I have been a great fan of SketchUp for some years now. One of the SketchUp features that I’m most excited about is the Solid Tool. Unfortunately these tools are only available for the SketchUp Pro users. I have always found that strange, because these tools are not something that are only appealing Pro users (like lay-out is).
I would greatly appreciate it if you include the full acces to the solid tools with SketchUp Make. I hope you will consider this for any future version.
I know they have never been part of the free version. What would be in it for Trimble you ask? Not much, I realize that, aside from my appreciation as I stated before.
The reason I made my request is that I have no intention to buy the Pro version, just for the solid tools. Yes, Pro is an appealling package… but just not for me. I am no more than an enthusiast amateur user, so Style Builder and Lay Out are more or less useless to me. I am only interested in the drawing features of SketchUp itself. And the Solid Tools definetely are some powerfull tools that could really safe some of my precious time while I am using SketchUp.
As I said, I have no intention whatsoever to pay a great deal of money just to unlock the solid tools. I have already tried the free third party plug-ins that are supposed to act like the solid tools, but they just don’t seem to work.
I would not hold my breath waiting for the solid tools to be given out free. As your experience with the available plugins shows, it is quite difficult to get this kind of tool to work within SketchUp and the developers surely spent a lot of effort on them (and despite this there are still some glitches from time to time). Even Google, who started the idea of a free version with the goal of populating Google Earth with lots of free buildings, didn’t give the solid tools away for free. You should be grateful for getting as much of SketchUp for free as you do!
Trust me, I am grateful for it. It was simply a polite request to further improve the SketchUp experience. This is a wish that I have for some time now. I would rather express my wish here where the developers can read it than keep it for myself. You never know right?
fwiw, SolidTools don’t do anything that can’t be done in suMake via intersecting&deleting…
solidTools simply automates the process and allows you to work faster in a boolean workflow.
so, it’s not like you’re lacking capabilities by lacking solidTools… you just go slower (unlike, say, .dwg import whose capability is absent from make and any workarounds you may find will be dependent on 3rd parties)
so with solid tools, you gotta look at it more this way:
either pay with your money to speed things up
-or-
pay with your time to keep your money
I agree with Tomatenketchup, I there is no harm in asking and hopping. and he is right about solid tools there are most likely more useful to the maker movement rather then pro’s. I use lay outs all the time for work but that’s in chief architect.
I think it would be good idea for sketch up would sell the tools separately I would pay, maybe some thing like $30-$50. they do save a lot of time.
Another work around I found to work well was exporting ever thing to STL and using MS 3d Builder to do my subtracting. and it works well also 3d builder givers you more basic shapes some ting I find my self importing anyway.
Also jeff what’s suMake? sounds like you mean that we do it manually and not that’s its a plugin. just checking.
Just get the “BoolTools 2” by Mind.sight.studios. After I bought this independent extension (it was quite cheap in my opinion) my Solids Tools have become obsolete. It has also got way better performance. BoolTools 2 works with both SketchUp Make and SketchUp Pro (2016 and above).
Solid Tools should be stored up on the Extension Warehouse for people who are interested in using it. Now it kind of feels like obsolete bloatware to me.
The one thing that causes me to hesitate is their recommendation that you turn autosave off while using their extension. That is not something that I’d be comfortable with.
I have not bothered to turn off Auto-save before running an operation with Booltools 2. But I always save my model as a habit manually before I run a bool operation though. Everyone has to decide what risks they are comfortable with taking I guess.
The recommendation to turn off auto save is to avoid a rare issue where SketchUp can bugsplat when trying to perform an auto save while a tool is active. Once SketchUp fixes this bug, we will not need this recommendation any more. No matter what extension you are using, it is good practice to save before launching any heavy processing.
I’m a professional user who use LayOut almost daily but never solid tools, dynamic components or style builder. Can I get LayOut for free? I only want LayOut, not solid tools, dynamic components or style builder.
