What are the best "plugins" for Architecture sketches?

Extensions
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1

I would like your “professional” opinions on the best Extensions to have.
You know, the ones very very useful (practical & gain of time).
In particular for Architecture (including geodesic domes).

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Skalp for SketchUp (www.skalp4sketchup.com) to create 2d drawings from your 3d Sketchup models

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@Guy, shouldn’t you not mention to him as well you’re the developer of this commercial($) Skalp plugin? Its not really an unbiased opinion to me.

@Angeleden: It all depends what you want to do with SketchUp. Some practical gems are:
ThomThom’s Selectiontoys, Vertextools($), QuadfaceTools, SubD($) …
Fredo6’s FredoScale, Curviloft, Jointpushpull, roundcorner …
TIG’s Sectioncutface, Purgeall, Weld, Archiver …

Again, it all depends what you would like to do with SketchUp. There are zillions of plugins and many different workflows using SketchUp,

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It’s very funny MaxB, but I’ve suspected automatically that Guy was doing business…
:sunglasses:

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Maybe I do business, but I’m also an architect with my own architectural firm (www.wydouw.be). We developed Skalp after we first created an early version of this plugin for our own business.

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You see Guy, your second eMail should have been in the first one… it would have been more «honest», but also much more convincing.

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This question will always generate subjective responses. There are many extensions that are applicable to architectural design and/or production documentation. Each individual architect uses SketchUp in a singularly unique way. That being said, here is brief enumeration of some of the SketchUp plugins that I use in my practice:

CleanUp3, Architect Tools, Medeek Truss, Profile Builder2, Extrusion Tools, Select All Dimensions, Unhde All Entities, Chris Fullmer Tools, and ThomThom’s various plugins are some of my most useful plugins in addition to those mentioned by @maxB .

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I have always pointed folks to extensions that are market agnostic. They are the ones that will help the SU user become more productive in most anything they do. As their SU workflow develops, more specialized extensions come into play. Here are but a few :grinning:

General

  • Selection Toys­ - Provides a wide range of selection modifiers, filter out all edges, faces etc. Let you quickly select entities with similar properties such as material, layer orientation etc.
  • CleanUp ­ - Cleans up and optimizes your SketchUp model.
  • Fredo BezierSpline - draws a variety of Polylines, Bezier and Spline curves, all in 3D
  • Layers Panel ­ - Designed to be very similar to Photoshop’s layers panel. It adds the ability to group layers, sort them, lock them, hide/collapse groups, etc.
  • DropGC ­- drop groups/components to face below

Working with CAD Imports & Making Volumes

  • Edge Tools ­- Suite of tools to simplify edges, close gaps, cleanups and more
  • StrayLines ­ - Label, Select, Delete or Show all the open ended line segments in a drawing.
  • Solid Inspector ­- Inspects and highlight problems with solids.
  • Fredo Tools -­ Collection of various inspection and simple manipulation tool.

Working with Terrain & Advanced Modeling

  • TopoShaper - ­ Generates Terrains from iso­contours, that is, contours which have a constant or quasi­constant altitude.
  • Artisan - ­ Subdivision, sculpting, and soft selection tools for artists, designers and landscape architects
  • FredoScale -­ Interactively apply a number of geometric transformations, such as Scaling, Tapering, Stretching, Plane Shear, Twisting, Bending and Rotation.
  • Joint Push Pull Interactive ­- performs push pull on multiple faces in one operation. JPP can maintain the continuity of the offset surfaces (mode joint push pull). This is useful to thicken non­planar surfaces.
  • Extrude Tools ­- A varied toolset for Extruding Edges into meshes etc
  • CurviLoft ­- Dedicated to Loft and Skinning
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Shameless plug for FlatText: I’ve been using SketchUp for HVAC and plumbing engineering for about 7 years now on some pretty large projects. I needed a text tool that would make annotations that stayed where I put them instead of always trying to face me, and would look the same when printed or exported to CAD as they did on my screen. There are two free versions, FlatText FREE and FlatText Lite, and a $10 version (30 day free trial) that adds some handy power tools.

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SketchUp Plugins for Architecture

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=59471&sid=df0ded2e6880bb153a40df1d2d0aa517

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You should check out mirror. It saves so much time, especially when you are working with symmetrical geometry.

Also I tried using Skalp to produce sections but it wasn’t very intuitive. I switched over to SectionCutFace instead which is 100% free.

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Whose says you can’t be biased on a SketchUp thread? I have been pretty impressed with Skalp thus far. I would say it is the missing link with creating 2d documents accusatory within surco/Layout.

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