Thank you so much, really appreciated.
That said, one of the main reason I did 100% of the modeling for that Ferrari car straight in Sketchup, was exactly to demonstrate there’s no reason to say that “Sketchup is a toy” when it comes to do some serious modeling for rendering/VR/animation stuff.
In regular production work I also use 3dsMax a lot, but I start my projects in Sketchup more often than not.
I feel that Sketchup is the most underrated tool for the initial sketches in this kind of workflow.
Many people in rendering/animation/game industry tend to use some nurbs cad (like Rhinoceros or Moi3d) for the “concept modeling” stage to be more accurate, but then they have to remesh/retopologize their models from scratch to create a good polygon flow to feed their GPU’s.
Using Sketchup you can jump that stage, because SU is already a polygon modeler, but it has that “CAD style” toolset and workflow inbuilt, so you can have full control over vertices and polygon topology, but at the same time you can take advantage of the best tools in the bizness to manage snapping, inferencing, accurate measurement, images and dwg references, photmatches, section planes, guidelines, dimensions, scenes, components, nesting/past in place… and so on.
Of course it has it’s own limitation, so one have to know when is time to switch to Max/Maya/Blender/C4d/whatever… In the car example, I modeled the 7.5 millions vertices water puddle straight in Max because it would have been nonsense modeling such an heavy full-organic mesh in SU.
I believe the same principle should be taken into account from architects and designer… they should know when is time to to switch their model from SU to Revit or something.
Here’s some example of the project I’m workin on right now. It’s the full 3d historical reconstruction for an old train’s restoration. I have to model tons of this '50s furnitures from old photos and incomplete hand-drawn technical sheets. The final model should be suitable for rendering and animation. Most people would say “do it straight in 3dsMax”.
But here’s how I work taking advantage of the above mentioned SU strenght points.
Try to do the same in Max, good luck whit that.
Now, my point is… Sketchup is capable of such good workflow for freeform detail modeling, but it seems that developers don’t believe in it and don’t care at all for “us”. They instead try to force a polygon/mesh modeler that can’t handle true curves or solids into some sort of odd CAD and annotation package.
Well, they can do that… if people like that, I’m fine with it.
But I wonder why they don’t give to people like me a better support, it would be much easier because this workflow is more suited to the “logical” way in which SU works by it’s nature (again, it works on vertices and meshes, NOT curves and surfaces).
Every time I say this, many silly people argue that I want advanced modelling tools such as subdivisions, sculpting and that kind of stuff inbuilt in SU and they complain about it becoming a “bloated” software like Max or Maya.
Well, I DO NOT ask that.
I just want that they give some love to some aspects that could empower better plugins creation in this field.
Because, you know, you need tons of plugins for this workflow, but if they build some more “basic” tools like inbuilt geometrical primitives, splines, chamfers and lofts, extensions developers could have better base methods to build their improved tools without having to reinvent the wheel every single time they write a new plugin.
I also would love to see some “unified” template for plugins, like maybe the ability to create side panels for extension just like the native ones.
In 3dsmax every plugin has the same interface of native Max tools in the side panels and such. In Sketchup every single plugin has it’s own interface, some of them are really cool, but the final result is a complete mess.
I would also like to see some improvements in terms of UV’s and exporters, to better collaborate in a production pipeline (I believe building support for multiple UV channels, which is crucial for advanced rendering, baking and VR stuff could be waaaay easyer to implement than a Revit importer).
And that’s my “constructive” rant. I hope some Sketchup guy will read it.