Trimble Archives | Page 5 of 6 | SketchUp for Design

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...

SketchUp 3D Basecamp 2014 Recap

May 1, 2014February 24, 2019 by Alex SchreyerNo Comments

Now that the semester is winding down, I can finally look back and post about the great SketchUp 3D Basecamp conference that happened 4/14-4/16 this year in Vail, Colorado. As in years past, this was a meeting of SketchUp users, plugin authors, technology vendors, and, of course, all the makers of SketchUp. What was especially good this year was that the conference was held in the same place where everyone stayed, making things very convenient. Once we all arrived there - which was not all that easy due to a late-season snowstorm - we got to enjoy the beauty of Vail and the hospitality of the Vail Cascade hotel. As part of days one and two I gave a presentation on "Components are our friends: How component-based modeling can improve your life" and a workshop (together with Daniel Tal) on "Plugins and Scripting for Architects". There were actually too many great presentations for anyone to attend, so the best way to catch up is actually to watch them...

What to do With Plugins in SketchUp 2013?

May 24, 2013February 23, 2024 by Alex Schreyer8 Comments

So now that you have upgraded to SketchUp 2013 you should be facing the question: What to do with SketchUp's plugins in this release. After all, when you started the new software for the first time, it likely only had the default plugins installed that Trimble released with it. But there was also a new toolbar button for the Extension Warehouse! At this time, you have a few options. Let's look at them: A) You are upgrading and you had plugins installed in the earlier version With the new Extension Warehouse and the SketchUcation Plugin Store now available, which both include one-click install and easy updating, it makes most sense to get plugins that are hosted in these places through the respective installers. So even if you had installed specific plugins in a previous version of SketchUp, I would recommend to go to these tools first to find them (instead of simply copying the Plugins folder). So here's my suggested order of...

SketchUp 2013 is Out!

May 22, 2013February 24, 2019 by Alex SchreyerNo Comments

Anticipated by many and announced last year at 3D Basecamp, SketchUp 2013 is now out and available for download. If you are still using SU 8 (or dare I say even 7 or 6), swing over to their website and download the latest version. The free version is still free and there are upgrade options for the Pro version. So what's new? Quite a few things. Here's the run-down: Extension Warehouse There is finally an official place where you can find the many plugins and extensions that are available for SketchUp (including mine). While all the other sites out there (Ruby Library Depot, SketchUcation, Smustard and even my sketchupplugins.com) did a great job accumulating these, the new warehouse is integrated right into SketchUp (just look for the toolbar button) and it features one-click installation and plugin updating as well as the usual app-store stuff of reviews, popularity stats and hopefully later: ratings. This might have turned SketchUp into the first CAD application with an App Store! ...

Read your SketchUp news right inside SketchUp

March 14, 2013February 24, 2019 by Alex SchreyerNo Comments

Have you ever wanted to… make sure you never miss a blog post by the Trimble SketchUp folks? stay up-do-date with your favorite SketchUp blogs? follow what’s going on at SketchUcation? keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook? make sure you never miss any of my blog posts? do all of this while you are working with SketchUp? Then consider yourself lucky! I just posted a SketchUp News plugin that lets you do all of this – right inside SketchUp. Even if you don’t usually use SketchUp plugins, this is the one to have! Get your copy at the link below. Oh, and did I mention it is free? http://www.alexschreyer.net/projects/sketchup-news-plugin/ Enjoy!...