Gaussian Splats have officially arrived in SketchUp Labs!
We’re thrilled to unveil the latest innovation from SketchUp Labs: Gaussian Splats!
After months of rigorous beta testing with our amazing community, the Gaussian Splats extension has officially graduated into a public SketchUp Labs feature.
What does this mean for you? You can now bring the real world directly into your SketchUp projects. This groundbreaking technology allows you to use your SketchUp models in perfect, photorealistic 3D context, making it easier than ever to design and present your ideas.
While you will still generate your splats using your favorite third-party capture tools (like Polycam, Luma, or Scaniverse) our new extension offers a powerful suite of native tools to:
Import your existing .ply, .splat, .spz, .lcc, and .sklat files directly into SketchUp.
Manipulate your Splats using regular SketchUp commands or purpose-built tools to crop, align, and rescale them perfectly to your site.
Integrate seamlessly with SketchUp’s native Scenes and Section Planes, and even maintain your splat visibility in 2D documentation using LayOut!
Download and install the latest version, then fully close and restart SketchUp to see your new toolbar !
Platform Requirements:Please note that the Gaussian Splats extension is currently only available for Windows users on SketchUp Desktop clients.
Pricing & Availability:
For as long as this feature is in the SketchUp Labs program, it will be offered at no additional cost for users with active Pro, Pro Scan, Pro Advanced Workflows, and Studio subscriptions!
We need your feedback!
Your mission in Labs: Put these tools to the test! Dive in, try out the snapping and cropping features, slice your splats with section planes, and let us know how it transforms your modeling experience. Please share your thoughts, feature requests, and incredible visuals right here in the thread!
I went ahead and opened a discussion on this in the Advanced workflow centercode.
( DIS-0047 )
I opened it over there because it felt more comfortable using f-words.
at this point, sketchup needs to pick a lane. either you start developing pro tools like point cloud or gaussian splats for mac and pc, or you decide mac users are not pro users and simply replace the mac version with the nerfed ipad one. and move on.
because this is ridiculous.
edit : we’re not talking legacy code that would require rewriting everything using mac compatible libraries. this is brand new. you started from 0 yet still made that choice.
When you released the splats in the labs last year, this was the FIRST THING many of us told you, when mac ?
dealing with pc only legacy code is a thing I would understand. but the company made an active choice to NOT develop this for its mac users. that’s a very “flipping at us” move.
If I understand correctly, this means that once you leave SketchUp Labs, it will become a paid service.
Ultimately, in the future, we’ll end up with paid subscriptions for a standard SketchUp license, and then we’ll have to invest in various add-ons to get additional features. Today we sometimes have to pay for certain plugins; tomorrow we’ll also have to pay for other Trimble-branded “plugins.” It’s likely to become complicated.
that’s how sketchup has been working since day one. ok, maybe not, because the subscription only arrived in 2019. so since 2019. basic sketchup + plugins, some free, some not, some official, some third party.
the open company, after changing how bim files can be open (in a browser, regardless of your software), is now tackling point clouds and splats, still in a browser, os-agnostic, next monday.
So Mac have the most powerful single core CPU on the market, most powerful multi core CPU on the M5 Max chip, a gpu better than an RTX 5070 and with a lot more memory. Nvidia just announced their new SOC with CPU/GPU/Neural Engine embedded on the same chip, something that Apple started in 2020. On the labs website you ask if there are Mac users interested on adding those features, every Mac user voted for it. Windows 11 is actually a pain in the a**, every day I find a new problem, I must reinstall windows at least twice per year to keep it clean cause somehow just by using it exclusively for work, at some point it gets buggy and I can’t even open the programs I use, before finding Atlas OS and ReviOS I had to suffer the AI and telemetry installed without any permissions, Apple’s MacOS is years ahead of windows and they have developed porting tool, a tool to make it easy for developers to port windows software on an easy way, I’ve seen videos of a normal human being porting games for Mac with almost no coding knowledge. At this point I just think that SketchUp for Mac is going to be the paint of architecture unless a third party developer creates all the tools that are available natively on PC. I don’t know if you’ve seen the trends but a lot of people is getting sick of windows but we have to keep using cause tools that are useful like Gaussian splats and Revit importer are not available for Mac users. On another post I rant about windows and wrote that I was hoping to all the tools that are missing are added to Mac so I can get a Mac Studio with a lot of power, install Linux on my pc and use it as a console to play with my sons. But looking at how Mac users get ignored I must just try to deal with windows for who know how long?
I hope that Nvidia’s new soc which uses arm architecture forces software companies to develop or port their software to ARM, Qualcomm has been trying it for a couple years but Qualcomm doesn’t have the influence that Nvidia has, and the products they showed looked promised, windows laptops suck really bad, they can’t be called portable devices, they force you to be plugged if you want to get full performance, in theory windows arm devices deliver full power regardless of being plugged or unplugged. Open your eyes Trimble, arm is the future, X86 is an archaic tech intel and and must go to get arm licenses if they want to survive, so all the development for SketchUp for windows X86, will be a waste of time in few years. Ignoring Mac users is going to cost you when other softwares add all the tools for us without making us beg for years.
Apple announced that macOS 27 is going to be the last one with Roseta 2 that means that if you don’t upgrade to an apple silicon machine, soon you won’t be able to use modern software since it won’t make sense to companies to develop x86 and arm versions for mac. I don’t see quantum computers hitting the market any time soon, actually I think that technology is moving towards ARM, I don’t like windows but Nvidia’s new soc caught my attention.
I’m so very close to ditching SketchUp for an open-source solution. They are generally more responsive and support more variations.
I’m still running Ventura, because It Just Works™.
Every time I “upgrade” MacOS, numerous things break. Most developers who stop supporting a certain number of older systems are just lazy. They aren’t really using features of the newer OS; they simply use whatever version of Xcode that Apple tells them to use, which arbitrarily cuts off older OS versions for no good reason. I will reward developers with my money for continuing to support older versions!
Apple has not read Geoffrey Moore. In Crossing the Chasm, Moore explains the technology adoption life-cycle. In the early days of Mac OS X, there were good reasons for frequent updates. But now, I think Apple churns the OS every year for no good reason — most new “features” since Ventura seem to be eye-candy, rather than substantial changes.
Computer operating systems have matured. Other than a processor change, there is no good reason to update every year.
No Mac support is definitely disappointing, but it is what it is.
What actually caught my attention is this statement:
*“I’m so very close to ditching SketchUp for an open-source solution.”
*
Which open-source solution are you referring to? I’m genuinely curious, because I haven’t found anything yet that offers a comparable combination of ease of use, ecosystem, LayOut integration, extensions, and workflow.
As for the OS discussion: I completely understand not wanting to upgrade every single year. However, Ventura was released in 2022. Between Ventura and Tahoe there are four major macOS generations. In software development, four years is a very long time.
At our company we run around 45 Macs exclusively, and honestly we’ve never experienced any significant issues after a macOS upgrade. That doesn’t mean problems don’t exist, but from our perspective staying reasonably current with the operating system has been far less painful than many online discussions would suggest.
Also, it’s worth remembering that macOS upgrades are free. Apple isn’t asking users to purchase a new operating system every year. While I completely understand the desire for stability, installing a newer macOS version typically costs nothing except a bit of time.
At some point software vendors have to draw a line. Supporting every OS version indefinitely means testing, maintaining and debugging against an ever-growing number of combinations, which ultimately slows down development for everyone.
Since macOS upgrades are free, it’s also fair for developers to assume that the majority of users will keep their systems reasonably up to date.
And I’m not even getting into the Intel-to-Apple Silicon transition. Apple announced that change back in November 2020 and has been very clear about the direction of the platform ever since.
Thanks for the info, Yohann! I’m already testing the updated extension and trying to see what settings it has and why it splits the point cloud in that rather strange way.
But now it loads my PLY file, with the mention of those two messages in the Console.
It’s cropping the splat. You should be able to define the level of “cropness” using the slider. For some splats, using 95% or 100% is rather good but for some others you can have a background sphere created and it may be better to lower this threshold a bit.
Yes, I know about these messages in the console. I’m in contact with the team that manage these. Unfortunately I have no other way for now. If you’re using Scan Essentials, you will also see them
Gaussian Splats have officially arrived in SketchUp Labs! 
Import your existing .ply, .splat, .spz, .lcc, and .sklat files directly into SketchUp.
Manipulate your Splats using regular SketchUp commands or purpose-built tools to crop, align, and rescale them perfectly to your site.
Integrate seamlessly with SketchUp’s native Scenes and Section Planes, and even maintain your splat visibility in 2D documentation using LayOut!
Platform Requirements: Please note that the Gaussian Splats extension is currently only available for Windows users on SketchUp Desktop clients.
