postings the required skills say “AutoCAD, AutoCAD, Revit, Revit, Vectorworks” For architects. For design and concept art its gonna be “Maya, Maya, Maya, Max,” They are the industry standard. As for what is faster, its what you work with. For hard surface modeling I’d challenge any platform to a duel if I was on VW. I could get there with SU but it would take me longer. BUT and here’s the big but, SU had one huge advantage, it was simple to use at the start, (I think Free is not) and it was basically free. So I could teach SU to students without experience or preconceived ideas about what software to use and some percentage of them, like you, would decide it was the fastest and easiest tool to use and would stick with it as they became professionals. The decisions to fragment SU and charge $55 (also about money) will mean fewer students will pick it. And I’m not switching to AutoDesk, I’m switching to Blender, also a plucky, indy, community based, software because learning the skills is the important part. The software will come and go.
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Yes no UV drives me crazy. But then there’s no unwrapping and texture errors and all that either. VW is my go to because for me the real meat and potatoes is the drafting. That’s actually what I get paid for. There’s lots of options for creating pretty pictures but the non-negotiable is the drawings. And what VW has better than any (even AutoCAD) is parametric editing. In scenic design there are constant changes and I can jump in and with a few keystrokes make a window exactly 3/8" narrower or whatever. Both SU and Blender give you one chance to get the number right. After that, exact changes are a pain in the butt.
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I actually picked up sketch up for the first time at high school and then again at uni, It’s not the only 3d modeling or drawing program i’ve used but whenever i was going to draw up a quick project for home it was always the one i gravitated towards because of that simple interface and quick workflow.
Fast forward (far more years then i’d like to admit) and I am a QS for a housing company; when i arrived they were either scribbling out floor layouts by hand or outsourcing all there complex concept drawings to an external draftsman which was expensive,slow and fraught with miscommunication. I showed them all what it could do and how simple/quick it was to do it and now we have 4 pro licences and ecstatic clients. Being able to bring up and interacting with models at client meetings allows them to really get a feel for what they are getting.
This is the 3rd workplace that I have converted from pad to cad through sketch up (still waiting on my commission btw 
) for shop drawings and/or concept plans and If it wasn’t for that first taste at uni and then the ability to use that (non-pro)make version for personal projects this would have been a completely different story.
I think a loss leader like a great free version for hobbyists and students pays dividends down the line but with a lot of the ‘maker’ community moving to fusion 360 and (by the descriptions above) students leaving too where will the next generation of sketch up users come from?
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I seriously do worry about the future user base of SketchUp with the demise of Make. For many people who have gone on to utilize the Pro version I think Make or the free desktop version at that time was their first point of entry into the SketchUp ecosystem.
I realize that the web based version of SketchUp is supposed to fill that gap but somehow I just don’t see the likely conversion from web based to Pro happening quite as seamlessly at it should. Honestly, I have yet to talk to one person who actually prefers the web based version over the desktop version but I probably don’t get out enough these days. With the lack of plugin support, the web based version also does not leverage the true strength of SketchUp so it is a much harder sell to the new up and coming user.
On a slightly different note, there has been a lot of talk about Blender or other products in this thread and I do believe these other products have their place within certain specific industries. However, when it comes to creating (accurate) architectural 3D models you would be hard pressed to surpass the speed and ease of use of SketchUp and its awesome drawing power. I think SketchUp wins this one hands down, especially when you couple SketchUp’s intuitive interface with some carefully crafted extensions.
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I’m still enjoying using SketchUp Make 2017. Honestly, I’m not a fan of the web version though because you need to pay for importing textures and stuff. Why would I use the web version if I could just do all that stuff for free on SketchUp Make? Also, SketchUp Make’s yearly upgrades were a minor hassle because it takes time to download the new version and set it up, but I do miss them now that they’re gone.
I totally agree. The ease of use is what really attracted me to SketchUp. In addition to that, they also offer SketchUp Make for free which is a great price. Despite the unpopular changes in the business plan, SketchUp is still my favorite 3D modeling program.
I’ve been using Blender for one and a half years now and I still often struggle with doing basic things like navigation and inferencing. Sometimes I wonder if Blender makes the program complicated on purpose, so they can sell more courses (like this one)…
https://www.blender.org/institute/training/advanced-fx-with-blender/
The majority of keys have three shortcuts and none of the tools were accessible in the menus (until Blender 2.8 beta). It took me months to figure this out. Becoming proficient at Blender is harder than solving a Rubik’s cube. I wish I had a better analogy.
SketchUp is beyond easier and people make awesome stuff in SketchUp too. In my opinion, the main thing that SketchUp needs is some new features like a good animation system with rigging, except an easy to use one. The more capabilities, the better, as long as they’re simple to use. Sure, Blender has more capabilities. But if it’s too complicated, then people will spend more time learning than necessary and it’ll impair their work. I can barely even model anything in that program. The modeling process is kinda different than SketchUp. All I can do is rig and make terrible animations in Blender.
I remember when I was in college, the $55 annual fee for SketchUp Pro was a lot to me. The current $300 subscription is even more expensive now that I’m not a student anymore. It’s just a lot of money to be spending on software that I can use for free already. I don’t feel like I get a lot of value for buying SketchUp Pro. The only reason I’d buy it is to do professional work. Honestly, I wish I could afford it comfortably because I’d buy it in a heartbeat, but I’m kinda poor.
I noticed that SketchUp 2014 can’t download new models (like you were saying), but it can download models uploaded before 2015. In my opinion, what they are doing is not “predatory money grabbing”. It’s probably just caused by compatibility bugs. I use SketchUp Make 2017 and never get compatibility issues with the 3D Warehouse.
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Fully agree - this may have a dramatic impact on ecosystem of SketchUp in couple of years. (not only plug-in developers, but amateurs as well, who may have brought software/knowledge later to the work)
I would not overestimate the value of this…
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I am glad to see this topic here in an American scenario. A few weeks ago I raised a similar question relating it to the fact that $55 in most emerging countries is a lot of money, much more than in the US. Unfortunately, people laughed at me saying that $55 is a bargain for such a good application as Sketchup.
But the problem is not the educational price per se but the fact that the competition is offering free copies of apps that can replace Sketchup. In today’s world, the cost of things is not irrelevant for most people and, given this discrepancy in cost, students will mostly prefer free software.
What I think Trimble is not realizing is the fact that if one works with a given software for the duration of one’s school life one will tend to stick with it after graduation. As things stand now that software will probably not be Sketchup.
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I found SU Free a few months ago looking for a CAD program to design a remodel of our bathroom. I liked the fact that it was easy to learn so I bought the Brightman book and signed up for the 30 day free trial. I was thrilled at getting better at using the software but then when the new pricing structure came out with the subscription fees I couldn’t justify spending $299 every year so I didn’t pull the trigger. I could have gone the Classic route but that was a little pricey for me and who’s to say that won’t be exiled in the near future. I’m probably not the type of customer that Trimble is looking for anyway but it’s still sad that such a great software isn’t more affordable.
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If you are not using SketchUp commercially you can still use Make 2017 for free.
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Please Sketchup, don’t die ! 
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Yes, this is my problem as well. I’m an independent user and and a slow learner.
I’ve seen my “Pro and Perpetual” licence downgraded to “Classic”.
Free on tablet now has an expensive add on the get the extensions. To get them all is an eye watering sum.
Is Trimble trying to glean a last harvest off of a dying programme?
John Laing
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There is no change except in the name. A “Classic” license is still “Perpetual”.
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