Friday, February 28, 2014

Playing around with SketchUp Pro 2014. Yes, NEW and IMPROVED! (Updated)

So I guess I got things out of order.  I saw the post yesterday hinting at something coming down the pipe regarding SketchUp and 3DWarehouse, but the automated email notice got stuck in my spam folder so I didn't see it until an hour ago, or about 8 hours after it was initially sent out.  I ended up noticing that there were 3 posts under the SketchUp Blog RSS feed, and that's how I discovered that there was an update email waiting for me.

A little bitty thing about that email: If you're using Pro, you'll need that email so that you can copy and paste the license info into SU when you first open it up.  It does a cool little trick of reading the pasted info and searching for the relevant info it needs to register your SU Pro software.

I haven't gone through everything just yet -- still playing around -- but this one related improvement related to SketchUp has really made my day.  Through the 3DWarehouse, you can upload your model then on its page, there is a section that will allow you to copy an embed code, which will allow you to insert the viewer into a webpage, viewable from any WebGL-compatible browser.  See the model I built a couple of years ago, below.





I know, right? Kick ass!  The point of this, is that I can now use a light duty tablet to view models with clients, without having to drag my ginormous 17" laptop.

This is a major release, now with BIM support, by way of adding IFC classification to objects (structured data, for which you can create your own as well, but then we'll all end up with forked classification systems, which goes back to the problem of custom XML, etc.), and exporting to a cross-compatible (or so the hope is) BIM format, and auto-text features for LayOut, and of course, speed, speed, speed.

You can read the rest of the features here.

The one thing I'm not looking forward to, is setting up my environments with all of the extensions, scrapbooks, etc., from my SU2013 to m SU2014 folder, then getting rid of SU2013, then installing SU2014 on my desktop, and repeating the whole environment setup, again.  Yikes. :P


Update: It looks like for now, even with WebGL enabled Chrome browser on an Android tablet, touch is not addressed for the moment, to make use of 3DWarehouse embedded models. Soon, hopefully.

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