My Sketchup 2018 Wishlist
Sketchup Pro&Make (In order of importance)
Sketchup developers should have no problem with the first few items in this list:
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Fix the bug that crashes sketchup without a bug-splat when holding down control and painting a large polygon model - it is a floodfill operation that I suspect has to do with Sketchup running out of stack space.
Refer: Bug - Sketchup crashes without bugsplat when painting large geometry -
Fix the divergence between textured and plain-colour specular lighting in the openGl shaders.
Refer: Plain Color vs Texture Specular lighting issue -
Sketchup brings the focus back to itself after it has loaded a large model, I don’t want this to happen if I have switched to another application (usually another instance of Sketchup), it is annoying and often-times confusing.
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Ability to lock the toolbars where they are docked. Often I hit the Orbit button (or think I’ve hit it) then start dragging the cursor to reorientate my model. What often happens is that I start the drag operation over the edge of the toolbar, and end up undocking and moving the toolbar over onto the model.
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Export to 3MF (Because Paint 3D cannot load a .dae file, which is supposedly the 3D model open standard, shame on Microsoft!)
Refer: 3d Warehouse models moving to Remix3d -
Import from 3MF (So we can import our freshly painted models back into Sketchup before uploading to the Warehouse)
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Decouple the user interface thread from model operations - I should be able to minimize, maximize, resize, and move (i.e. basic windows operations) the sketchup application window during a large model operation such as explode, or while loading a large model.
If our scripts can be validated and loaded in a separate thread after Sketchup starts, that will speed up the load operation.
3D Warehouse
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Default the sort order to the latest models. The existing ‘sort by relevance’ default option means that older models built in the Google Sketchup days get more views, downloads, likes, etc., even though there are subsequent and considerably better alternatives posted much later.
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Limit the number of tags (12-16 seems reasonable to me, although I may have more in my own models), to prevent people gaming the system. Refer: Model tag abuse
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Add an automatic 3D tag if the model bounding box is in 3 dimensions, this allows us to exclude most 2D face-me models from the search results.
Note ‘3D’ as a tag should be automatically removed from a 2D model. Likewise a 2D tag could be included for 2 dimensional models. -
Include ‘Exportable’ tag alongside Private and Public, so it is treated as private during a search, but the model can still be shared and downloaded via the URL.
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Include direct-download URLs of the model with url parameter specifying model format, i.e. &format=[skp|skp2016|skp2017|kmz|3mf]
Where skp format is simply the latest version of Sketcup available. Note I did not include .dae as it uses external texture files, and if I recall the kmz is simply a zip file of the dae along with the textures anyway.