I like that idea and am willing to help define a wishlist and contribute $000s to tick off items we need.
However LayOut’s lack of customisations makes this impossible.
I wish that Trimle hadnt hired the best extension developers to work in house. Fredo is still independent.
As for me, for small to medium sized buildings.
For complex buildings where modeling, scheduling, editing and sharing IFC between different stakeholders is key, honestly, it’s just lacking so much.
It’s great for creative or very custom architectural work. Good for fast visualizations. Good for small projects.
Honestly it goes up to a point and then you might want to move on. Unfortunately.
Hey @jure , not sure if you’re familiar with the layout petition that was put up 2 years ago. Responding to your plan of attack…
Contact me if you’d like.
That petition came out well?
Are you still envolved in meetings?
If Layout changes dramatically, maybe SketchUp can move forward.
SketchUp is lacking only in output. The direct modelling approach is still valid for architecture. The dumbness of a SketchUp model and the minimum tools we have for presenting stuff is where SketchUp stalls.
Creating a schedule for windows, doors, closets… Is far from automatic.
Having multiplanar sections or clipboxes.
Attaching building elements to measurements and have them change dynamically as project progresses.
Isolating interior elevations of stairs, bathrooms, kitchens or any space?
Creating detailed sections of a project…
Creating DWG drawings that work…
All of this is cruel.
That petition came out well?
I’m assuming that’s sarcasm. What would you like me to say to that Joao? What answer are you looking for?
I wanted to know if you are still envolved in those meetings. Layout is key for SU development.
I understand why it looks sarcasm though it isn’t.
Count on me!
I think we can do BIM with Sketchup. And Trimble Connect is a fantastic CDE for helping is with that.
I’m using Sketchup for Bim 4D and 5D also with small and medium projects
I’m not denying that there is a specific argument around SketchUp/Layout’s position in the marketplace vis-à-vis (for want of a better description) larger more complex projects and other software that is more geared for that.
Just the (lazy) claim that crops up often that SketchUp and more specifically Layout, is not capable of producing professional work without tearing your hair out because it is lacking compared to other software.
It’s very difficult to produce pro work if you want to get past a certain level of detail and building complexity, while the design keeps changing.
That’s what I do for a living and I just started working with Archicad too. The difference is huge!
Sketchup is better at some stages and some smaller projects. Archicad is better at everything else.
I’ve been meeting with Sketchup once a month for 2 years, since that petition. I also work regularly (once a month) with Fredo to help develop architectural plugins for Sketchup.
I am not pleased at all with this years updates, and I’m not pleased in general with how Sketchup manages their time. I don’t care to be blunt, I think it’s a shame that people have a relationship with someone and then they change what they honestly think as a result of then conflict of interest. I don’t have that. Having that mindset, if anyone from Sketchup is reading this, is not what drives innovation. Honesty is. I don’t know what Sketchup is doing or where they are heading. As a result of my honesty here, if I get kicked out of my meetings with Sketchup coming up for good, so be it.
Frustrated is a good word to describe how I feel about this years release and development for Sketchup and Layout in general. The programs are purely neglected and the company makes excuses. I am waiting for the days where the company actually prioritizes the professionals that use this program and gets off this once or twice a year update band wagon. I don’t know if they are scared to develop or what the deal is, but year after year, most years, the development is garbage. The only 2 years in the past 6 that I was impressed with was 2021 and especially 2022 was great, now after seeing this years development, looks like they’ve dropped the ball or changed focus yet again. I do know some big things are coming and initiatives being worked on, but in general, the Sketchup desktop app and layout app could get a WHOLE LOT MORE ATTENTION, if this company woke up. As a business owner, I take feedback seriously and I don’t think they are listening to us and the release notes are CLEAR. It’s not like they don’t have the money to hire out a development team to get way more into this program. So what on earth are they doing during the day? This is what I and other developers I’ve talked to wonder about.
I am not impressed and I hope this changes eventually. I feel like we the community have been begging for years. They still don’t get it. That’s all I know right now.
I agree some things we need to move forward might not be produced by Sketchup. Especially the 2D dwg-export issues is something there strangely seem to be a specific resistance agains solving. Count me in.
In for what?
Setting up a group that hires a developer to work on things we need
I think there are much bigger problems as well to address in regards to finding a developer. I’m in as well @jure to talk about stuff if you’d like.
In my opinion, the plugin community is practically dead. If sketchup cleaned up their menus, their program, gave it a better interface update to freshen up the vibe and get people psyched, took more initiative with their extensibility team to listen to devleopers, actually added regular useful features to sketchup desktop and layout etc, I think we would have a lot more awesome plugins being regularly updated and created. When is the last time profile builder got updated in a major way? Or really any plugin that is super useful for Sketchup. In my mind, the plugin community will stay doing mostly updates and less innovating until Sketchup figures their act out with the professional programs we try to rely on. Until that happens, hiring a plugin developer to do what you guys need, would work fine, however in the long run, I think the only thing that will make a big difference on general plugin development, is when the plugin developers see that sketchup and layout are awesome products that the professionals truly love. They are great programs, my livelihood is based around these programs, but they could be SO MUCH BETTER. Sketchup in my opinion has completely dropped the ball with this.
It’s crazy to me. You’ve got a company who could do so much better and make so much more money and be so much more successful, but they don’t do what’s needed to achieve that. I talk with Sketchup once a month and I still don’t understand what is happening.
What part of the customer base do you want to see left out? To achieve your vision SketchUp will have to deploy more resources and manpower. That in turn will drive up the price of the subscription. So much for the hobbyist market as they are left behind.
Just curious… can this not be done by turning off tags?
My understanding of this statement, trying to think how I would do this with the current toolset and I think it would be by using tags…
You have a good point. Why not a hybrid of what you’re saying which I know the community wants to keep the price low and also at the same time, develop the product to be at it’s true potential?
By Sketchup innovating and developing in this way, it would of course directly impact the popularity of the program and therefore the popularity of plugin development and innovation. I have always felt that there is so much more that can be done and then here we are again, another terrible year of meaningless development. We get, the flip tool. YAY. How about making scene management, tags, etc much better, so many things can be done and are not year after year. I believe they could improve the program a ton and therefore improve the development community’s psych for the product and still keep the price low and offer different tiers of pricing.
One of the brilliant things Sketchup has done is not over clutter the program like Revit and other programs, however, they can do so much more while keeping it simple, automate so much more instead of us having to do so many things manually between these two programs.
You can’t. There is no tag for isolating bathroom 1. At least not until you can define multiple tags per object.
Or you can, however the workflow is so convuluted that it’s not practical.
In a software like this you have space A and you define that you want to see it from the inside.
You also define which LOD you need. There’s a lot of automatic features and some manual drawing is possible too, but you can’t do this easily in SketchUp without at least 4 sections for interior elevations and two sections for roof and floor plan. Imagine cross sections for a model with several bathrooms.
If you want to do this in SketchUp, you can. It’s just tedious work and results in a confusing model or in several models.
The only way I could see this type of development would be to strip out all the features that relate to BIM, IFC, reports, and all exports like Trimbal Connect, DWG. Keep PDF and STL, Leave what is left with the extensions for the lower price point and build everything else in and continue to develop the upper pricepoint software.