After the 2022 3D Basecamp in Vancouver, Canada, it was time again this year for Trimble’s bi-annual conference that covers everything relating to SketchUp. This year marked the first time that SketchUp’s conference was co-located with Trimble’s big (now annual) event, Dimensions. And since Dimensions had been in Las Vegas for many years, this year’s 3D Basecamp used that location, too.
Overall, the venue was great (as can be expected in Vegas)! Basecamp had its own space on the third floor of the Venetian’s conference center, complete with a Knowledge Hub, Art Gallery & Lounge, an AR Exhibit Space, and a SketchUp Labs zone that allowed everyone to test unreleased features and provide feedback on SketchUp directly to the developers. But most importantly: This event is always a great time to check in with old friends and fellow SketchUp-pers and see which cool projects everyone is working on.
For those that don’t know: Trimble Dimensions is a quite large conference (this year with 7,000 attendees) that covers all of Trimble’s products. One of the coolest things that Dimensions has is an offsite expo area that—after a short bus ride into the desert—lets you try out all of Trimble’s field equipment in-situ. You can even operate some of the construction machinery there, if you like. And you can observe autonomous, GNSS-guided construction equipment in its natural habitat, grading away…
So, what’s New with SketchUp?
This year’s keynote and various other demonstrations showed off SketchUp’s many talents and those of its multifaceted users. But the keynote also teased several as-yet unreleased features. While we don’t exactly know when the new features will be coming, here’s what was shown:
- SketchUp is getting a PBR-capable materials system. Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) means that materials can be given reflectivity, glossiness, and various other parameters, which will significantly enhance their realism. And best of all, this will be available in SketchUp’s regular viewport – no rendering software needed.
- AI-based texture improvements. To make “classic” material conversion to PBR easier, this tool provides a one-click solution to clean up textures (make them more seamless) and then provide them with bump maps etc.
- Collaborative, live editing and commenting in SketchUp. This feature will allow for very fast turnaround on design-changes and goes way beyond sending emails and jpg files back and forth.
- Diffusion improvements. SketchUp Diffusion (an AI visualization tool), which was released a while ago is getting better at visualizing scenes. It will soon also allow you to paint over parts of a generated image to change it with newly-generated content.
- SketchUp Assistant. This new AI tool will allow users to ask queries and chat with a help system. But even beyond that, it is able to generate walls or spaces in SketchUp’s modeling space based on floorplan images, populate a model with furniture, based on a prompt or a mood board, write Ruby code, and much more. While some of this functionality is very similar to my OpenAI Explorer (Experimental) SketchUp extension, their assistant goes further and looks very promising as an extendable platform.
Overall, we should be expecting some exciting new features coming down the road. For the time being, watch the keynote video, embedded below, to get a first glance of all of those. If you want to try these out for yourself, look for the “early engagement program” link in that video’s description and apply to be a beta-tester.
3D Basecamp 2024 Keynote
Following is the recording of the entire SketchUp Keynote. If you are interested in also watching the Trimble Dimensions keynote, then you can do that here (unfortunately minus the very entertaining chat with guest speaker Brendan Hunt, who plays Coach Beard on Ted Lasso).
Gallery
Here are some impressions from the event…
Links
I will update this list as new content gets released.
- SketchUp 3D Basecamp
- Trimble Dimensions
- The following were my presentations at this conference (as PDFs). Each of them had a live SketchUp modeling component, so many of the key visuals are unfortunately missing from the slides.
- S-1203 – The Many Possibilities of AI in SketchUp – You can find some of my related videos in this playlist.
- S-1204 – From Points to Polygons – You can find some of my related videos in this playlist.
- S-1205 – Parametric Design in SketchUp – You can find some of my related videos in this playlist.