The ∞ SketchUp Wish List

Did someone force you to buy this software ? If so, you might have to get a lawyer.[quote=“CEMartin64, post:183, topic:33695”]
before their customers go and find OR CREATE a new and BETTER product!
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Competition is always good for business.[quote=“CEMartin64, post:183, topic:33695”]

  1. Your Help area needs critical work!
    [/quote]
    Most of the software I use doesn’t ‘read’ user’s minds, so it is alway’s ‘guessing’ what precise information he would need via the knowledge center. You will have better luck on fora like these, where a whole bunch of people are involved in building a (civilized) community around SketchUp and not specifically by SketchUp.

Back where I came from, we have a saying, something like : “Wie vraagt, wordt overgeslaagd” (quod qui quaerit de percussum)
I learned that a great way of learning software is by following a course or buy books written by experienced users.
2) : I don’t think that there where major changes regarding GUI or looks.
3) : Which experts do you mean ? They are all around here. If you have technical problems, please contact support
If you have any workflow-specific questions, use this forum ( but please, do not demand…)
4) computers are designed to ‘remember’ things like account information etc. At first, I thought you would need some secret password to join a group or website and that all members would share the same password ( like we had when we were young and had secret groups, only those who knew the secret password got to join in) Turns out, everybody has their own! I wouldn’t want the same login-information for this discourse-forum and SU. In fact, I use several login- accounts on SU, depending on what I am doing for whom.
5) : most often, dramatically improvements come with a shock, so you might reconsider point 2)

In general, it’s always good practice to ask for one thing at the time at a civilized manner.

qui bona non bene occurrit

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, MAKE AN EXTENSION OR SKETCH UP FEATURE WHERE YOU CAN EDIT THE SETTINGS OF THE SPEED AND SMOOTHNESS OF THE ZOOM.

MODELING MAKES ME SUPER SICK SOMETIMES! THANKS! :relaxed:

And I’ve noted a bug that if you are working in Metric units, and want to enter lengths in the VCB in Imperial (some or all of feet, inches and fractions) you get daft and inconsistent results. See:

On a different tack from my previous post.

I’d like there to be a Read Onlly status for a component or group in a model. It would keep the component locked, but allow copying it elsewhere.

Otherwise, you have to unlock the component, copy it and risk moving it, then remember to re-lock it.

1 Like

Nested scene tabs and nested layers. But definitely the scene tabs as a higher priority.

If not nested scene tabs at least have the ability to have multiple open files in a single instance of SU in the Windows version like they do in the Mac version. I know i can open up multiple instances of SU for each file but wouldn’t that take up more memory?

It would also be nice to allow for a greater number of segments for arcs and circles to return or at least to exist as an option.

If not either of those two at least have SU tell you what the maximum allowed segments is rather than just tell you have exceeded it.

And finally, although i may be wrong, for some reason in SU 2017 the repeat previous tape measure snap function seems to have disappeared. Again, at least allow it as an option.

But i’m guessing in keeping to their philosophy of simplicity the developers don’t want to make the program bloated with options. But wouldn’t having options in an organized settings page be better than unsatisfied users who cant get what they want?

And finally, why not add the letters SU and the word Sketchup and all the other company associated words to the allowed words in the dictionary to this forum itself so that whenever we the users are typing them we don’t get the red underline. I mean, if it’s possible, then why not? But i guess if is the question!

1 Like

I don’t what scene tabs has to do with open models. Theye serve completely different purposes. The only thing I can think of that they have in common is how they are in the GUI controlled by tabs above the viewport

I don’t think there’s a very big different in RAM usage depending on the number of opened SketchUp instances; I think it’s the models, not the application itself, that uses a lot of RAM.

You can enter a huge number of segments (I think it’s 999 or something like that) but it bloats the file size and slows sown SU. I very often just use 8 sides for small circles such as cross sections of pipes.

The spell checker is a feature of your own web browser and has nothing to do with the forum. Normally you can right click a word and chose to add it to your dictionary. You could also write in the user forum of your web browser and ask to have the words added by default.

THE MOTHER OF ALL FEATURE REQUESTS:

A dedicated website (within the forum or standalone) that is designed specifically for feature requests. The developers could create a survey generated on their own or from reading user requests that would allow the user to check which features they dislike or like with a rating of -10 to +10.

Such a website should exist for every company that has the budget and time for such a function.

And the more sophisticated the website the greater the feedback that company gets, which in turn leads to better implementation of ideas, better sales, and more satisfied customers.

I honestly think this is a grand idea. I cant see why it would not be.

7 Likes

eneroth3, it’s annoying to have a long array of SU taskbar icons. It would be nice to have them all in one instance of SU. And if your working with a very large project where you wish to use many scene tabs in an organized fashion then having multiple open files all referenced to a central file through importing produces an effect similar to multiple scene tabs, thus making a single instance of SU containing multiple files a handy feature if nested scene tabs is not available.

Also, i think you are right about limiting the number of segments in arcs and circles but i feel that they just set it a bit too low. If the default segment size is not high then there is no reason why the file should balloon to too large of a size and become slow to work with. Also, if someone is working on an imaginary project that is not going to be materialized in the real word where it would be very handy to have a much higher resolution for segments ranging from large to small objects (like fractals) then why not leave it alone.

But ultimately, i think the problem with arguing, like in forums, lies in the fact that each person is often not simply wrong or right, but is wrong or right from -100 to +100. In other words, the correctness and completeness of suggestions for ideas and the reasons for them are not as simple as black and white, but more like a spectrum of grays.

My wishlist would be:

  1. Support for real curves (not just facets) that stay curves/arc and support for accurate creation of double curved surfaces not just meshes (solids)

  2. Support for HiDPI desplays in Windows - especially if you have dual monitor setup and they are not the same resolutions (ie; one 4K and another just HD - right now the 4K display makes certain elements appear huge in the HD monitor)

Real curves would completely break Sketchup. It would mean an additional geometry type at a very low level (not just faces and lines, but now a curved surface). The inference engine would be slow (it must deduce what the centre of the curve is, and points on the surface), plus existing scripts would not handle such an object type. The curved object could not be exported to a standard 3d object file format such as DAE, or Wavefront OBJ, not without breaking it up into multiple faces.

I agree with the better high definition support, however I suspect that would be quite of bit of work for the dev team, and I’m not holding out on this being implemented for next year, but we can hope.

3 Likes

I think the best thing Trimble could do is re-release sketchup before they bought it. Every release gets just a little bit worse. I often wonder if the developers there even know how to use the program. I just opened 2017 for the first time today and the line quality is horrible. One outstanding feature of SU has always been that if two touching lines weren’t co-linear, they would display slightly thicker and more jagged, and you could correct it if necessary. NOW ALL THE LINES LOOK LIKE THIS! I know I can jack up the anti-aliasing, which will make them look better, but offer no visual cues about their precision AND make large scenes WAY TO SLUGGISH. I always ran SU in 0x for these very reasons.

I’ve been using this program since 2004 now, it’s a fantastic program for so many reasons, but precision and speed were always it’s greatest assets. I don’t think Trimble understands this.

The forum ought to have a “dislike” button…

4 Likes

Anssi, maybe you didn’t make it past that first sentence, but the line quality is a legitimate issue. That said, in fairness to the topic, here are some wishes beyond fixing something that worked perfectly in prior releases.

  1. Guides should be lockable and have global color options, they’re difficult to see when working in color by layer when they’re the same color as the geometry being worked on. They’re a tool, so I’ve never understood why they would need to be colored by material or layer to begin with.

  2. There should be a text option without leaders, this would be super easy.

  3. There should be a key override when trying to move a points adjacent to groups,since they can’t be pre-selected like all other geometry, and SU inference usually defaults to the group. Locking the adjacent group solves this, but it’s cumbersome. OR, maybe just the option to disable auto-select - I’ve always preferred select then move anyway.

  4. There should be an editable shadow cutoff for transparent materials instead of just being a simple 69%, or if we want to get really fancy, shadows could gradate based on transparency.

  5. I almost never use textures in sketchup because I do all my render output in MAX, but layer textures should have the same UVW tools that material textures do.

  6. The follow-me tool is way overdue for some banking and normals features.

  7. The follow-me tool extrusion could adopt the layers or materials of the edges in the extrusion profile. This would be super easy.

  8. Groups and components should have scale constraints the same way dynamic components do, this would be super easy.

  9. I would love a tool for extruding (skirting) a complex surface. There used to be a ruby script that did this well, but the latest release is a bit of a mess.

  10. Offset could work on more than one loop, that would be nice.

  11. Protractor inference should go back to pre 2016, when you could lock it to a plane and move it to another face, something else that worked perfectly in prior releases.

  12. .3ds export no longer exports material by layer when current selection is checked. this is a bug. something else that worked perfectly in prior to 2015.

  13. When saving out a component, the filename should match the component name, this is no longer the case if the component name has changed at some point in the model, it retains the original name, though not always in new, small files, oddly. something else that worked perfectly in prior to 2016.

  14. There should be a way to specify the template folder location. something else that worked perfectly in prior to 2017.

  15. Right-click make component shouldn’t bring up the create component dialog - this is just more clutter, I only need to name or customize about 0.5% of the components I create, and this is easy enough to access for that, something else that worked perfectly in prior releases.

  16. There really should be a select inverse option - at least on live geometry.

Sorry, I guess the last five aren’t ‘new’ features. Hopefully there won’t be another ten at the end of the day.

Cheers

3 Likes

There used to be save and restore options for the toolbars in a prior release, which was particularly helpful after resizing the window, because they would all stack up.

Another feature trimble decided we didn’t need any more.

1 Like

The reset for toolbars went away a long time ago. That’s because the toolbar manager doesn’t rearrange and stack the toolbars like the old one did. I’ve never had any problems with toolbars holding their positions since the the switch to the new manager. And the new toolbar manager provides the option to make custom toolbars for native tools which I think is a great thing. No need for toolbar buttons you don’t use.

I totally agree with this, there should be a global color setting for guides. Especially when working in a group that’s on a layer - everything is the same color, which is unhelpful

You will get much better response from a post like this than a purely negative rant such as your previous one! But please never say “this would be super easy” in a feature request. Unless you are one of the SketchUp developers you really have no way to know how hard or easy a feature might be to add. Things that seem easy from the user’s perspective sometimes cut deeply across prior implementation choices and are quite hard to program.

Addressing a couple of your specific items:

If you start a text item by clicking in open space, it is glued to the screen with no leader. Also, you can hide a leader in the Entity Info window for a selected Text.

Please expand on this to clarify what you mean. It isn’t obvious what “banking” and “normals” mean.

1 Like

I know, you’re right, I tried to end that post on a positive note. But I also thought it would spur some conversation, and I’m frustrated and a little alarmed with the last 3 releases. I’m a bit of a sketchup originalist, and I wish trimble wouldn’t re-invent things that I think always worked so well, like the protractor inference. (not to mention these seem like difficult changes)

Regarding the leader, I rarely use this, so it’s moot, but I thought it would just require an invisible leader to anchor the text. I didn’t know about clicking in on the screen, but the problem I’m finding with this is that the text can’t be accurately placed or moved (to hover over a building for example). When I hide the leader in the entitiy info, the text disappears as well ( I don’t think it’s meant to do this)

the follow me tool often produces reversed faces (normals), also not a big deal because it’s easy to flip. regarding banking, certain geometry will start to distort if the path has too many turns. A handrail will often be quite torqued at the end of a path, for example. In 3ds Max there are a number of options for controlling this. (I often just create this sort of geometry in that program for this reason)

The multi-layer follow me option would be my biggest request regarding this topic.

Thanks for responding. I know some implementation is easier said than done, but I’ve often fantasized about seeking a UX position with trimble for this reason. If they were located in Seattle I’d probably look into it.

windows antialiasing is also looks much worse than prior releases. But there are many other issues with sketchup and macOS, changing an object’s layer is a mess, last time I checked, there was no way to import or export shortcuts, and is there no ruby support for sketchup on Mac - I couldn’t find a way to load plug-ins.

I’m not seeing that at all on my Windows machine. AA looks better in SU2017 than in earlier versions.