Okay. I think I feel confident enough in my ability to use the native tools to get what I want out of SketchUp. I’m ready for the next level and it’s the weekend so there’s time to play.
Hit me with your “can’t live without” extension recommendations . I’m not opposed to paying money for the well deserving ones.
For curves look at Bezier Spline and Fredo Spline from SketchUcation (SCF). For more organic surfaces you might look at Vertex Tools and Artisan from Extension Warehouse (EW). There’s also Fredo6’s Round Corner and FredoCorner (SCF) that you might find useful. Curve Maker and Taper Maker, Soap Skin Bubble (EW).
If memory serves me Fredo has a bundle of eight of his plugins at a discounted price. A great value. Would also look at QuadFace Tools and SubD as companions to VertexTools. Plenty more to be had , choice sort of depends on what the main focus of your modeling is……
Curic Mirror
Fredo Joint Push Pull
Midpoint
Selection Toys
Solid Inspector 2
And don’t forget Curviloft. It’s included included in Fredo’s bundle.
Cleanup3, BoolTools2 and Material tools
You’re going to get a lot of recommendations, there are so many out there and everyone finds their own rhythm and workflow with a slightly different set. Many of the big names have been mentioned above, like the exciting organic modeling toolsets and the indispensable Fredo suite of tools. Bending extensions like TrueBend and Shape Bender (each excels in different situations) are worth a look. Curic Mirror is a daily for me, Eneroth Solid Tools, Selection Toys, bla bla bla, I could go on and on.
Instead I’ll mention a few smaller perhaps less flashy extensions that really help out my workflow. Each does a specific but crucial job, sometimes silently in the background, sometimes similar to a native tool with a small difference, sometimes adding what might be considered missing native functionality.
Eneroth Auto Weld
Auto Invisible layer
Upright Extruder
Push Line
Add tag/layer to select comps by def name
It’s a jungle out there in extension land, but a fun one.
Angular Dimension 2 from SketcUcation adds a feature missing from native SketchUp. I’m at risk of blowing my own trumpet here, because it’s an extension largely developed by @slbaumgartner (Steve Baumgartner) based in an idea of mine, and has proved popular - if you need it, it does the job.
Or you could add your angular dimensions in Layout.
It goes without saying, the most important extension to install is the Sketchucation tool itself. Not only do you need to to keep track of Fredo’s and other licenses it does a whole bunch of other stuff to boot.
It keeps track of updates to your extensions
it gives you a quickly searchable interface within sketchup
it allows you to interactively enable and disable extensions
it will install ‘bundles’ of extensions for you without you having to look for them
bundles that you can edit
you can create ‘Sets’ sets of extensions that you want to load for a specific session.
and a few other things.