Sketchup 2019 Feature Requests

I suppose because it’s a Mac widget thingummy? Can you get a list view in any other applications that use it on the Mac? The Color Picker app does show a list if you have Color Palettes selected.

Mac material selection/editing seems rather awful. The material and color concepts are mixed up in a total mess.

The Mac SketchUp Materials window has been controversial for a very long time! But it seems that most of the Mac SketchUp UI has been “frozen” for a long time while the Windows SketchUp UI moves forward…

SketchUp’s Materials (aka “Colors”) is implemented as a customization of the system’s Cocoa Color Picker. The base color picker, as its name suggests, is geared toward (duh) colors, not something more sophisticated such as SketchUp’s materials. I don’t know what the developers were thinking - maybe that Color Picker would be familiar and comfortable to Mac users? maybe that this was far easier than developing a complete Materials editor from scratch?

But whatever the thinking, it has led to two ongoing problems. The first, as @eneroth3 noted, is a cognitive dissonance because color concepts and SketchUp materials concepts are jumbled together. This clash very often causes users to become confused. The second is a complete break from the Windows Materials editor that must repeatedly be explained to users, especially as there are some operations in the Windows version that are awkward or impossible in the Mac version.

Returning to the list view question, even the system’s Color Picker doesn’t provide a way to toggle between tile and list views. But, ironically, it does have one panel that uses a hybrid tile+list view but is not contained in the SketchUp Materials window:

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I can certainly understand the benefit of re-using native UI elements, both from a programming and UX point of view. However, I wish the system color picker would only show up once a user actually chooses to change the color of a material, not as the primary material selector.

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Yep

Roman Gorshkov March Hons Dip Arch
Architectural Designer
www.romangorshkov.com
www.wood360.co.uk

Well, there’s one feature request sorted for you. That one was done years ago, though.

Scene sets - or cascade able scene tabs
Ability to change autosave/temp save location. So they will stop messing with my cloud storage.

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Sketchup is not helping us make models for other software to handle. Sketchup is being used to make professional models, full projects, documentation and presentation, all in one package. It’s no longer an accessory software as it once was. Sketchup is not a sidekick, it’s already the main work software for a lot of us. Layout is no longer a quick and rough annotation from model software, it’s already capable of full 2D drafting.

Sketchup has some drawbacks though, Layout has a lot.

I think it is time to assume Sketchup and Layout as true contenders in many markets and specially since Trimble removed Make.

We, that use Sketchup as our main Pro tool need features that work flawlessly:

  • Line styles in Sketchup that are work on actual model geometry are nowhere related to what Layout is capable of doing;
  • Multiplanar Sections that work on multiple levels and way better section management which 2018 may have opened some possibilities but didn’t explore deep enough or made them really useful;
  • Inteligent curves/arcs/circles and curved 3d shapes or surfaces, even if they are polygons that think they are curves;
  • Better UV mapping possibilities, like UV unwrapping and having UV mapping for default material inside components. (we can have a component of a car and paint it white, black or red while keeping it the same component, but if it’s a rally car with stickers in the right place, we have to make UV map it correctly and we cannot have the default material correctly mapped so all cars must be made unique for changin the texture in each… not good)
  • Better scenes, components and layers management through it’s inspectors. They have so much potential yet they are so limited. Groups, groups, groups…
  • Vector hatches or materials.

Layout:

  • Every tools should work as Sketchup’s. Accurate rotate in Layout is not possible. There are workarounds for that, but they make a simple command take minutes to solve. Move, rotate and scale as tools instead of a deviation from selection. I cannot count the amount of times this causes havoc in my work…
  • Separate lines from curves tool.
  • Move while dragging, selection while dragging, double click editing, triple click editing… why so many point and clicks Layout strains us…
  • Way better exporting to DWG. It’s getting slowly better and our FRs are being heard but we need much more in order to deal with other professionals that use CAD… they are just too many still using it.
  • Components in Layout.
  • The vector hatches or materials above should be nicely translated into CAD. Maybe as components or a different layer.
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In addition to units of measure and background to the user needs to be can choose a set of plugins for the selected work environment. This way running a Sketchup can be faster.
For example.

  1. Run SketchUp;
  2. A window appears with the choice “Template” with chosen for him a set of plug-ins;
  3. SketchUp loads chosen plug-ins for the “Template”;
  4. After running a plugin “Extension Store” or “Extension Manager” you can add or remove plugins from the set for the specified user environment.
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The Sketchucation extension comes with an extensions manager that lets you create your own sets of extensions. You can load different groups of extensions for different types of projects.

I don’t think your idea would work with templates as you need to restart Sketchup to update the menus for any plugin that you’re removing.

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You are right, though it goes even deeper than that. SketchUp loads extensions as it starts up the Ruby interpreter. Once it is running, there is no practical way to unload the extension’s code or to undo effects it may have had on the open model (such as attaching observers). So, although you can indeed create, save, and set a suite of extensions as “active”, you must restart SketchUp to make that what is loaded into the interpreter.

To implement the requested feature, I think there would have to be a mechanism built into the SketchUp code itself to intercede before the Ruby interpreter starts loading any extensions.

the ‘old school’ way of doing this is to place all, non SU plugins into ‘type’ sub_folders…

you then add a manger plugin that opens a selection dialog on startup and you choose the toolset you wish to load for that session…

the main issue ‘game stopper’ in earlier versions of SU was toolbar positions, which I suspect is still the case…

john

I’m all for a way to save and restore toolbar positions so you can switch between different sets for different taks but it should NOT be a choice you have to do each time you start SketchUp. I loose count on how many times I open new SketchUp instances in a day and being interrupted by such a choice each time would be a terrible distraction to my work flow.

Also I see no point in adding or removing plugins for the different sets.

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as it stands the only way to stop any loading is to remove them from the load path…

in my opinion the toolbar and menu items are the only things that should be loaded on startup…

activating those should load the extensions resources i.e. lazy-loading…

if this was enforced then switching toolbars on or off becomes trivial…

convincing some extension authors that their plugin isn’t the best feature of SU is impossible…

john

That would require plugins to be written in a whole other way to define their menu and toolbar entries without loading the underlying plugin. I don’t know how it would function. Also there isn’t much harm in loading a plugin, at least if it doesn’t load all its resources or do online license checks until needed. That is something plugin developers could keep in mind today already.

However, it would be nice if toolbars were better integrated with the API and you could make an extension that saves, restores and lets you switch between toolbar sets.

Hello, been a sketchup user for more than 10 years now and throughout I’ve build up my personal workflow on sketchup and based on that I do believe that the following features and tools could step up its capabilities pretty well.

  1. I do highly agree with some of the previous suggestions related to Lineweights, Advanced Layer manager and material manager (including better UV mapping controls).

  2. @Designer2020 provided a pretty sufficient list of bugs that I support as well.

  3. since sketchup 8, sketchup’s overall geometry handling capability have undoubtedly advanced to pretty high extend but I would still love to see more development in this field. I still stumble across situations where the program becomes too slow on larger or more complex models (Complex and organic geometries, Several nested layers, many nested componenets, etc. )

  4. I would also love to see more advanced Snapping controls. Sketchup’s snapping is really good overall, maybe way too good, that in many cases I get stuck trying to snap onto a specific intersection or near point that the cursor keeps snapping the endpoint of the closest line.

  5. There is also an issue (probably not an issue, not sure) where while working on a large model, zooming in to a very small portion of the model starts “cutting or hiding through” those small geometries. I’ve seen this in various other programs and am sure its something related to how graphics work but it gets kindof annoying sometimes.

  6. Lets get to the cool part, I would love if sketchup would finally support MULTIPLE FACE PUSH/PULL or extrusion to be more specific. I am not only talking about selecting several disjoined faces and extruding them together (yes thats cool too) but also extruding joined surfaced. For example extruding a curved surface, or a cyliner or maybe the entire topography of a site to give it thickness. I wouldn’t find implementing such a tool is complicated, I usually do this operation by copying the reference surface, extruding its projection to intersect bothe surfaces and then cutting the excess ends of the extrusion.

  7. Align comand please, I know its fast to copy/move an object to a location and then rotate it to the preferred alignment, but a single ALIGN tool (like AutoCAD’s or Rhinoceros3D’s Orient or Orient2Pt). this command is super useful for th entire workflow and time saving strategy.

  8. 1001 bit tools offers alot of editing tools that I also think should be embedded within sketchup like : Fillets and Chamfer, and I would also like to see surface fillets.

These are the points I managed to remember right now, I hope they are usefull.

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A native surface push pull that looks and feels exactly like the existing push pull (same selection interface, same colors, same VCB behavior, same feedback etc) would be wonderful!

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Re: SketchUp Free

Dear SketchUp Team:

Two suggestions,

  1. ability to sort layers, similar to Pro
  2. a separate tray for Scenes instead of combined with Views

I have just started testing Trimble Connect and Sketchup Free for the Construction Administration phase of project I have documented in SketchUp. As I work through the Procedures and Policies, I will keep you informed of my thoughts.

Thanks.

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Or just force them into always displaying in alphanumerical order.

Agree completely. Scenes are so much more than just cameras. It’s also layer visibility, entity visibility, styles, axes and more. I just can’t get used to scenes being forced into the “Views”, which at first glance appears to be a panel for camera options. Separate “Camera” and “Scenes” panels would make it easier to find what you are looking for, as well as makign it easier for new users to understand the different features.

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I’m talking about spherical backgrounds.

Your suggestion of a watermark doesn’t work because when the model/camera is rotated, the watermark doesn’t change so it’s not realistic at all.