I’m curious to know what the community thinks of our new extension called SketchPlus. Our goal was to provide a large number of commonly used simple tools all in one package with a consistent SketchUp-like user experience, making it easier for professionals to manage their plugins.
In addition, we wanted to lower the barrier of entry into the world of extensions for new SketchUp users. The amount of extensions available is overwhelming and it takes time to research and learn about all of the options available. We thought that SketchPlus could help streamline this process for beginners.
We know there are some great free plugins from various developers that have similar functions to many of our tools but we hope to add some value by putting in extra efforts into the UI and user experience of the tools to make them feel that they are a natural extension to your existing SketchUp workflow. And by including them all into one ever-evolving and growing extension, the entire process of managing these commonly used tools will hopefully become much simpler!
Version 1 contains over 30 tools including:
Selection Filter
Lasso Select
Polygon Lasso Select
Deep Select Face
Selection Painter
Select All Instances
Select Previous / Select Next (Selection Memory)
Component Finder
Explode+ (Recursive Explode)
Change Axes+
Mirror+
Smart Array
Path Array
Replace Component+
Random Spin
Random Scale
Random Position
Drop+ (Drop objects on the surface below)
Move to Origin
Nudge
Align
Move to Z
Flatten to Ground
Sphere Tool
Cone Tool
Torus Tool
Make Faces+
Unpaint (all entities recursive, groups / components, or faces / edges)
Untag (all entities recursive, groups / components, or faces / edges)
Deep Paint Faces
SketchPlus is a (relatively low-cost) paid extension and there is also a free trial available.
You can learn more at the SketchPlus website below:
It would be great to hear your feedback on this! And also let us know which tools you think we should add to this product. Thanks!
It looks a bit like @curic4su’s Pie Menu in the way that it groups tools together, but that only uses existing tools and gives a means of quick access. Sadly, I have found it unstable on Mac and have had to disable it. But I like the fact that it is highly customisable. Is SketchPlus?
On a personal note, I have always missed dedicated Copy and Mirror commands. I can see you have a Mirror command (interestingly, I do use @curic4su’s Mirror command which works fine on Mac) but is Copy still a subset of the Move command?
Thanks for your interest! Version 1.0 of SketchPlus has limited customization options but there is the ability to turn off the toolbars that you don’t use as often. We may add more customization options in the future if that’s what our users want.
For the current version, we do not have a dedicated Copy command, but thanks for the suggestion!
yes, I’m very interested to hear an explanation from @curic4su. Appears to be a petty attack on SketchPlus and he’s only hurting his own users. Why? Because 5 out of the 30+ SketchPlus tools share some similar functionality with some with his free plugins, which also happen to have similarities with other historical plugins from other developers that predate curic?
Okay…sorry to hear. Curious what’s the cause of this.