Lets face it, 99.9% of the content in 3D Warehouse is pure ■■■■ when you are looking for components to use in your own projects. A lot of models are great if you just want to look at them but many aren’t even that. Add 20 third party cars to your car park or 30 chairs to your office and even a top notch machine starts lagging. SketchUp’s own components are pretty much the only ones that are efficiently modeled with a reasonable polygon count and a consistent style and level of detail.
But how can I navigate to the SketchUp components? Author search doesn’t seem to work anymore. Searching for “author:SketchUp” doesn’t show any results. The 3D Warehouse front page used to show SketchUp’s main collection, which was my primary way to find components, but I can’t find it anymore. Of course searching for SketchUp just brings up page after page with random third party content.
My current way to find any useful components is to search for “Jin Yi”, and click on the author link at the second result (the scale figure component published by SketchUp, not Jin’s personal account). From there I can go to Collections and scroll down to the SketchUp Component collection. But there must be a better way to get there? Not?
tl;dr hit enter to search, and search for Author “SketchUp”, or bookmark this link: Search | 3D Warehouse
(below, I demoed with author “PM3D”.
We’ve changed search a lot, and we have tickets to add those back in, but for now you’d have to narrow it down on the search options to the left side (once you’ve done a single search, or just hit ‘Enter’):
We are working on making searches non-exact for user name and partial searches, and making the query work the way it did. Right now, you have to do a magic secret incantation to get it to work from the command line, and rather than teach everyone that, we’ll fix this. I’ll let you know (near future) when we roll this out.
Bookmarking doesn’t work for the embedded browser I’m afraid, and it still isn’t possible to directly drag download links from a proper browser into SketchUp for fast downloads into the model.
Yes, it is. I sent this to sages a while back (EDIT - I looked for this in my old posts, and didn’t see it. Sorry, my mistake): paste that url into the search bar and it’ll work. Also ctrl-shift-L to get the url of the page you’re on in SketchUp shown in the search bar, then copy and paste in a browser to do it the other direction.
We just pushed new code today that will now return this, with a slight caveat: use quotes around the author name. So if you want models from an author named “SketchUp”, from the home page you can type
author:“SketchUp”
and you should get them. Note that author’s screen names aren’t unique, and while we may scowl and scold at users who are posers, you might get some others, so trust but verify. And note that after this search, your search term “SketchUp” is placed in the advanced search’s field for Author.
What do you mean by this? I usually download models from inside Chrome, then drag the file (once it’s finished downloading) from the bottom of the browser right into SketchUp. Are you not able to do this, or are you describing a different workflow?
She was referring to using SketchUp, Window->3D Warehouse and searching from there. That saves you from getting the wrong version, and gives you the option of immediately inserting or saving to disk.
Until around 2016 you could use your real browser with proper tabs, history etc (not the embedded one) to find models, and then drag the download link directly into the SketchUp viewport to download and place the component. Then something changed with the website so you couldn’t do this, but had to download to a folder and insert the model from there.
? I tried 2015 and it doesn’t work… but now, on any version 2014+, you should be able to drag the URL from the browser into the Search bar, go to the model, and download.
Drag the url, just like you’d drag into SketchUp window. In your original post, you said “drag the download link directly into the SketchUp viewport”. Now instead of dragging into SketchUp, you drag into SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse search bar and hit enter.
To use the embedded 3D warehouse (after finding a model in a proper browser with history, tabs and the like) you have to:
Copy the URL
Click File
Select 3D Warehouse
Select Get Models
Wait (this could even count as 2 steps because how distracting it is to your flow to just sit and do nothing)
Paste the URL in the search field (which is probably a small hack added for testing purposes, not at all an intuitive step you would know of if you weren’t told about it).
Press enter.
Press download
Confirm to download into the model.
There are 10 times as many steps to do the latter, and took 7,5 times as long for me in this example. Sure, the second model was slightly larger and maybe took half a second extra to download, and it took me a few seconds to locate it as it wasn’t drawn at the origin, but it still takes 5 or 6 times as much time to download a model now than it did in 2016. This isn’t progression.
I miss however did the interaction design back in the @Last Software days.
When you download something in Chrome, do you have the option enabled where you see recently downloaded files at the bottom of the browser? If so, you can just drag into SketchUp from there.
I gotcha. Personally, I use my downloads folder as a junk drawer that I purge out every few months. If I download something I need to keep, I immediately move it to an organized folder. Otherwise, I just leave it in the downloads folder and it gets deleted during a purge.
