LayOut Archives | SketchUp for Design

Just Released: Third Edition of “Architectural Design with SketchUp”

July 5, 2023July 5, 2023 by Alex SchreyerNo Comments

I am very excited to be announcing the release of the third edition of my book “Architectural Design with SketchUp”! You can as of now find this new edition on Amazon, Wiley and everywhere else where books are sold. It is available as full-color paperback and e-book editions. Since the publication of the second edition in 2015, many changes have happened to SketchUp and in the larger realm of architectural software: Trimble introduced a web version of SketchUp as well as an iPad version that has proven very popular. Real-time rendering options have increased in availability, and point cloud modeling is now often used on renovation projects. Beyond that, many new extensions have been published, others have gone away or have been replaced with built-in functionality, and their underlying Ruby engine has received new and updated capabilities. All of these changes made an update to the second edition necessary, which led to me thoroughly editing and rewriting the entire text. I updated screenshots...

SketchUp 2023 is Out!

February 22, 2023February 22, 2023 by Alex SchreyerNo Comments

The Trimble folks have just released the 2023 version of SketchUp. As always, you can learn more about new and improved functionality in their blog posts and the YouTube channel. I am quite excited about the new Revit importer (see image above for an example) because it allows for improved coordination and rendering workflows with Revit. It loads and converts models reasonably fast and even inserts various plan sections. Now if we could also have a way to easily export from SketchUp to Revit that includes creating native system families (walls, floors,...) where appropriate. IFC only goes so far... Another great new tool is the Flip functionality, which lets you mirror objects in any orientation. This was of course already possible with extensions and via the "-1" scale-factor trick, but it is now implemented in a more comfortable way that also makes this functionality usable on the iPad and web versions. This version also includes some future-focused core program improvements like a new...

SketchUp 2016 is Out!

November 23, 2015February 24, 2019 by Alex SchreyerNo Comments

Last week I was busy talking about SketchUp at the ABX 2015 conference in Boston, so I didn't get a chance to write this post until now. Therefore, let me at this point announce (with a slight delay) that SketchUp 2016 is out!!! Yay! The Trimble folks released it across all languages and both Make and Pro users are encouraged to update their versions. As always there are a bunch of new features as well as bug fixes. You can get a complete list on the release notes page. Let me point a few of these out to you here, though: The most visible changes are the introduction of Lisanne as the scale model and the new trays. With the tray system (you can see it on the right in the image above), the formerly free-floating tool windows are now bundled together into a clean arrangement that SketchUp Pro users already know from LayOut. You can even create new trays and arrange the windows...

Second edition of “Architectural Design with SketchUp” is now available!

October 26, 2015February 24, 2019 by Alex SchreyerNo Comments

I am very excited to be announcing the release of the second edition of my book "Architectural Design with SketchUp" today! For this edition, I went back through the text and updated and improved a lot of content. As before, my main goal was to keep it relevant for as large a variety of SketchUp users as possible and at the same time provide thorough yet easy to follow examples and tutorials. I am also very excited to announce a completely new chapter on physically making things with SketchUp that includes 3D printing, CNC cutting, and other techniques. Lots of fun stuff! As before, this second edition will use the companion website at http://sketchupfordesign.com/the-book where you can find free sample chapters, videos, references, 3D models, and tutorials.There are also now over 30 videos that accompany the book and can be accessed using the instructions in the book. Interested in getting the book? Check out Amazon or Wiley. Here's the official press release: 3D Modeling in SketchUp and Digital Making Come Together in Second Edition of “Architectural...

What’s New With SketchUp 2015

November 8, 2014February 24, 2019 by Alex SchreyerNo Comments

This is What's New... Depending on who you ask and how those people use SketchUp, it is quite likely that they will hone in on different favorite elements in the 2015 release of SketchUp, which came out just this week and parallel to Trimble's Dimensions user conference in Las Vegas (which I attended, hence the late post). High on many people's wishlist was 64 Bit support, so that is likely what will get mentioned most. Others will find the new IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) importer extremely useful. Here is my perspective on the new features: The performance improvements from 64 Bit support, face-finder improvements, and the "fast styles" labels are significant. Even with a thorough, component-based workflow (as I described in Chapter 3 and in my Basecamp presentation) especially large models could in the past bog SketchUp down quite a bit. Things should now get much smoother, especially on powerful machines. The now built-in IFC importer is a tremendous addition! This allows SketchUp to at least...