Yes! Well spoken @TommyK, thank you. If the past indicates the future, delete “2020” from your thread title. All of your GUI suggestions (except perhaps no 8) are valid, needed, or sorely needed, and worth pursuing in some form.
Just as an example, Entity Info is a dialog panel one cannot live without, especially when solid modelling, e.g. for 3D printing. Just a few quick tweaks would enhance its information value considerably. A simple thing like always reporting the active selection’s number of groups and components that are solid and are unsolid would be most helpful. Why does Entity Info not do that? But then again, maybe “one text row ought to be enough for anyone”.
Granted, many of us relish lingering on in the early noughties. The GUI:s may have been somewhat crude, perhaps, but still they had a kind of hand-made, grayish je ne sais quoi. Wasn’t life somehow sweeter back then?
– Hey boss, how about this quick UI concept?
– Not so fast, junior. Let me first test it on five cuboids… Sure, it works. Just ship it.
Then, nothing is so permanent as a temporary solution.
Anyone who has tried serious work on even the most well-organized and well-instanced hundreds-of-megabyte, multi-million-edge, several-ten-thousand-group skp will realize that a positive answer to the question “Can I do that in Sketchup” is contingent on patience, and an almost biblical deal of it. Methuselah may rejoice, but files like this are the bread and butter of many a firm. Here, it may take a good ten seconds waiting for the group command to successfully group a cube. I once did a boolean subtraction that took 45 minutes (it came out successful). The snail is in the works because legacy intersect insists on checking everything against everything, instead of doing a simple initial space hash and a fast reject of irrelevant geometry. Ho-hum.
So, one underlying explanation as to why these GUI and performance improvements are still lacking in Sketchup is simply:
Trimble product managers do not routinely use Sketchup to solve pressing, difficult, real-world problems applied to complex models.
But this is exactly what we average Joe users have to do.
If product managers had to, too – they would have fixed this long ago.
Or they would have gone as mad as we are.
@jbacus Thank you. However – it is not that there aren’t limits to the amount of model complexity that a 3D modeler can handle. It is that other 3D modelers can display and edit complex models much faster. We just want it in Sketchup. Sketchup’s basic premise is excellent. It’s gold. Sketchup works great on simple models. But neither its performance nor its UI handles complexity gracefully.
And this has almost nothing to do with Sketchup’s basic premise. It has to do with its current core geometry engine and lack of attention to UI polish, as they relate to managing complex models.
Sketchup should feel like child’s play when creating geometry – but like a jetpack when managing it.
For me, this is what the sad forum rage concerning “subscription models” and “ecosystem junglification” is ultimately about. From a user perspective, as long as the API is good – modelling performance and UI polish should be Trimble’s big focus for Sketchup. Take a long hard look at whence you came. And, give us this.
https://cdn4.techly.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Success-Kid-Blank-799x423.jpg
Please let me know if I can help.