Ho Hum after more than 12 months...that's all a dash line?

Lucky you Ratatosk Lumion is my dream renderer but I am on Mac and they don’t support macs

Lumion is awesome! Such a time saver. And the best thing: Lumion customer support and how they integrate customer feedback into new versions is the best I’ve witnessed in the whole industry.

I agree with this. And, unlimited Cloud Storage. Not a game changer for me when I, and every client I work with, use Dropbox.

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:cry:…Don’t tell me anymore !!! That Lumion is amazing !!! ■■■■ might have to buy a PC just Lumion alone

That is interesting- your 2015 MacBook Pro may have a better GPU than your (newer) iMac, but other than that I can’t think what the difference might be. I’ll check in with the QA gang to see if there’s something going on that we don’t know about. I can well understand why this would be frustrating to you!

Sounds like you have a great process for your landscaping projects- I can well imagine that a photorealistic rendering environment like Lumion (with procedural trees and other vegetation) would be something that you value. Then again, Lumion doesn’t have modeling tools like SketchUp’s… so really it makes more sense to use them together. I don’t think the market yet has a single product which does both realtime vegetation rendering and hard surface modeling in one package, but that would be really useful to you if it existed, I imagine. Maybe Blender and Xfrog can do this?

Have you had a look at the workflow from Epic between SketchUp Pro and the Unreal game engine? Pretty neat stuff, there.

There are several additional advantages to using Trimble Connect over Dropbox, though by all means if you have a process that works for you there you should keep using it. If you’re open to making a change, however, here’s a few things to consider:

  1. Connect understands SketchUp models (as well as a dozen other common BIM formats) and can preview them in your client’s web browser
  2. Connect includes version control for SketchUp models, so you can track back through changes you have made
  3. Connect includes clash detection and other kinds of model coordination tools

Fo a nice preview of the reasons why Connect makes a better model sharing platform for SketchUp users, check out Aaron’s latest video on the subject.

I don’t think the market yet has a single product which does both realtime vegetation rendering and hard surface modeling in one package, but that would be really useful to you if it existed, I imagine. Maybe Blender and Xfrog can do this?

Have you had a look at the workflow from Epic between SketchUp Pro and the Unreal game engine? Pretty neat stuff, there.

I actually like that the programs are separate, so you work very task specific in each application. This also makes you pretty quickly build up a library of assets you can reuse time and again.

Thanks for the datasmith link! I didn’t know the integration was that tight with sketchup!
I’ve been eyeing Unreal engine for a long time, and experienced it as quite unstable still, with crashes, and a little cumbersome, but it is definetely something to watch. Lumion is steady is a rock in comparison.

jbacus you have been very helpful today I must compliment you on your service

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Damage Control! I hate being negative so I’m not going to read any more of this thread. All the SU team has to do is cruse the wish list and tell us how many things we care about got checked off. By the way the 2018 release was a step in the right direction. I was just hoping for more. Good night Gracie.

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Thanks for your contribution, and thanks for the recognition that we’ve ticked off a couple of your personal wishlist items.

Hi,
I have just downloaded the 2019 update, and am having problems with a bug that has been around for a while. As far as i can see this is still a problem.

What I would like to be able to do is overlay sketchup model scene views in layout and have the transparency be preserved so i can see the details of the lower viewport through the transparent features of the upper layer.

Can you confirm this is still a bug in 2019, or am i missing something about the way to do what seems to me a common visual communication technique

Wow. Have to say I am disappointed. Really get the sense that Trimble doesn’t give a Sh*t.

Don’t get me wrong. All the Sketch Up folks I had the pleasure to meet at 3D Base camp where great. Really nice people that I’m sure worked very hard.
But.
Dotted lines and an improved tape measure tool? Seems the biggest change is pricing. Best I can tell is we do not even get a credit for the maintenance plan if we move to the subscription model. So I paid 120 in November. Now I would have to add 300 hundred to get XR Headset Viewing? And some storage.?basically AutoCad 360.

I really like sketchup but it is getting harder to accept its downfalls. Too often I end up needing to split one dwg into 3 or 4 files. Every thing I make is a named group or component from the first face to keep things within best dwg practices,I purge and check for stray lines constantly, but before you know it the lag becomes a real drag. The Outliner in 2018 version starts bouncing around and Sketch Up could be unusable for 10 minutes. Then it happens again.
How about the ability to deal with larger files in 2019.
I am curious how many requests have been fulfilled from the 2019 wish list? Where subscription packages on the wish list?

. The release notes seems to me like a bunch of bug fixes that should have been addressed in an actual update some time during the year. Not a new release. didn’t see an update during 2018. Did I miss it ?

I’ll have to do the math but Its starting to feel like that after adding in the paid extensions to get what I need out of SketchUp its costing as much and not working as well as my old AutoCad subscriptions. And they handled pretty big construction dwgs with plenty of line options. PDF also.

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Blender 2.8 with EEVEE can render and do animations very much like Lumion, and it works on your Mac…and it’s free.

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John,
Background: I’ve been using Sketchup professionally since V5 came out. I design store fixtures and interiors which is more industrial design oriented.
I am going to agree with some of the others that are chiming in here. As you all develop this overarching vision of a Sketchup “system” (which is all good and well) some of the core issues that have limited Sketchup’s application as a professional tool have not, in my opinion been addressed as well as they, in my opinion, should have.
The two core issues/limitations: Polygon handling & speed. The Ability of Sketchup to handle more polygons efficiently and speed improvements have not increased significantly since the 2015-2016 release. Both of those elements a crucial to the professional user. The # of polys SU can handle goes directly to the complexity of the type of models that you can produce an manipulate in an efficient manner. Turning layers on & off is fine but eventually you have to have the entire model present & that’s when it get’s dicey. Speed relates to an even more important issue: deadlines.
I have upgraded all the way to 2018 but only use it occasionally. Even so, I almost exclusively use 2016. Anything after that offers no significant upside in my mind.
JMOTC.

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Kind of true, but not when you are constrained by time-limits and budget on projects

Hi @jbacus

My MacBook Pro has an Intel Iris Pro all in one GPU. My iMac has a dedicated AMD Radeon 4GB GPU, so I’d say that the iMac has a better GPU.

If you’ve been around SketchUp since V5 (thanks for that!) you have doubtless seen significant improvement to SketchUp’s ability to render models with more polygons at faster frame rates. And you have likely seen me answer questions about why SketchUp can’t render/more faster on a number of different occasions. I would hate for you to think we don’t recognize how important (to simply everybody) SketchUp’s core rendering/modeling performance is. Clearly, we do.

It turns out performance is pretty tough to quantify. I would have to go back and look at the historical test runs, but I would be surprised to find that we haven’t improved performance at least marginally since 2016.

We’ve known for years that we are locked in an ‘arms race’ with out user community. We make SketchUp handle more/faster, which allows our users to make bigger models until they get big enough that SketchUp’s performance is pegged again. We respond by making SketchUp handle more/faster again, at which point our users are again free to make bigger models until… they reach a point where SketchUp is pegged again. Most users simply don’t think about performance at all until it starts to suck, and then there’s nothing easy that can be done to improve things short of managing down your model complexity.

As a team, we are committed to continuing to improve raw performance with every release. I just ask in response that you recognize that performance is not infinite and there will always be a point at which your model is ‘too big to run’ on whatever the current state of the art system happens to be.

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Quite a thread!

From where I sit, it seems to me that companies like Trimble have at least four areas to apply attention to:

  1. Holistic ones (such as the new “ecosystem referred to here”);

  2. New features;

  3. Bug fixes;

  4. Improvements

Traditionally, software companies have liked to concentrate on new features as they are easily marketable and probably more fun to work on if you are a developer.

Holistic improvements are probably the hardest thing to implement, especially whilst maintaining backward compatibility, but are necessary for companies to keep moving forward.

The Cinderellas of the game are the bug fixes and improvements. The time/reward ratio is probably quite low. Yet ironically, they are the things that often make the biggest impact for the end user. Many of us keep banging on about what appear to be simple improvements that would make our lives easier (and, we like to think, others too did they but know it) and wondering why we get ignored. Perhaps it’s not such a puzzle after all.

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I don’t understand what you mean by:

but not when you are constrained by time-limits and budget on projects

If you referring to the learning curve, Blender 2.8 is substantially easier to pick up and unlike Lumion, there is no cost-- it’s free. There are tutorials out there that literally hold your hand to transfer your SketchUp models to fully rendered and animated realtime rendered scenes in Blender EEVEE, just like Lumion. So… perhaps you mean something else?