Hi all! My company is looking to purchase a SketchUp pro plan. Ideally, we’d like the use of touchscreen hardware to enhance our design capabilities in SketchUp. We currently work on Macbooks and are searching for the most economical way to access the SketchUp Pro features that are not available on tablets while still having use of a touchscreen device (i.e. we don’t want to purchase new laptops).
Curious if anyone has experience connecting a drawing tablet to a Macbook to achieve this. If so, please let me know what tablet you’ve worked with and if the process was generally seamless. We appreciate any and all advice.
There isn’t anything built into SketchUp to help take advantage of touch screens, even if macOS had touch screen support. You can send the SketchUp window to an iPad, and use the Apple Pencil to do drawing in SketchUp, but if you have SketchUp Pro you also get the iPad app, and might as well use that instead.
I prefer using a good mouse with configurable buttons, but you can also use a graphic tablet, there’s a guy in the sketchup team who uses to model I don’t remember his name, also Aaron made a modeling video with a graphic tablet some time ago, you can check those videos on the sketchup youtube channel. They also use Macs.
SketchUp was designed for use with a 3-button mouse. While there are some out there that prefer using a graphic tablet or screen tablet, a majority of professional users excel using just the mouse. Personally, as a user of both a mouse and a tablet, I find the mouse quicker and easier to model with.
That said, I would recommend that your company look into supplying designers with Space Mice. That is a piece of hardware that had made the biggest change in how I and many others design in SketchUp.
