We were using SketchUp Make 2017 and Thea Render with out students.
I guess this is then the version we will remain using.
SketchUp Web is an interesting idea for starters but we all know that SketchUp desktop already has issues with larger files/designs thus I see the Web version not likely to be very useful for architecture / interior design.
Web based technology still has drastic performance issues vs native applications.
This move by Timble just confirms our plan to fully move to more mature applications such as Revit which the students can get for free while they are students.
Plus with Fusion 360 which we employ too students have much more mature design tools than what SketchUp still only offers.
Simple fact: web-based programs cease to function without access to the web. Then what? The web is NOT 100% reliable, not yet, and probably won’t be. Too many physical problems, too many nodes, too many users who don’t fully understand or just hit the wrong button. How about what just happened in Hawaii? Please keep my programs off the web, or at least, let me download authorized versions to my machine!
You gotta be kidding. You really think Trimble would sink this huge amount of dev resources, time and money to just create a free browser based system for the kiddies? Open your eyes.
It’s more than clear, if undeterred, Trimble plans on making SUPro a pay-as-you-go online subscrtiption model.
My thinking is that Trimble, not being any sort of tech company, is letting it’s developers talk them into creating a cloud platform. In fact if real marketing people were involved, don’t you think they would have focus grouped or test marketed such a huge move as this?
OnShape, with it’s $80,000,000 dollars of investment to build a professional CAD platform, benefits from the cloud in a much different way than SU. First off, it’s primary customers are CAD professionals, each with up-to-date computer configurations and a stable and powerful internet. Most users are involved with some sort of enterprise IT management to install and keep them updated with the latest browser and OS fixes.
Furthermore, one of OnShape platform’s biggest draw is it’s collaborative modeling experience. Versioning, bill of materials and other cloud-based teamwork features are touted to give OnShape advantages over competitors.
Lastly, CAD modelers can be very effective as cloud apps as they are very compute intensive and cloud based distributed processing can help generate complex booleans and shelling operations, parametric calculations and FEA in a fraction of the time it takes on a regular computer.
Unfortunately, your cloud platform has none of these needs. Your FREE customers are not substantially a group of professionals with robust equipment, software and internet connections. There is little collaboration toolsets provided or needed (do you even have a use case for Free?). And, there are few if any computationally heavy tasks that can be aided by cloud based scales of computational power.
You’ll need to find a better example if you want to convince me this move to the cloud has any real value other than padding developers resumes.
Really? Most understand Make 2017 is still available. But, it’s a dead product. What happens if Apple or Windows create an update it doesn’t work with? Trimble has stated there will be no more updates.
Do those with hundreds of hours of time invested in learning SU over the years switch to a hobbled web version overnight-- or do they have to shell out $700 to finish the dollhouse design for their daughter?
I have opened my eyes, Chipp. No one from Trimble has said anything about Pro becoming a cloud based application. There seem to be a few people, you included, who have decided that they are. All I wrote was that it hasn’t come from Trimble.
Most users of non-Pro SketchUp are using versions that are older than SU2017. Many are still using SU8 and I know of some using earlier versions. They haven’t been affected by changes made by Apple and Microsoft. There’s no reason to think that’s going to suddenly change.
My point about opening your eyes is it appears to be obvious to the casual observer that SU Pro is destined for the cloud.
John’s enthusiastic support of OnShape’s business model and the assertion “it would be unthinkable to build a new CAD system in any other way” seems to be as pretty straightforward an indication as any.
Of course they haven’t. Neither has Apple announced an iPhone 11, but we know one is coming. It’s common practice in todays tech world not to pre-announce products before they ship.
SU2017 Make is dead. If people want to continue to use it, then fine. There’s a risk. It’s not supported and there will be no fixes no matter what.
Like you, I am a PRO user. I’ve paid and used SU since the very first version. I was selfishly ecstatic when Google made a free version. Not that I would ever use it, but it meant there would be a significant expanse in the user base, which would propel the product to new heights-- and it did. More users equals more testers and more use cases and more requirements for new features and more extensions and a much larger ecosystem.
Because it was free, my daughter and millions like her learned how to use it in school. The product became a core mainstream application and at one time, IIRC, was the number one most used 3D product on the planet. How Trimble can screw up that big of a head start is stunning.
I’ve been around 3D longer than most here. I used the first version of Cubicomp on the PC, the first Super3D on the Mac and a too many others to mention. Many of my faves are gone - and mostly because of stupid marketing mistakes-- just like the one Trimble is apparently making now.
Either Trimble is without good software marketing skills and has not thought this through very well, OR they just don’t care about this market. Perhaps it’s not a big enough slice of their core business? I don’t know. In any case, as someone who has been the CEO of a number of software development companies, my view is this doesn’t end well unless they rethink their cloud based strategy, and soon.
I will do my next project in Blender. Recently, I built the entire Alamo Reality (www.alamoreality.com) 1836 architecture in my beloved SU 2017 Pro. It turns out SU is really good for lo poly modeling. And it’s unique rendering styles are well-suited to game models.
That said, I see no reason in continuing working with SketchUp Pro in the cloud as it has to be a part of a full pipeline for Unity (see my many SketchUp to Unity YouTube vids) – I do not believe SU can work as a cloud app for such workflows easily. For instance, I can double-click on a file in a Unity folder and it opens in SU, and when I save it automatically get’s updated in the Unity file.
I digress. My point on posting here is to point out to others the writing is now clearly printed on the wall. We will someday soon be paying an online subscription fee to use SU Pro in a browser unless enough people protest now and Trimble has a change of heart.
Yes, they have not yet announced the move. But then, they didn’t ask anyone here if they minded moving the free version to the cloud before they did that either. Just trying to give some feedback before they commit. Hopefully, these messages matter.
After nearly 20 years of working on critical life support equipment, I’ve learned that what may appear to be obvious to the casual observer isn’t always correct. I’m not ready to join you in your condemnation of Trimble and SketchUp because the known facts do not support your conclusion. I’ll use the same process I use in the operating room and gather more information first.
I am comfortable with Sketchup Make and it meets my needs except when I try to import models to ChiefArchitect. SketchUp Free does produce importable models. That’s great but it is really slow when it come to opening files. Some files are large and it really slows the work. It would be really helpful if there were an option to save and open my working files locally.
For some reason you all seem to think there is an always on high speed fiber internet connection everywhere around the world. There is not at my coffee shop, nor in the car travelling, nor on the plane where i spend hours, nor at the vacation beach house where there is a 1mb connection (also where i do most of my sketchup work), nor most hotels when I travel, nor at my dad’s or sisters place or the inlaws, or or or.
I now live in a developing country where anything browser based will be an issue for 10-20 years yet. Nor is the connection very reliable.
I have used other browser based products and they are never even a close match to a desktop product. And based on what I have read here, yours is no better.
Also not allowing us to connect to our existing locally stored models from previous versions is incredibly stupid.
I have been using SU since it’s inception and always appreciated that Google had a free version and recognized that I would never be able to do all things in the free version. I designed my last house in it, I design our furniture in it. I create details of stuff for the handyman (which is sometimes me), I have designed yard/landscape plans for my house.
Indelibly etched in my brain is the visual image created by Phil Bernstein in a lecture on Integrated Project Delivery where he took a jab at Gehry’s design method by crumpling up a piece of paper, tossing it on table, and saying something to the effect of “There I’ve created a design.”
I myself am a Pro user for 15 years, so Make isn’t directly a part of what I do daily, but I have been teaching SU to beginners in high school for 5 years now, and I can credit the popularity of the free version for being the school’s platform of choice. I can see reasons for a web version and I welcome it to the lineup. Last fall I gave the web version a shot by going all in on using it for my class. That meant me creating a project and lessons in it as well as watching and helping my students use it. My take on it is this:
A web version isn’t worthless.
It does bring SU to Chromebooks which a lot of schools rely on. (I had one student who insisted on using their own.) It’s easier for system administrators to deal with, and the other biggest competitor in a school environment, Tinkercad, is web based as well. If they can work out a way to use the web based version on tablets, that would be another benefit.
The web version currently falls far short of Make’s capabilities.
If the answer to most of these shortcomings is “Not implemented yet”, well, I look forward to their development in the future (I hope), but it currently isn’t a replacement for Make. Given the amount of ire from users, how much trouble would it have been to give Make one more year of life, a year of overlap between the two while the public essentially beta tests this new web version? I think the current shortcomings of Free made it a bit premature to announce the end of life for Make in terms of public relations with current users.
“SketchUp Pro is too expensive for hobbyists”
Hobbyists, students or just artists and craftsman with small budgets, there’s just a big gap between $700 and free. I think there needs to be another choice offered, and plenty of voices here have said they are willing to pay more than zero for something more capable than SU Free.
That said, for me, maintaining SU Pro every year is a bargain compared to ArchiCAD and REVIT. REVIT is what, $2,200 per year?
I agree. I’m very grateful for the free version. One of my hobbies is wood working and I use sketchup to create 3d renderings of the things I’m building. I like to be able to see the joinery to check for any issues and to be able to visualize the project before I start cutting the wood.
If there were a version that was priced at a lower amount, in the $100 range, then I would be wiling to buy that version. I can’t justify the cost of $700 for a tool that I don’t use that often, or that I’m not using for commercial work. I also understand the move to put the application in the cloud with browser access to it, I just don’t like that model. I moved away from Adobe’s products to competitor products because I did not like having to have a network connection to do work.
Trimble, a multi-billion dollar company, with not even a mention of SketchUp on it’s homepage, clearly makes it’s money in places other than SketchUp. IOW, they are not particularly incented to continue to provide the world with a best-in-class easy-to-use software product as it does not reflect anything to do with their core business
.
What it does have is very strong positioning-centric information processing tools and apps. SketchUp can play a strong role in creating a tool chain and workflow for industry leading geo-location types of products; clearly their incentive for purchasing it from Google, as it extended their construction engineering BIM portfolio.
The company itself, as john_drivenupthewall says, already focuses it’s technology in the cloud with it’s Office-to-Field-Platform.
As mentioned by jbacus, the SketchUp product manager, “it would be unthinkable to build a new CAD system in any other way." This is also consistent with the ENTERPRISE approach the OnShape team took when building their cloud platform.
Creating a cloud version of SketchUp is a major undertaking, It requires load balanced servers, tons of code refactoring, creating a completely new UI/UX, and a commitment to a continual update process. This would be silly to do for only a FREE version.However, if one was to plan on moving the whole platform to the cloud, this would make perfect sense.
If it was not the case, don’t you think someone from SU would’ve spoken up by now.
Dave, you are certainly welcome to ignore all these signs. Just don’t pretend they aren’t true.
John, perhaps. Still, if Trimble needs to figure out a way of moving the scripting API of SketchUp to the cloud (as they have said they would do), then it will probably be the same or similar for Layout.
I would expect Trimble to provide all extension developers with some sort of rapid conversion toolset to help with that (fingers crossed!)
