Who is Steve Oles?

Whenever I teach someone SketchUp, the first thing I like to do is introduce our scale figure. Functionally, these 2D face-me components help orient you to a model’s scale and perspective. More personally, the scale figures we’ve chosen for our default templates have always been members of the SketchUp team. For us, it’s a fun way to recognize someone who’s helped make SketchUp what it is.

In SketchUp 2015, our default scale figure isn’t one of our great colleagues, but one of our great friends: Steve Oles.

SketchUp 2015’s default scale figure “Steve” rendered in the PSO Vignette style that he helped create.

If you’ve come to a 3D Basecamp, you may have met Steve or even sat in on one of his unconference sessions about hybrid drawing for architectural illustration. The name might also be familiar if you’ve ever used one of the PSO styles in SketchUp (Steve is short for Paul Stevenson).

And if the PSO styles are familiar, we’re guessing you may have come across Steve’s book at some point in your architectural studies. Steve has been a source of inspiration for our team for some time now, and as we’ve gotten to know him, we’ve really enjoyed learning about his career too. So, in our 2015 update for SketchUp, we decided it was about time to introduce you all to our friend, Steve Oles…

Posted by Mark Harrison, on behalf of the SketchUp team

SketchUp, Trimble Connected

Trimble Connect is a collaboration platform for building construction projects. It plugs into SketchUp via a free extension that lets you pull down and publish models, as well as work with reference models in your own project.

This week, at Dimensions, we launched Trimble Connect — a new website for architects and those who work with them to collaborate on building construction projects of all levels of complexity.

You can sign up for a Connect account today (single user accounts are free), but don’t stop there. We’re also releasing a Trimble Connect extension for SketchUp today which lets you work with Connect right inside the SketchUp modeling environment. You can install it for free from our Extension Warehouse.

For years, SketchUp users have asked us to improve data interoperability and to offer better ways to collaborate with others. Using the new Trimble Connect extension, coupled with a subscription to Trimble Connect online, you can publish your work for others to use, as well as reference their work back into your own SketchUp models. Reference data from Connect can be updated as changes are made without fuss. And you can coordinate models from multiple contributors using all kinds of different software together on one common space — and offer comments and requests for additional information all from one convenient interface.

SketchUp is only one of a collection of Connected applications announced today. You can also share models with Tekla Structures, Vico Office, Trimble Business Center and many other applications as well. In addition, we are now Connected with other products outside the Trimble family, including Bentley ProjectWise CONNECTED edition. And because Connect is built on GTeam (a product we recently acquired from Gehry Technologies), it already works with Rhino, AutoCAD, and IFC files. We’ve always said that your data belongs to you — with Trimble Connect, it’s easier than ever to work with that data in the tool or your choice.

Trimble Connect is still a young product, and we have grand plans for its future. But I think you’ll already find much in it that is useful to you and the folks with whom you collaborate every day. Come on in and take a look around — and let us know what you think.

Special note for Makers: we built Connect with the construction industry in mind, but there’s plenty of useful stuff in there for folks that work on projects of all different kinds. Single user accounts will always be free… and we support a bunch of file formats that you’re going to find useful in your work, too.

Posted by John Bacus, SketchUp Product Management Director

Sharpening SketchUp for 2015

We have some news to share today — SketchUp 2015 is available for download now — but first we’d like to share something that’s a few weeks old.

Here at SketchUp HQ in Boulder, we have a team dedicated to answering the phone and email questions that customers send us every day. Recently, we received these two emails on the same day:

Thank you for replying to my mum. I’m Marius and I’m 8 years old. I really like SketchUp and we have it in school. In art school, I made a factory with my best friend. 

— Love, Marius XXX

And then, just a few hours later:

I’m a detective for the Ottawa Police Service. I specialize in Bloodstain Pattern Analysis and was introduced to your software while collaborating with university students. Using online tutorials I was able to quickly create 3D plan drawings for our crime scenes. The quality of the visual evidence produced was above and beyond what our court system was used to.

— Det. Ugo Garneau, Ottawa Police Service

We get emails like these all the time, and we always think it’s incredible that so many different kinds of people can learn and be productive with SketchUp almost right away. On the other side of the spectrum, we regularly hear from seasoned modelers who have mastered SketchUp to make building things more efficient.

We’re incredibly proud that SketchUp helps all of these people be successful — and have some fun while they’re at it. So when we plan updates, our team feels a big responsibility to preserve the reliability and flexibility that makes SketchUp… well, SketchUp.

In this release, we turned our focus to upgrading SketchUp’s performance infrastructure. In particular, we’ve updated SketchUp, LayOut, and our Ruby API to run as 64-bit applications. The least nerdy way to explain this change is that 64-bit architecture allows SketchUp to take advantage of more of your computer’s active memory. We’ve moved to 64-bit both to improve performance, but also to set up SketchUp to work better with the operating systems and extensions that people will be using over the next few years. So while this is a big modification to SketchUp’s technical backbone, we kind of hope you won’t notice it at all.

Similarly, SketchUp 2015 includes new modeling and documentation tools that we designed to feel like you’ve been using them for years. Probably our favorite of these is the Rotated Rectangle tool, a way draw to axis-independent rectangles that’s both incredibly useful and surprisingly intuitive. Give it a try: we think it will remind you of the first time you used SketchUp.

SketchUp 2015’s official Rotated Rectangle Tool draws rectangles that don’t have to be perpendicular or parallel to an axes. It’s a simple idea that saves you about a dozen clicks to draw shapes like the cube on the right.

There’s a lot more to explore in SketchUp 2015: fast styles… LayOut smart labels… a 3 Point Arc tool… simpler Pro licensing… full IFC compatibility to get more and more folks participating in information modeling… we’ve even linked SketchUp to Trimble Connect, a new collaboration platform for sharing, reviewing, and commenting on any kind of project file.

You can download our latest version here, and if you have SketchUp Pro License, go ahead and use our license wizard to upgrade. If you work in SketchUp every day, we think you’ll really love this release — after all, all we’ve done is make SketchUp work more like… well, SketchUp.

Posted by Mark Harrison, on behalf of the SketchUp team

Licensing in SketchUp Pro 2015

We’re very proud of the things we’ve added and changed in SketchUp 2015. One of the changes that I’m particularly happy about is a completely revised licensing system. Since when did licensing become exciting? Well, it isn’t. But the licensing system used for SketchUp Pro 2014 and older was very dusty, to say the least. It needed a facelift so that we could take advantage of modern technology and solve a number of long-standing issues. Now, let’s take a peek at what the new licensing can do…

• Cross-platform support. Microsoft Windows? Mac OS X? It doesn’t matter! Use the same license information on both platforms.

• 30-day Trial. The 8-hour trial that SketchUp used in the past was quite sophisticated but not very clear. We applied SketchUp-simplicity to this one: 30 days. Simple.

• Centralized Network License manager. For those of you who happen to manage a network license, the SketchUp Pro licensing server is hosted in the cloud. No more creating a shared folder on a server, setting specific permissions, generating a network license, and so on. We’ve taken care of that for you.

• “Checkout” support (network licenses). Need to work on a plane or show a model to client in a remote location? Now you can check out a network license seat for offline use. Just be sure to do it before you go offline, though. 

• WAN support (network licenses). Network licenses of old were more like LAN Licenses, because they only worked across a LAN. Now, with the network license manager in the cloud, your users only need access to the Internet.

• Changing seat count without generating a new license (network licenses). So you found out that a 20-seat network license isn’t enough and you need to add another five seats. Before, we would generate a new serial number and you would have to go out and update the license within SketchUp Pro. Now, we make the change for you on the server and you don’t have to change a thing!

There’s one very important difference to note with regard to this new licensing technology: you’ll need to have an active Internet connection to add a license and remove a license from your computer. Drop a line to your IT folks that SketchUp needs access to the Internet via ports 5053 and 50530 just in case your network whitelists those kinds of things.

You can add your single-user SketchUp Pro license to any two computers that you use. But you need to be the one using SketchUp Pro — hence, single-user license. And only one computer can run SketchUp Pro at a time. If you need to install SketchUp on your third computer, you’ll need to remove a license on one of the other computers first. To remove a license, open SketchUp then select Help > Welcome to SketchUp… > License > Remove License…

Lastly, if you see an error message while using the new license, check out this Knowledge Center article for some help resolving the problem. Or get in touch with us.

That’s it! The goal of licensing is to give you access to your favorite SketchUp Pro features then get the heck out of the way. If that’s your experience, then we’ve done our job and earned a slice of Trimble SketchUp cake:

Posted by Tommy Acierno, on behalf of the SketchUp team

Using Trimble Vision images to create SketchUp models

Last year, Trimble (SketchUp’s parent company) introduced a kind of super-camera called the V10 Imaging Rover. The V10 captures and compiles images of large objects like buildings or bridges, then tags those site photographs with precise locations and orientations. Trimble Vision Total Stations also collect this kind of imagery, so here in Colorado we started wondering how geospatial professionals might use this location-aware data to create 3D models in SketchUp.

Today, we are happy to announce that the latest versions of SketchUp Pro and Trimble Business Center now work together to export images and camera poses for direct use with SketchUp’s Match Photo tool.

A bird’s eye view of Trimble Vision images imported into SketchUp along with the resulting 3D model.

We developed this integration along with improvements to Match Photo to make this kind of photo modeling simpler than ever before. There is no need to designate vanishing lines and prominent features on the structure to determine each camera pose. Instead, camera orientations are pre-loaded with the file import from Trimble Business Center (TBC). With as few as three points exported from TBC you can set up your axes and begin to create your model.

To set up this workflow, we had to extend the TBC *.skp exporter to allow images and points to be included. This lets you leverage TBC’s ability to create photo points with precise locations. You can generate and export any key points that will aid the modeling process within SketchUp, including points for setting up your SketchUp axes and inference points for important architectural details.

A Trimble Business Center station view with photo points visible

The Trimble V10 includes a panoramic camera array. This means there are twelve cameras that collect images for a full 360-degree view. The multiple viewpoints are useful while you are processing the images in TBC, since you can generate tie points all the way around each of the photo stations to be used in the bundle adjustment.
However, for modeling in SketchUp, you only need to export images that include the area of interest (e.g. building, bridge …). In TBC, you can easily create a polygon boundary around the area of interest. If you use a boundary, the *.skp exporter will include only the images with view angles that intersect it. This greatly reduces image clutter in SketchUp.

TBC boundary around the area of interest, highlighting in purple the images that will be exported

To further help filter out unneeded images from the exported *.skp, TBC allows you to include a subset of your photo stations. This lets you select only those stations which have images you need for modeling in SketchUp.
The *.skp that TBC creates during export contains a separate scene tab for each image. This reduces confusion and provides easy navigation during modeling.

After importing your imagery from Trimble Business Center, every image is automatically positioned in its own scene.

Since the ability to move easily between images is important to efficient model creation, the “Igloo view” (keyboard shortcut “i”) has been improved to walk you through the images rapidly. You can see the adjacent images that provide context around the structure.

Igloo view showing adjacent images for context

After exporting appropriate 3D points to SketchUp, their positions can be matched with pixels in the images, to orient the coordinate axes. If the structure is rectangular, this should only need to be done with one image using a few points, and then all of the images will be automatically oriented in such a way that a consistent model can be created from multiple images.

Modeling the building using SketchUp’s Match Photo tool

The images from TBC have the camera distortions removed, so they are also great for texturing your model in SketchUp. Make sure to collect the images from locations that allow for a clear view of the structure (without obstructions like cars or trees), then use the Project Photo tool to apply them as textures.

Using the Trimble Business Center images to texture a SketchUp model model

When you are done, you will have a model that can be used in all sorts of SketchUp workflows, including daylight, shadow, and view plane analyses, report generation, and Google Earth previews.

Posted by Richard Hassler, Hardware Product Manager