Wow. Just read through the topics in this forum. Nothing but COMPLAINTS!
Okay… So there are some issues that need to be examined. MANY of the problems that people have with SketchUp are USER ERRORS. YOU did something wrong, and now SketchUp cannot give you the results you wanted, because it cannot determine was you MEANT to do…
This post is all about THANKING SketchUp for providing an EASY to use, EASY to learn, AFFORDABLE 3D rendering program for us to use!
Have you priced SOLIDWORKS? What about AutoCAD? SketchUp is very reasonable, and actually FUN to use, once you learn the tools and how to make things work. I paid for access to Fusion 360, and I am trying to learn that software. It is very similar to SketchUp, but the tools are somewhat different, and I just find SketchUp to be more intuitive, and EASY to understand.
So lets work on the problems and the issues, but take a moment to remember WHY you use SketchUp, and maybe … just MAYBE give them kudos once in a while!
Sketchup is absolutely most awesome - I think most people agree with you 100% and some! Getting things OUT OF Sketchup (DGW-Export, Step-Export, Layout-woes, etc. - that’s where the struggle begins - and has been stalling for some years.) But Sketchup - man - I don’t know what I would do without it…
Those who happily gruntle on forums are often castigated for being fan boy etc, so some 20 years down the track many of them try to keep there heads down and just help when they can. Some still stick their big grunttling heads up above the parapet regularly. And as you mentioned, gruntlers also have grumbles.
Exactly–that’s what many users are doing when they post a concern or complaint. While I agree that some posts reflect user error, and some are nitpicking, and some are downright entitled, there are many that are legitimate concerns and bugs that often go years without being addressed or fixed. While I applaud your positive attitude, I also sense a broad, backhanded judgement about people who experience demonstrable issues and turn to this forum for troubleshooting or to raise awareness.
I think that most of the people in this forum agrees with you, and so I do. For me SketchUp Pro is one of the best softwares for modeling and documentation of architecture, I’ve been using it for over ten years and every day I like it more and more, though I know a lot of the program and I think I’m able to model anything, every now and then I learn something new about it. I’m happy with the updates of the program and new tools that are added, I would like them to be more frequent but it isn’t a big deal, I don’t think that sketchup should change like some users suggest, it is perfect as it is, it doesn’t have to become a Revit or archicad like software. the tools it has are already are great and you can develop an entire model using only native tools, and plugins are one of the best things of the program, they can fulfill any necessity, there are plugins that can boost the program amazingly, like Fredo tools, that help you to model any shape you can imagine or profile builder together with Quantifier pro that give sketchup the “abilities” to work with a BIM methodology. The price of the subscription is more than fair for me and I gladly pay it every year knowing the benefits it brings to my work, I actually prefer the subscription licensing instead of getting a permanent license without new updates after a year, but that’s my opinion, some people prefer to pay once and use the version they bought for several time, maybe sketchup should bring back permanent licensing for this people. My only complaint with the program is the performance of it once a model gets big, it is a problem with sketchup and also layout, I’m not a software engineer or developer so I don’t really know why sketchup has this issue, I thought it was because of the API, but apparently that’s not the problem according to other guys who know more about it than me, I know its possible to improve the performance because I also use blender sometimes, mostly for rendering, and a model that gets laggy in sketchup when I export. it to blender it works fine without any lag, even with heavier textures than the plane ones in sketchup, blender uses apple native graphic API, Metal, on MacOS and OpenGL for windows and linux, that made me believe that it was an API problem, unlike windows apple doesn’t support newer versions of the openGL API, but performance problems aren’t only on MacOs, also windows has this problems, it can perform a bit better than on Mac depending on the hardware, but its not a big difference of performance. I saw On another thread that the Sketchup team are already working together with third party developers to port the program to a different API, maybe this will fix the performance issues, will have to wait to try it by ourselves.
Absolutely. I love Sketchup, too–that’s why they get my hard-earned dollars year after year. Most of us made an informed choice and are present in these forums because we chose SU and continue to do so. Anyone who bought the software without doing their homework and then post rants about how other modeling software is better are just proving they make poor choices. But I really believe that’s a minority of comments.
Most of us are committed to SU and care about it’s continued development. We vote with our dollars and participate in these forums because we value SU. We sometimes compare to other programs because good ideas can come from anywhere. Iron sharpens iron and learning from the competition–which sometimes means doing the opposite–is critical to survival. So while kudos for what we like about a product or service is always appropriate and helpful to the company, I think our overall appreciation for SketchUp is a given and why we’re here in the first place.
